First victim and perjurer
On April 7, 1986, a police officer on duty in Leningrad accepted a call and heard a woman crying on the receiver. Arriving at the indicated address, investigators saw the body of nine-year-old schoolgirl Dasha Mikheeva in a school uniform with an open jacket and numerous stab wounds. There were no signs of hacking on the door lock – the researchers concluded that the girl opened herself to an unknown person. Criminologists also concluded that she was raped before her death.
The girl’s body was found by her neighbor Nina Rozanova. When he entered the open apartment, confusion reigned there: everything fell apart, drawers and cabinets were smashed, wine and blood stains spilled on the dressing gown of the criminal’s deceased mother. Jewels and money were missing from the house.
After some time, the parents of the deceased Dasha discovered that books and toys were removed from the apartment, including a flashlight and a Rubik’s cube. The cops suggested that such a strange set could be carried by a teenager.
There was another version that the murder was committed on the basis of revenge or jealousy, and possibly the relatives of the schoolgirl were involved in the crime.
The girl’s parents did not arouse suspicion, there were no conflicts in the family, relatives and friends described them positively. 96 people from the family’s social circle had an alibi at the time of the murder.
Investigators interviewed classmates of the murdered female student and learned that she went home with her friends right after the classes were over. In the afternoon, a witness saw Dasha talking to a friend near her entrance. What happened next, none of the residents of the surrounding houses could tell, no one noticed what was outside. This seemed strange to the attendants: for the volume of books and toys that the criminal took out of the apartment, he would definitely need a few bags that would attract the attention of others.
Unexpectedly, help came from Elena Rokotova, a young girl living next door. On April 7, he claimed to have seen two teenagers with bags flee from the entrance, seeing a children’s kaleidoscope coming out of a pocket, and reported an important detail – there were suspicious men on the Volga.
But Rokotova’s statement did not significantly help the investigation, since later the girl added contradictory details to the story several times, which is why the police doubted the veracity of her words. Their suspicions were reinforced by the testimony of the inhabitants of the house – none of them saw the Volga in the garden. That is, Rokotova herself was under suspicion: the agents decided that she was protecting criminals and deliberately complicating the investigation.
It turned out that everything was much easier. A few days later, Rokotova admitted that she had invented the mysterious teenager in order to be able to ask permission from her parents and spend time with her friends, under the pretext of police assistance.
Footprint from a shoe
Law enforcement focused on the young offender version. They checked on minors (there were more than 500) registered with the police, and in a psycho-neurological dispensary, from April 7 to April 10, unexcused street children, youth who were stopped in an alcoholic state. poisoning. Officers searched the rooms of the vocational school hostels nearby, looking for items stolen from Dasha Mikheeva’s apartment.
At the same time, a criminal with sexual aberrations was sought, as well as hooligans, brawlers and people hiding from the court.
On May 20, a new crime was committed, five-year-old Masha Vostryakova died at the hands of an attacker. As in the case of Dasha, a neighbor discovered the body. Again, there was no sign of theft. On the assumption of detectives, an unidentified person entered the apartment, killed the boy and took out his valuables and toys.
The fact of the rape was not recorded, but criminologists found fragments of the criminal’s biological material. Also, this time the attacker tried to pretend to be mentally ill: he took a mummy from the first aid kit in the kitchen and smeared it all over the hallway.
Investigators began to compare the two events and noted one detail: A piece of sneakers was found in Dasha’s apartment. They also began to study similar crimes committed before Mikheeva’s murder.
Among the previous cases of attacks on children, a similar one was singled out – then 10-year-old Igor Semenov almost died. He survived by pretending to be dead, hoping to fool the murderer. The boy explained that the perpetrator was a young man in white-striped sneakers.
All three cases looked like a series, but the search for the suspect was complicated by the fact that the attacks were carried out in homes located far from the city center – there were very few eyewitnesses. Also, the killer operated during the day while most adults were at work.
Operators considered the theft of items of no particular value to be an important feature of the criminal’s behavior. However, some copies of the books that disappeared from the apartments were extremely rare.
For example, the tales “Library of Adventures” in 19 volumes and “A Thousand and One Nights” in 6 volumes, published in Dushanbe, were stolen from the Vostryakovs. Employees of second-hand bookstores and libraries and those who donated these books were asked to report to the commission.
