Andrei Chikatilo: The Rostov Ripper (Part 2)

By Katherine Ramsland

Some Possible Leads

In 1984, numerous victims were discovered in wooded areas, some of them quite close to where previous bodies had lain before being discovered and removed. The first one found after Typapin’s arrest was a woman who had been slashed up in the same frenzy as previous victims. Yet her eyes were intact and one new item was added: a finger had been removed.
They also had one more piece of evidence: a shoeprint left in the mud, size 13. On the victim’s clothing were traces of semen and blood.
She was soon identified as an 18-year-old girl who had been seen at the bus station with a boy who worked nearby. When questioned, he had an alibi.
The medical examiner’s report returned three significant facts: she’d had pubic lice, her stomach contained undigested food, and there was no semen inside her. The killer apparently had masturbated over her. It was also possible that, given her state of poverty, she had been lured away with the promise of a meal.
The police checked pharmacies for anyone purchasing lice treatments, but they came up empty-handed.
One thing they did discover was that this woman had a friend who had been missing since 1982. Matching dental records to skulls from various remains, they managed to identify their second victim in the series. That linked two of the victims together, one of whom had her eye sockets slashed and the other who did not.
Another suspect was caught and he confessed, but Burakov was looking for a certain personality type, and no one thus far seemed to come close. He spoke out to officials and was rebuked. His opinion also divided the task force into factions, helped along by the fact that the crime lab could not give them a definitive answer as to whether semen samples found on two victims were from the same person. They brought in a forensic scientist from the Moscow lab, who did better. They were type AB, she said, and with that, she eliminated their entire list of suspects. None of the confessions gathered thus far were any good and the killer was still at large.
He struck that March in Novoshakhtinsk, grabbing 10-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov, who was found three days later, mutilated and stabbed. The tip of his tongue and his penis were missing. The semen on his shirt linked him to the previous two crimes where semen was found. Near this body was a large footprint.
This time, however, there were witnesses. The boy was seen following a tall, hollow-cheeked man with stiff knees and large feet, wearing glasses. Yet no one had recognized him. Someone else had seen a white car.

Lyudmila Alekseyeva (Victim)

   Then a 17-year-old, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, was found slashed 39 times with a kitchen knife, and leads went nowhere, wasting time and resources. Soon there was another victim, and then another close by. One was a girl, killed with a hammer, the other a woman stabbed many times with a knife. Mother and daughter, they had died at the same time. By the end of that summer in 1984, authorities counted 24 victims that were probably murdered by the same man. Whenever semen was left behind, it proved to have the same AB antigen. There was also a single gray hair on one victim, which seemed to be from a man, and some scraps of clothing near a boy that failed to match his clothes.Lourie writes that the killer had shifted his pattern somewhat that year. He now removed the upper lip, and sometimes the nose, and left them in the victim’s mouth or ripped-open stomach.
With no witnesses, little physical evidence, and no way to know how this man was leading his victims off alone, the police felt the investigation was out of control. This killer had stepped up his pace from five victims the first year (they believed) to something like one every two weeks. Surely he would eventually make a mistake. They had no way of knowing as yet that they had not found the earliest murders and it would be some time before the killing spree was stopped. This man did not make many mistakes.

Suspects

With all the surveillance, it was inevitable that certain suspicious men would be followed and detained, and this procedure produced two suspects, each of which was interesting for different reasons. One appeared to be the man they were after and the other became an informant.
The Minister of the Interior appointed a dozen new detectives to the case, and a task force of some 200 men and women became involved in the investigation. Burakov was appointed to head this team. That got him closer to leads as they came in. It also shouldered him with the heavy responsibility of forming a good plan to stop this killer. People were assigned to work undercover at bus and train stations, and to wander the parks.
According to Cullen, they decided that they were looking for a man between 25 and 30, tall, well built, with type AB blood. He was careful and had at least average intelligence, and was probably verbally persuasive. He traveled and lived with either his mother or a wife. He might be a former psychiatric patient, or a substance abuser, and he might have some knowledge of anatomy and skill with a knife. Anyone who generally matched these characteristics would have to submit to a blood test.
The press was not allowed to carry stories about the links among these crimes, only to ask for witnesses concerning one or another of the murders. No warnings were given to parents to protect their children or to young women out alone.

