#17 | September 11 - 24, 1997  

shot in podyezd	connected w/ Russian sports	murder for less than $100	really stupid criminal	explosive device	cries for help ignored	perp in body count
children	"investigation continuing"	carved up like a turkey	cannibalism	riddled with bullets	related to victim's job

In Crimea Corpse Boom, a Vote for Despair

Officials in the Crimea are beginning to worry that the male gender will soon become extinct. While Andrea Dworkin may be celebrating the budding Sapphic paradise, the inhabitants of the peninsula are calling it a major crisis. According to health officials, the average life expectancy of men has dropped to 56 years, while women still clock in at a robust 72-year lifespan. This makes Crimean men the hands-down winners of the Jeffery Sachs Shock Therapy Award for the most fucked segment of Ukraine's desperate population. With almost no males left to speak of, homo Crimeus is in danger of becoming extinct.

"Wow, that last episode of the X-Files really blew my mind!"

See, without live males to deposit their live sperm into females, no children can be created. So as the corpses pile up, the baby racks are gathering dust a-plenty. This is confirmed by statistics showing that deaths exceeded births in the peninsula by 1.7 times. The Ministry of Health in the Crimea says that what the disputed peninsula needs is social-economic improvement and a better ecology. Rumor has it that World Bank consultants offered, for a fee, the answer to their woes. New York Times' hack Michael Specter was said to have attributed up the lack of a baby boom to the fact that Yeltsin didn't win an election in the Crimea.

The Smell of Flathead Spirit

Who says that bandits don't have feelings just like the rest of us? Certainly not a certain Mr. Nikishin (first name left unrevealed), who was found dead, the victim of gunshot wounds, in his apartment on Smirnovskaya Ulitsa last Saturday night, right smack in the middle of the Celebration of the Century. But sometimes other people's celebrations can make sad people even sadder, and this apparently was the case with the 23-year-old Nikishin, who could no longer bear his troubled track-suited existence as a young man whose head resembled the smooth plateaus of Utah.

"Okay, okay. Next time I promise to brush up on my doggie paddle."

When Nikishin's girlfriend hadn't heard from him in a while (ie., about two weeks), she grew worried and showed up at his apartment unexpectedly. Nikishin didn't answer, so the lovelorn lovebird broke down the door with a neighbor. Instead of finding him in bed with a bleached blond whore and a bottle of Moskovskaya, she discovered two male corpses lying on the floor-corpses so rotten that they had turned a green shade of black. Their faces had decomposed so horribly from lounging around the apartment for 10 straight days that the decaying duo were thoroughly unrecognizable, and probably in need of a shower. An investigation showed that one corpse belonged to Nikishin and another to a man in his 40s or 50s. The weapon found in Nikishin's hand was a German revolver.

The Chekhovian twist to this whole tragedy lies in the fact that Nikishin had undergone a far deeper epiphany than mere death. A note that the lifelong criminal left showed that he was sort of the Kurt Cobain of the flathead world, only he was a little weak in expression. According to investigators, his note contained such moving confessions as, "I am a bandit through life" and, in a moment of pity for the man he'd capped, "This corpse is making me sick." The rest of the note was rambling and disjointed, proof of a crisis in Russian education.

Investigators suspect that he shot the older man, then took his own life out of despair. The other corpse has yet to be identified.