walked away for a minute
On one of the hot summer days of 1974, a resident of Togliatti with his seven-year-old son and mother went to the bus station to leave the city: to take a walk and get some air. The bus station building was full of buses leaving every minute.
The women were distracted for a minute and the boy disappeared. His mother and grandmother rushed to look for him, but they could not find the child on their own. Then they turned to the police on duty.
The boy’s body was found 60 meters from the bus station building, in thick bushes. The murdered boy’s mother passed out: the boy was lying face down in the grass, with numerous bruises and abrasions on his head and neck, and his jeans and swimsuit were down to his knees.
Initially, law enforcement officials suggested that the boy did not run to the toilet, stumbled and fell, hitting his head on the ground. It is noteworthy that this is confirmed by an inexperienced criminologist. However, when the body was taken to the morgue, it was determined that the victim had been strangled to death.
At first, suspicion fell on the boy’s mother, but the researchers quickly refuted this version. The father of the boy, who later left the family and did not pay alimony for a year, was suspected of the incident. However, his new wife and mother confirmed his alibi.
In this case, principal investigator Gronid Simakov instructed to question the drunks who regularly sat at the station – the so-called wine glass worked in the area. One of them said that he saw strange guys showing gestures to each other – they crossed their arms in the groin area and shook their hips.
However, law enforcement did not have time to decipher this version – a message was received from the city of Kuibyshev (now Samara) about a new disappearance – this time a five-year-old boy.
New chapter
The missing boy was walking in the garden, while his mother watched him from the window of the apartment. As with the first victim, he only took a minute to get food from the refrigerator. When he returned to the stove, he did not see the boy through the window. At first he got up and waited, but after five minutes he went to the Volga embankment and shouted his name.
The body of a young Kuibyshev was found only two weeks later. She was raped and then killed with a blow to the head. Then, the maniac for loyalty stabbed the body several times. The most shocking detail was that the perpetrator cut off the child’s genitals.
Investigators concluded that both crimes were committed by the same person. Among the group of suspects were: alcoholics who were regularly near the bus station, strange people who made gestures to each other (pointed by bastards), and had previously been convicted of pedophilia.
first suspect
Meanwhile, researcher Simakov was working on a version with strange movements. He came to the station and followed the men, and soon he himself went to them and repeated the signs they had shown.
It turned out to be a community of clandestine homosexuals. In those years there was a sodomy article that anyone with a non-traditional orientation could go to jail.
With the help of these movements, the first suspect was later identified – a physics teacher at a school named Pyotr Popov. It turned out that the teacher repeatedly devoted to his own business during classes, including the day the second victim was killed.
Therefore, the investigators had no evidence but continued to keep the man in jail. There he tried to commit suicide twice unsuccessfully. Then Popov unexpectedly confessed and told law enforcement that he was the one who killed both children.
Simakov immediately realized that the teacher was slandering him – as a result, during interrogation, he forced Popov to confess his innocence. The teacher lied because he wanted to die because his homosexuality was made public.
With new details, the law enforcement officer became head of the city police department. However, this inspector did not listen – by that time, a report on the arrest of the child murderer had been sent to Moscow. Simakov was threatened with imprisonment for aiding the murderer if he continued to defend Popov.
The research experiment put everything in its place. Popov showed how he allegedly killed men on a mannequin, but he got it wrong. As a result, investigators, trying to smash his statement, had to release him.
The maniac was hidden for 10 months
The next murder was committed near Kuibyshev. The two children went to explore the bunker, which was built in 1942. There they lost each other.
One of them returned home and told his mother what had happened. The police came to the scene immediately. The boy’s body was found – he was strangled and his genitals were cut off.
After that, the maniac went into hiding for 10 months. In April 1975, another boy disappeared from the park. He was walking with a friend when a young man approached them – according to eyewitnesses, he looked about 15 years old. The young man invited the children to follow him to the apartment, seducing him with a toy. One accepted, the other fled.