The Rostov bus station (police file photo)

   One undercover officer spotted an older man in the Rostov bus station. He spoke to a female adolescent and when she got on her bus, he circled around and sat next to another young woman. This was suspicious behavior, so Major Zanasovsky thought it was time to question him. The man’s name was Andrei Chikatilo and he was the manager of a machinery supply company. He was there on a business trip, but lived in Shakhty. As to why he was approaching young women, he admitted that he’d once been a teacher and he missed talking to young people. The officer let him go.However, he spotted Chikatilo again and followed him, boarding the same bus he got on in order to watch him. “He seemed very ill at ease,” Zanasovsky’s report states, “and was always twisting his head from one side to another.”
He followed Chikatilo into another bus and saw him accost various women. When Chikatilo solicited a prostitute and received oral sex under his coat, they arrested him for indecent behavior in public and went through his briefcase. Inside were a jar of Vaseline, a long kitchen knife, a piece of rope and a dirty towel—nothing suggestive of business dealings.

Andrei Chikatilo, teacher (school photo)

   Zanasovsky believed he had the lesopolosa killer. He urged the procurator to come and interrogate the man. Chikatilo’s blood was drawn and it was type A, not AB. He was also a member of the Communist Party, with good character references. There was nothing in his background to raise suspicion. Nevertheless, they kept him in jail for a couple of days to see if sitting in a cell might pressure him into a confession.He denied everything, although he admitted to “sexual weakness,” and was finally released. He was later arrested again for petty thefts at work and he served three months in prison. Still, he did not have the right blood type, so he was not their killer.
Burakov decided to breach protocol and consult with psychiatric experts in Moscow. He wanted to know what they thought of the idea of a single person killing women and children of both genders. Most were either uninterested or refused to say much, due to insufficient detail. However, one psychiatrist, Alexandr Bukhanovsky, agreed to study the few known details, as well as the crime scene patterns, to come up with a profile. He read everything he could find, specialized in sexual pathologies and schizophrenia, and was willing to take risks. This case, unusual as it was, interested him. He came up with a seven-page report.

Alexandr Bukhanovsky, psychiatric expert (police file photo)

    The killer, he said, was a sexual deviate, between 25 and 50 years old, around 5'10" tall. He thought the man suffered from some form of sexual inadequacy and he blinded his victims to prevent them from looking at him. He also brutalized their corpses, partly out of frustration and partly to enhance his arousal. He was a sadist and had difficulty getting relief without cruelty. Often sadists like to inflict superficial wounds, as was evident on many of these victims. He was also compulsive, following the goading of his need, and would be depressed until he could kill. He might even have headaches. He was not retarded or schizophrenic. He could work out a plan and follow it. He was a loner and he was the only offender involved.Burakov got two other opinions, one of which insisted there were two killers, and he felt that no one had given him anything that brought him closer to closing the case. He was still frustrated.
Working with the idea that the killer had a sexual dysfunction, the dogged investigator looked up records of men convicted of homosexual crimes and came across Valery Ivanenko, who had committed several acts of “perversion” and who had claimed he was psychotic. He also had a charismatic personality and once had been a teacher. At age 46, he was tall and wore glasses. He’d been brought to the psychiatric institute in Rostov but had escaped. In short, he sounded too good to be true. He was the perfect suspect.
Staking out the apartment of the man’s invalid mother, Burakov caught and arrested him. But his blood was type A which eliminated him as the killer. In a deal, Burakov enlisted his assistance investigating the gay population in return for his release. Ivanenko proved to be quite good at getting secret information, which in turn led to others providing even more information under pressure. Burakov soon knew quite a bit about Rostov’s underworld, from perversion to violence.
Yet Burakov still felt as if he was just going toward more dead ends. The gay men that he investigated just did not strike him as having the right personality disorder for these crimes. He began to come around to Bukhanovsky’s view that this killer was heterosexual but probably impotent when it came to normal sexual relations. He needed more details.