Detectives received a total of 17 notifications from bookstores whose employees were informed that they had purchased books from the Adventure Library and Arabian Nights series, but none of the owners were involved in the crimes.
awake neighbor
Meanwhile, the murders in Leningrad caused great alarm among the inhabitants of the city. Someone shared rumors from outside, but one day an old woman, who was standing in line at the grocery store, spoke about the murder of Masha Vostryakova. His words were heard by Raisa Sulimenko, who guessed that he had already seen the criminal.
The woman immediately contacted the police and said that about an hour before the murder, she received a call from her apartment. Raisa’s younger son Vitaly went to open the door.
After hearing the boy talk to a stranger who had offered to enroll in the library, he entered the hallway and saw a young man dressed in jeans, white-striped sneakers, and a leather jacket.
Noticing the woman, he was embarrassed and twitched, then confusedly asked her to use the phone. The number, as Sulimenko noticed, the young man randomly called.
Moments later, the suspicious stranger apologized for the inconvenience and left. Raisa remembered this well and was able to tell law enforcement. So the investigation took the identity of the suspect, but even he gave little – they did not find the young man.
The detectives thought that sooner or later the criminal would decide to get rid of the things he stole, so they decided to run an advertisement in the print media and on television asking the townspeople to say which ones or someone they knew had copies. Adventure Library and Thousands and one night.”
At the corner of Liteiny Prospekt and Zhukovsky Street was the oldest second-hand bookshop, which sold unique copies of special bibliographic value. When a young man appeared there, he was holding a pile of books, including the famous “One Thousand and One Nights” published in Dushanbe. He left his data, signed it, and left, and noticing a rare book, the store employee could not resist and began to run through it. One of the pages had spots that looked like dried blood. The frightened man called the police.
It turned out that 24-year-old Mikhail Makarov brought the books to the store. The photo in the passport was compared with the current ID compiled according to the testimony of Raisa Sulimenko and came to the conclusion that this is one and the same person.
Investigators decided to detain the young man and went to his place of residence, but Makarov was not at home – he went to the store. When the suspect returned to the apartment, he was taken into custody.
Confessions of a maniac
Makarov was married and raised a child, lived with his wife and mother-in-law, was a member of the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League (VLKSM), worked as a plumber at the Lengydroenergospetsstroy enterprise. He was never held responsible for the crimes, but he himself admitted: he always wanted to visit the murderer’s place.
“I read detective stories, watched murder movies, and enjoyed it. “I wanted to experience the same feelings and emotions as criminals, murderers and rapists,” he said.
The maniac met his first victim, the 10-year-old schoolboy Igor Semenov, by chance, while wandering around the city in search of profit – he wanted to get money and leave his wife’s relatives, he wanted to be separated from the relatives of his wife, who constantly lost and reproached her. with a piece of bread
Makarov will follow the boy, searched the apartment and asked the student for a pen and a piece of paper. While hesitating, Makarov entered the apartment and, using a sharpener made from a screwdriver, inflicted many blows on the boy, hitting him on the head and chest.
The victim did her best not to breathe so the killer wouldn’t know she was alive. The schoolboy had to endure even when the young man put out a cigarette on him and remained motionless as he hastily collected money and toys around the apartment.
The boy survived, but was crippled for the rest of his life.
A few months later, Makarov killed Dasha Mikheeva with more than 30 stabs with a souvenir knife found in the apartment. He had oral sex with her before. The girl offered the criminal to close her in the bathroom and take her valuables, but save her life. Then Masha Vostryakova became the victim of a maniac – a five-year-old girl opened the door to the attacker, without looking through the door hole and not thinking that her recently departed older sister had returned for forgotten things.
The killer revealed that he planned his crimes in advance and even took time off from work. In addition to killing children, he also confessed to attacking an old woman who was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Makarov beat him to death with a screwdriver. The young man explained: he did not like the tone of communication of his grandmother, who spoke negatively about him. However, the attacker left the scene after he could not find any valuables in his home.
The criminal hid the loot in the basement of one of the houses in the center of Leningrad. After the murders, he came to that courtyard to hear stories about himself and what he had done. Then he admired the mugs for a long time – the rings, brooches, bundles of money and toys that he planned to sell, and he invested the proceeds in the purchase of his own apartment.
During interrogation, the murderer cried and demanded that he be sent to the war in Afghanistan, claiming that he wanted to atone for his crime with blood. He was sentenced to death by confiscation of his property on November 27, 1987. Until recently, the maniac thought that the execution would be canceled and he would be transferred to a “hotspot”. However, in 1988, the sentence was carried out in the Kresty pre-trial detention center.
Source: Gazeta
