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low-yield murder |
"skull-brain trauma" |
podyezd |
really stupid criminal |
children |
Russian Sports Connection |
murder-suicide |
cries for help ignored |
"investigation continuing" |
carved up like a turkey |
related to victim's job |
cannibalism |
riddled with bullets |
old people |
Yet Another Serial Killer You Never Heard Of, Because He Was Buried On Page...
12. That's right: in what is certainly the all-time record for press indifference to mass murder, an as-yet-unidentified suspect was apprehended last week in the Perm Oblast town of Lyisva and charged with the strangulation rape-murders of eight women-and the news only made it into one Moscow paper, Kriminalnaya Khronika. Worse, the story was buried deep in the biweekly, on page 12! Of course, eight murders isn't that many these days, in the overall scheme of things-hell, last year's serial murder enfant terrible, Alexander Spetsivsiev of Novokuznetsk, is a suspect in some 80 murders- and even he never got much press.
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| "Look, I'm telling you, all the big models had to go through this in the beginning. I promise you, I'll make you famous! Now close your eyes..." |
Still, you think you'd hear about it when eight women are strangled over the course of a year and a half in the same small village. No such luck. According to the papers, the suspect, a mettalurgical engineer, was a chip off the block of the Taganrog Monster, a notoriously stupid and unsuccessful serial killer who strangled four women in southern Russia earlier this decade. Like the Monster, the Lyisva killer lured women and girls (ranging in age from 11 to 60) to dimly-lit places, then attacked, raped, and strangled them from behind. Also like the Monster, the Lyisva killer had a low batting average. Amazingly, of 12 women he attacked beginning in late 1996, four escaped, including a 12 year-old last week who ran away and called police in time to prompt a successful dragnet. Not much is known about the suspect yet, except that he had a live-in girlfriend who apparently suspected nothing. Women: they can't forgive you if your socks don't match, but they never notice the important things. Probably because they don't read past the front page...
A Little Too Salty
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By now, you're probably wondering what terribly sick and disgusting things must have happened in this country lately to possibly push a serial killer of eight back to the middle pages. Well, let's see...there was the arrest of a record-setting heroin mule at Domodedovo (surgeons removed 192 heroin-filled condoms from his stomach), a 70 year-old man in the Chelyabinsk region who shot eight (including four children) and killed three with a double-barrel rifle when he got fed up with the noise his underage neighbors were making on the street, a 72- and 79-year-old pensioner couple in Blagoveshensk who planted a bomb in a post office to protest the non-payment of their pensions, and old man in Lipetsk who was arrested for dismembering his late wife and tossing her head and torso in the garbage when he couldn't afford a funeral, and so on...In short, a pretty standard couple of weeks for today's Russia. There were, however, a few real doozies, stories destined for the history books. Among those was the sentencing of one Yekaterina Lisichkina, a lab assistant at the Moscow Medical Academy. According to Kriminalnaya Khronika, Lisichkina set the all-time municipal poisoning record when she killed four people and seriously injured two others in a Burning Bed-style tale of spousal retribution.
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| "Hey, hand me a snorkle, willya? I can't breathe through all this blood!" |
Actually, not Burning Bed, exactly, but Vomiting, Retching Bed. Lisichkina was unlucky in love. Her husband Sergei Lisichkin left her after just a year and a half of marriage, and though he said at first that he wouldn't make a claim on the apartment, he changed his mind a few months after the divorce, when he returned home and moved in with his new pregnant wife. When his ex wouldn't move out, Seriozhka got violent, whacking Yekaterina around on a regular basis, sexually assaulting her, even groping Yekaterina's sister. Meanwhile, the new wifey-poo regularly went into Yekaterina's room, used her things, drank her liquor, etc. Refusing to move out, Yekaterina tried a different strategy. She poured a heavy concentration of barium into a bottle of vodka and left it in her room. No one bit, however, and the vodka went untouched, forcing Yekaterina to try a new tactic. Next, she brought home a different poison, thalium. This was a nasty poison: unlike cyanide, which kills instantly, thalium kills people alive over a period of days, leaving the victim in excruciating agony. The victim finds that its is painful to breathe, sheer hell to swallow, that he can't stand, and that he is soon condemned to nonstop vomiting, first of stomach contents and finally of blood and bile. Worse still, the drug is a pseudo-stimulant, leaving the victim unable to sleep or lose consciousness throughout the course of his death ordeal. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, Lisichkina, in a nice culturally-identifying detail, put the vile stuff in the family borsch. She then added it to the family salt supply, then spread it on the hallway floor, and finally poured it into a shampoo bottle in the bathroom. Both husband and wife fell ill immediately and were taken to the hospital. Meanwhile, the younger daughter (the new wife had by then given birth once and become pregnant again) subsequently became sick when a friend of the second wife came over to babysit when the parents fell ill. Then the babysitter and her son, who had also come over, fell ill when they both ate dinner in the house, probably having used the salt. A doctor who paid a house call to the daughter then also fell ill. In all, four died, five if you count the unborn child: the two parents, the daughter, and the babysitter. The son and the doctor survived. Lisichkina last week was sentenced by a Moscow court to 15 years of hard labor- the maximum sentence a woman can receive in this country.
Nouveau Dead
Ulitsa Druzhba in the Khimki region doesn't run through the greatest neighborhood. The street is lined mostly with your standard Soviet architecture, boxy 5-story khrushevki and 9-floor concrete monstrosities, and populated mainly by the usual low-salary Chinese-wardrobe lumpen proletarian types. House number 10 was a working-class nine story residence, with a few exceptions. For instance: about a year ago, a young married couple moved in. They were friendly enough, but were clearly different from their neighbors. Both wife and husband changed their foreign cars like gloves, wore mountains of gold jewelry, and regularly received well-dressed guests who drove in on their own luxury cars. The pair was ostentatious, but mysterious: no one knew where their money came from, or what they did for a living.
Last Saturday, they got a clue. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, the unidentified couple had guests over-two men and two women-and held a dinner party that went on well into the morning.
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| "Somebody get me an inmate! I'm feeling horny!" |
By 3 a.m., the hostess had served a cake and the guests appeared ready to disperse...only just then, there was, as they say, a knock on the door. The host opened it to discover two men clutching machine guns, trigger fingers depressed. The assassins spilled into the room, firing in all directions, slaying five of the six inhabitants, with only one female guest (who hid under a blanket in the living room) escaping. One woman tried to hide under the table, but, as the paper reported, "the bullets found her even there. The unhappy woman was frozen for eternity in a sitting position next to one of the table legs..." Not surprisingly, the victims' neighbors reported seeing no evil and hearing no evil. Police say they think the killings were related to intramural struggles within the Khimkinskaya criminal gang, and they have every intention of soving the case in the very near future. Maybe even tomorrow! In the meantime, the investigation is continuing.
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