Killer X

Pressure was on to solve the crimes that had happened already, but over the next 10 months only one more body turned up—a young woman—but she was killed near Moscow. The killer may have moved or traveled there, but they just couldn’t tell. They wondered if the killer had left the area or been arrested. Perhaps he had died. Then a body was found in August of 1985. She bore similarities to the others and she lay near an airport.
Burakov went to Moscow to look at the photos of the dead girl. It was so similar to his recent victim in Rostov that he knew the killer had gone to Moscow for some reason. He checked the flight rosters between Moscow and the airport where their victim had been found, and had officers go painstakingly through all the handwritten tickets. But they failed to discover a significant clue right under their noses.
Then detectives in Moscow put together a series of murders of young boys that had begun when the Rostov killings had stopped. All three had been raped and one was decapitated.
But the Rostov crew was quickly drawn back to Shakhty. In a tree grove near the bus depot, a homeless, 18-year-old girl lay dead, her mouth stuffed with leaves. This was the same signature as the girl in Moscow earlier that month. She had a red and a blue thread under her fingernails, and sweat near her wounds that typed AB—different from her own type O blood. Between her fingers was a single strand of gray hair—similar to one of the earlier murders. This was the most evidence left at a crime scene thus far. The detectives believed they would break this case soon.
In fact they did find a good suspect who had also been implicated with a previous victim, and he did confess (after 10 days of intense interrogation), but to Burakov, it did not sound right. Nor could the suspect take them to the correct murder site. Once again, frustratingly so, he was not their man.

Chief Investigator Issa Kostoyev (police file photo)

   A special procurator with one serial killer investigation behind him, Chief Investigator Issa Kostoyev, was appointed to look into the lesopolosa murders. By this time, they had 15 procurators and 29 detectives involved. Many of them were watching train and bus stations for suspicious activity. The female officials worked undercover to try to lure men to talk to them. Kostoyev looked over the work done thus far and felt it had not proceeded well. In fact, he believed they’d already come across the man they were after and just hadn’t known it. This did nothing to improve the already-low morale of the investigating team.To try to learn more about the type of killer who would be so raw and brutal, Kostoyev had the classic nineteenth-century work on sexual predators by Richard von Krafft-Ebing translated into Russian. He also discovered a rare edition of Crimes and Criminals in Western Culture, by B. Utevsky, which included a chapter detailing cases of dismemberment and disfiguring of victims. He saw that some killers were driven merely by arrogance and the idea that their victims were objects that belonged to them to do with as they pleased. Kostoyev stored this information away to use when they found more suspects.
In the meantime, Yuri Kalenik was still in prison awaiting the completion of the investigation on him, which was now delayed by investigators looking into other areas. One of these leads produced yet a fifth false confession. Something was clearly wrong with the process, and Kostoyev was furious. He did not believe that Yuri was guilty of anything.
Burakov turned again to Dr. Bukhanovsky, finally allowing him to see all of the crime scene reports so he could write a more detailed profile. This, he thought, might help them to narrow the leads. Bukhanovsky took all of the materials and spent months of his own time writing 65 pages devoted to what made sense to him from his work with gay men, sexual dysfunction, necrophiles and necrosadists. He labeled the unknown suspect “Killer X.”
The details, in brief, were the following: X was not psychotic, because he was in control of what he did and he was clearly self-interested. He was narcissistic and arrogant, considering himself gifted, although he was not unduly intelligent. He had a plan but he was not creative. He was heterosexual, with boys being a “vicarious surrogate.” He was a necrosadist, needing to watch people die in order to achieve sexual gratification.
To render them helpless, he would hit them in the head. Afterward, the multiple stabbing was a way to “enter” them sexually. He either sat astride them or squatted next to them, getting as close as possible. The deepest cuts represented the height of his pleasure, and he might masturbate, either spontaneously or with his hand.
There were many reasons why he might cut out the eyes, and nothing in the crime scenes suggested what actually motivated X. He might be excited by eyes or fear them. He might believe his image was left on them, a superstition held by some. Cutting into the sexual organs was a manifestation of power over women. He might keep the missing organs or he might eat them. Removing the sexual organs from the boys might be a way to neutralize them and make them appear more female.
An interesting twist was the hypothesis that X responded to changes in weather patterns. Before most of the murders, the barometer had dropped. That might be his trigger, especially if it coincided with other stressors at home or work. Most of the killings were also done mid-week, from Tuesday to Thursday.
While he was vague about height and occupation, he now thought X’s age was between 45 and 50, the age at which sexual perversions often are most developed. It was likely that he’d had a difficult childhood. He was conflicted and probably kept to himself. He had a rich fantasy life, but an abnormal response to sexuality. Bukhanovsky could not say whether or not the man was married or had fathered children, but if he was married, his wife let him keep his own hours and did not ask much of him.
His killing was compulsive and might stop temporarily if he sensed he was in danger of discovery, but would not stop altogether until he died or was caught.
Despite the length and detail of this psychological report, Burakov found nothing practical in it to help him find the man.

