Issue #01/56, January 14 - 27, 1999  

low-yield murder	"skull-brain trauma"	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	"Mark Ames"

A First in '99

You won't believe this... but there was a contract murder in Moscow last week. And guess where the poor sucker got capped? That's right: on Bolshaya Yakimanka, just across the street from the Interior Ministry's headquarters, and, incidentally, nary a hop, skip and a jump away from the home of our own Mark Ames, earning this contract murder a special "Mark Ames" icon.

"Man, I couldn't have picked a better place to kill myself."

There was nothing unusual about it. A 36-year-old by the name of Otari Otkhozoria was found slumped over in his Audi at 4am. The cops were tipped off by the fact that the car's headlights were on and the engine was running--in fact, it had been on and running for up to seven hours before the vigilant Interior Ministry headquarters got wind of the whole thing. It seems someone used a Makarov pistol to drill a clean hole in his head. Otkhozoria is said to be a well-known, worldwide swindler, fraud, and even Harvard-trained economist. And somehow, he felt safe enough to set up shack right across the street from the Russian empire's police headquarters. No money was taken, and no leads have been found. The investigation is, uh, still continuing.

It's A Horrible Day In The Neigh-borhood, Won't You Be My Victim?

It's a new year, folks. A new year means we all start from scratch. Things are going to be different this year. Way different.

Take for instance a recent incident that took place in Podolsk, a suburb of Moscow. A 36-year-old working mother allows a neighbor to take her 7-year-old boy, Sasha, out to the snow-hill to play. She thinks nothing of it--heck, what's there to be afraid of, a serial murderer or something?

Well, yeah. According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, last Friday, little Sasha's body was found, the victim of a rape-strangulation. The murderer was detained and confessed almost immediately that shortly after he took Sasha to go sliding down the hill, he decided that he had to get a piece of his ass. After raping the boy, the neighbor thought that there was a better than naught chance that he'd nark, so he strangled him.

But that's not all. Readers may be surprised to read this, but it turns out that the neighbor was a classic low-rent serial murderer. After getting nabbed by police, he admitted to at least two other rape-murders, including one of

"Maybe if I lay my head this way, no one will really notice."

another Podolsk neighbor, whose body he dismembered. Investigators think that he may be responsible for at least 5 such murders, earning him a three-inch by two-inch news-in-brief piece. Oh the times, they are a-changin'.

How To Borrow Money

It's said that with Russia defaulting on its debt and its credit-rating hovering somewhere between Sierra Leone's and Rwanda's, borrowing money here will be a nearly-impossible task for years to come.

Enter five enterprising young flatheads, average age of about 20, who seem to have found away around all those credit rating snags. They borrowed money the old-fashioned way. They killed for it.

On December 21st of last year, the day of the winter solstice, one of the posse was celebrating his birthday. But the problem was, they had no money with which to buy such festive accouterments as drugs and whores. So, according to MK, one of them called up a lady-friend, a 27-year-old resident of Butyrskaya Ulitsa in Moscow's Savelovsky District, and asked if he and the guys could pop by for a sec. Just at that time, the lady's husband called from a local casino and asked her to join up with him.

Around midnight, the husband got worried, raced home, and found his wife's corpse, two caps busted in her head from a TT, and her young daughter bound up beside her dead mother. What happened was, the normally generous lady-friend wouldn't loan her flathead young friend the money he wanted, so flathead & Co. popped her execution style, tied up the daughter, then took what was theirs. Several thousand dollars--as well as expensive goods. As our friend Tony Montana would say, they got the money, got the drugs, and got the women, and "furiously" partied down like it's 1999 at a dacha outside of Moscow. And

"Gee Ellen, maybe you should switch to Palmolive!"

then... Woops! Out of Time! On Christmas Day, the entire posse got nailed, proving once and for all that Santa knows who's been naughty and who's been nice.

...There Goes The Neigh-borhood, Part XXXVII

You won't believe this, but... there was this 17-year-old kid, a certain Gubanov, who--get this!--was a serial murderer who sliced up his neighbors! The details are too horrifying to get into, so hold onto your pants as we take you on a little gore-tour of Boshaya Cherkizovskaya Ulitsa here in murder-mad Moscow. On March 30, 1998, neighbor #1, a 35-year-old Lonely Lady, invites Gubanov over for a little vecherinka, gives the little bastard some vodka, and ends up dead with 24 knife wounds; neighbor #2, a 43-year-old man, is found drained of blood April 16th on the stairwell between the 7th and 8th floor of Gubanov's apartment building, boasting a whopping 18 mortal knife-wounds. The fact that the building housed a severely retarded freak named Gubanov, and that two identical murders had taken place within a few meters of each other got the investigators a-thinkin'. And you know what they thunk? Gubanov is now in jail, scheduled for trial any day now, meaning we call all sleep a little easier.