The missing man’s body was never found, but another attack followed soon after. A young boy was walking in the park, where a strange young man approached him – he offered him something and led him to the forest belt. There, investigators will find a barely breathing boy – the criminal did not have time to kill him, because people were walking nearby.
Later, he will help law enforcement make the identity of a maniac. A friend of the missing boy also provided a portrait of the criminal. The problem was that the children identified the criminal in different ways, only one detail coincided in it – the ears. When an approximate identity was available, the researchers found an adult witness who immediately remembered seeing it when the word “big-eared” was mentioned—he was carrying a young boy from his hands into the woods.
mysterious voices
According to eyewitnesses, the researchers noticed that the age of the maniac did not exceed 18 years. The sketch was sent to all district police departments. Once, the senior inspector of the criminal investigation department, Vasily Spirin, was driving a car around the city with a friend and saw a young man asking him for a lift.
Having reached the goal, the young man tried to pay the operator with a strange-looking female brooch. He took the suspect to the branch and immediately asked, noting the detainee’s similarity to the sketch of the alleged serial rapist and murderer: “Did you torture children?” This was followed by the answer: “What are you, have you been followed?”
The quiet and modest Vladimir Usov turned out to be a serial killer. He was only 18 when he was arrested.
He turned out to be almost no different from his peers in his mental and mental development until about 14 years old. But from the fifth grade, he almost abandoned his studies at school and regularly skipped classes, walking all day in the park or forest for no particular reason.
When asked by his parents what he was doing there, Usov replied that by himself, he liked to think about his fate, looking at the forest and the sky, as well as sneaking a peek at people passing through the paths from behind the bushes. .
Soon the young man began to tell his friends, and then his family, that he regularly heard some mysterious voices within himself. Often they talked about his special mission and convinced him of the exclusivity of his earthly existence.
As a result, the parents took the teenager to a psychiatrist. In 1971 he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Usov’s voices began to convince him that he could only prove his exclusivity if he started raping and killing young children.
Crazy and untrial
At the initial interrogation, Usov spoke in detail and impartially about how he committed the murders. Along the way, he confessed to two more thefts.
So, in June 1974, Usov at night climbed into the savings bank, where he walked around the room and took only forgotten things. A few weeks later, the young man Ldinka entered the cafe – there he opened 13 three-liter cans of prune juice and eight cans of birch juice, the contents of which he poured on the floor. He only took with him a cupcake, a pack of cookies, a cigarette, and a tin opener.
After hearing everything, Usov was sent for a forensic psychiatric examination to the Serbsky Moscow Institute, where he was examined throughout 1976. As a result, he was considered insane and beyond his jurisdiction – the young man was sent to Kazan, where he was placed in a special mental hospital.
He was held there for 18 years. At first, Usov tried to persuade the most incompetent patients to have sex, and then suddenly became obedient: he worked, followed the daily routine and took medication.
In 1996 the hospital management decided that he was no longer a danger to society and transferred him to a private boarding school in Samara. There his mother came and looked after him.
One day a woman came to him with food and gifts, but she snatched the bag and fled to the hospital grounds. At first, Usov wanted to get out of the fence, but realizing that it was too high, he ran to the door, which was looked after by a nurse – he pushed him and ran away.
There was a stop near the mental hospital – buses did not run there regularly. Usov was lucky, he managed to crash into the oncoming transport at the last moment. The man came home, found the keys in his mother’s bag, changed his clothes and disappeared. Soon the authorities received an explanation – two children disappeared near the shopping center.
They were found alive in the park in the evening. Vladimir Usov was not allowed to finish the job, which scared him away. The criminal returned to the house where law enforcement officers were waiting for him in the morning. They tied him up and during the search they found pornographic magazines. In the car, Usov said that he did not regret what he had done, only that he did not have time to kill those two children.
Usov was again declared insane and sent to the Kazan clinic for dangerous mental patients. He died there in 2006.
Source: Gazeta