Police sketch of suspected killer

   Then he consulted with someone who was much closer to these types of crimes: Anatoly Slivko, a man convicted of the sexual murder of seven boys, who faced execution. The police wanted this man to explain to them the workings of the mind of a serial killer. Slivko attributed his actions to his inability to engage in normal sexual arousal and satisfaction. Sexual murderers have endless fantasies through which they set up the rules of behavior and feel a demand for action, and the act of planning their crimes has its own satisfaction. He offered nothing practical for the investigation in what he said, but his manner under questioning showed them a compartmentalized mind that could kill boys and still feel morally indignant about using alcohol in front of children. That meant he could live in a way that hid his true propensities. Only hours after the interview, Slivko was executed.The investigators believed that X was very much like Slivko, and that meant he would be next to impossible to catch.
But then, oddly, the killing seemed to stop.

Frustrations

Only one dead woman turned up in 1985 in Rostov, and nothing happened that winter or the next spring. Then on July 23, the body of a 33-year-old female turned up, but it bore none of the markings of the serial killer, except that she had been repeatedly stabbed. Burakov had doubts about her being in the series, but not so with the young woman found on August 18. All of the disturbing wounds were present, but she had been mostly buried, save for a hand sticking out of the dirt—a new twist. Now they had to wonder whether there were others not yet found who were also under the earth.
The handwriting experts finally gave up on the Black Cat postcard, and the police could go no farther with the 14 suspects on the list so far, all of whom Burakov believed could be eliminated. He created a comprehensive booklet to give out to other police departments, and a card file was created to keep track of new leads. He and his team were dogged by the fear that this case might never be solved.
At the end of 1986 Viktor Burakov finally had a nervous breakdown. He was weak and exhausted, and could not sleep, so he went to a hospital, where he remained for a month. Then he was sent to rest for another month. Four years of intense work had come to this. But he would not give up.
He had no idea then that he was only halfway there. This devil was not yet finished.
Burakov’s period of rest, however, had given him some perspective. He’d been able to think over their strategies thus far and felt that none was taking them down the correct route. Not only that, all were time- and resource-consuming. He might only catch this killer if he surfaced again—in other words, murdered someone. It was a grim thought, but it could be their only hope
Yet nothing occurred for the rest of that year or throughout all of 1987.
The winter melted into spring before a railroad worker found a woman’s nude body in a weedy area near the tracks on April 6, 1988. Her hands were bound behind her, she had been stabbed multiple times, the tip of her nose was gone, and her skull had been bashed in. Only a large footprint was found nearby. People recalled seeing her but she had been alone. There was no sign of sexual assault and her eyes had not been touched. Nor had she been killed in the woods.
The investigators pondered whether they should include this murder in the series. Perhaps the lesopolosa killer was no longer in business. Yet only a month later, on May 17, the body of a 9-year-old boy was discovered in the woods not far from a train station. He’d been sodomized and then his orifices were stuffed with dirt. He also bore numerous knife wounds and a blow to the skull, and his penis had been removed.
Unlike the murdered female, the boy was quickly identified as Aleksei Voronko, missing for two days. A classmate had seen him with a middle-aged man with gold teeth, a mustache and a sports bag. They had gone together to the woods and Aleksei had said he would soon return but did not.
This was a strong lead, one that could be followed up among area dentists. Few adults in the region could afford gold crowns for their teeth.
Yet by the end of that year, they had turned up nothing. Not only that, they learned from the Ministry of Health that it had been a mistake to assume that typing blood in secretions was an accurate match to blood types (or, alternatively, to assume that the labs were providing accurate results). There were rare “paradoxical” cases in which they did not match. In other words, any of the suspects eliminated based on blood type could have been their killer. While this was frustrating news and made the investigation more difficult in many ways, it also opened a few doors from the past. However, it meant taking semen samples (which had to be voluntary), not blood types, and it also meant redoing four years worth of work to that point. The idea was overwhelming.
The only method of investigation that seemed viable now was to post more men to watch the public transportation stations.
Still, the killer did not strike. It was April 1989 before they came across another victim who could be added to the lesopolosa series.

