Issue #18/99, September 14 - 28, 2000   

low-yield murder	"control shot"	podyezd	really stupid criminal	children	cries for help ignored	murder-suicide
"investigation continuing"	carved up like a turkey	related to victim's job	cannibalism	riddled with bullets	old people	Hunger-related murder

BURN, BABY, BURN

”If he beats me, that must mean he loves me. But if he diembowels me... God, how lucky I am to have a man!”

Ever come home to your apartment late at night, walk through your filthy, garbage-strewn podyezd, press the up button on your rusted elevator, and think: wouldn’t it be great to shove a dead body in this elevator cabin, press the button for the top floor, and run away? No? That was just us? Oh, well, we’re sorry... Well, at least we have one kindred spirit. We know that because just last week the prosecutor from Moscow’s Golovinsky region charged a 45 year-old schizophrenic junkie with doing exactly that-to his junkie girlfriend. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, the story happened as follows. Schizo-junkie owned an apartment on Solnechnogorsky Prospekt and shared it, Three’s Company-style, with two 21 year-old girls. Heh-heh, heh-heh-he was gonna score. And he did, with one of the two, gorging himself on her fresh young snapper and hoovering up homemade crank off her pert naked breasts. Meanwhile, he and the two girls opened a business, making and selling the cheap vint they were all hooked on. Straight out of a wet dream, this life. But then, all of the sudden, everything went wrong. Like one of the great tragic heroes of antiquity, our Schizo-Junkie could not escape his fate. It turned out that for years he had been living off an imaginative little fraud scheme, in which he sold his apartment, pocketed cash from the deposit, then had a “relative” challenge and annul the sale in court on the grounds that the seller was mentally ill. The scheme was profitable, but it made him a lot of enemies. As schizophrenics are wont to do, he began to hear voices everywhere whispering horrifying calumnies and accusations in his wax-clogged ears. He began to suspect that his girlfriend was sleeping with one of the people he’d defrauded and was plotting to turn him in and steal his apartment. On the fateful night, August 14th, he confronted her and accused her of all. When she denied everything, he beat her severely with his fists and the butt of a knife. Then he tied her up. As she watched in horror, he poured a can of kerosene over her back and set her on fire. In what the newspaper described as “horrible agonies” the girl struggled mightily, then finally died of her burns. That matter settled-all matters, in fact-he then lazily dragged the girl’s body out into the hallway to the elevator. He pressed the button and when the cabin doors opened, he shoved her body in. Then he punched the button for the top floor, went back into his apartment, and fell asleep. At eight o’clock the next morning, neighbors discovered the body. He was soon arrested. Hearings to determine his fitness to stand trial are to follow.

NOW I CAN SLEEP!

There are two places to find gruesome crime stories in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets: on the front page, on the bottom, and on the back page, up and down the left-hand column. Being a sensationalist publication, MK usually puts the really awful murders on the front, under headlines like “Commercial Director Fed Own Foot,” or “High School Girl Pays Dearly For Being Trusting.” The back-page killings are generally run-of-the-mill affairs, styleless mob hits or domestic murders of the two-drunks-and-a-kitchen-knife variety. But sometimes... sometimes even the violence addicts manning the

”You know, I think I liked my previous tailors a lot better!”

crime bureau at MK find a story that repulses and depresses them enough to make them bury it in the back of the paper. Such a story hit the newsstands this past Monday, when criminal proceedings opened against a woman from the Podmoskovny region of Ivanteevka who is charged with strangling her two year-old daughter. The indictment charges that on the night of May 1 last spring-the baby’s birthday-the parents of little Olga Kovalevskaya held a birthday party at their friends’ apartment. All night long the couple drank to the health of their little girl, resulting in a situation where everyone present, by the end of the evening, could barely stand. Apparently there was some history between the couples, because at the end of the party an argument broke out in which various accusations of infidelity were traded. In the end, the accused-the mother of the baby and the owner of the apartment-were left alone at the table, their better halves having stormed off into the night together. Interfering with the suddenly intimate atmosphere was little Olga, who instead of sleeping suddenly began crying and whimpering. Mom-having obviously not learned two much in two years on the job-attempted to quiet her down by slapping her cheeks. The girl, of course, only cried even harder at this, which enraged Mom even more. She pulled the girl out of bed by her hair and threw her on the ground, then proceeded to beat her severely. As the beating intensified the mother began interrupting her blows with repeated applications of a pillow to the little girl’s face. In a frenzy, having lost all control, the attack finally resulting in an all-out smothering, and the little girl quickly died. Her companion during all of this was drunk and asleep; when the mother realized the girl was dead, she woke the man up and asked him to take the body out and hide it somewhere. Taking out the garbage-man’s work. In what apparently was meant to be a show of moral courage the man declined to help, and instead of burying the body, merely left it outside the building in a place where it would be easily found. Police fulfilled his wishes the next morning and arrested both parties. Eventually charges were dropped against the man. The woman’s trial begins next week.

SGT. POLAND-TOO LATE

”Gee, I’m sorry— it must be that time of the month!”

The abovementioned infanticide took place on May Day; yet another horrible crime took place on the next holiday, Victory Day. On May 9, a policeman, of all things-a member of the South-Eastern Okrug ecological police-ran into a pair of Polish migrant construction workers at a cafÈ. The three, plus the cop’s girlfriend, drank heavily. Despite the language barrier, everyone hit it off. After that the usual scenario unfolded; the Poles invited the couple back to their place, everyone got drunk, and someone made a pass at someone else’s (i.e. the cop’s) girlfriend. The girl and one of the Poles were passed out by the time the representative of Moscow’s finest reached the critical jealousy stage of drunken belligerence. The latter beat the first Pole severely, knocking him out, the slit the throat of the second. Subsequently, in the clever manner of drunken murdering law enforcement officials, he placed a knife in the unconscious Pole’s hands, smudged his clothes with blood, then grabbed his girl and split. The trick nearly worked, as the still-living Pole woke up to find police crawling all over his apartment and accusing him of murder. It might have worked despite the accused’s protestations had not the cop fucked up badly when called in by investigators for an interview. While waiting in the hallway of the police station to be questioned, he suddenly freaked out and ran out the door. Amazingly, police managed to figure things out from there. The court worked fast on this one; the defender of ecology was sentenced last week to 10 years’ incarceration, during which time he will presumably be free of the scourge of Polish company.