The Count Rises

This discovery, in the woods near a train station, was that of a 16-year-old boy reported missing since the summer before. His killer had stabbed him repeatedly and had removed his testicles and penis. He was badly decomposed and had lain under the snow for months. A watch, inscribed from his aunt and uncle, was missing. It would help immensely if it was found in someone’s possession.
None of the investigators assigned to ride the trains and watch people in the stations in that area had reported anything suspicious. No older men with boys or women. However, a ticket clerk reported that she had seen a man that summer on the platform. He had tried to convince her son to go into the words with him. The police did locate him, but quickly eliminated him as the killer they were seeking.
However, Yuri Kalenik had been released from prison after serving five years and he now lived near the area where the body was found. Perhaps they had been hasty in releasing him. When questioned, he insisted he knew nothing, so they let him go.
Then on May 11, an 8-year-old boy disappeared. He was found two months later by the side of a road, stabbed and genitally mutilated. This change in the killer’s habits, from the woods to out in the open, alerted the officials to the possibility that he might have noticed all the surveillance at the train stations and changed his manner of procuring victims.

Elena Varga, victim

That was disturbing. Yet killing someone so near a road was also careless. That could be a hopeful sign. Even the most organized killer can disintegrate as need replaces caution.Then he killed a   Hungarian student, Elena Varga, in August, in a wooded area that was far from any train or bus station. Her body had been violated like all the other female victims in the lesopolosa series.

Aleksei Khobotov, victim

In just over a week, the fourth victim, a 10-year-old boy, Aleksei Khobotov, went missing, and four months later, early in 1990, the sexually mutilated body of an 11-year-old boy turned up in a lesopolosa. Then another 10-year-old boy was killed, his sexual organs cut off, and his tongue missing. It appeared to have been bitten off.

Victor Petrov, victim

  Once more, the killer shifted his pattern and went for a female victim, and at the end of July in 1990, workmen found a 13-year-old boy, Victor Petrov, killed and mutilated in the Botanical Gardens.They now had what they believed were 32 victims over the past eight years and the newspapers, now free to report this news after the loosening of government control, were putting pressure on the investigators. Those in the top positions threatened those on lower rungs with being fired. This killer had to be stopped. People were getting desperate.
Then on August 17 Ivan Fomin, 11, went swimming not far from his grandmother’s cottage. In the tall reeds not far from numerous potential witnesses who should have heard if not seen him, the serial killer had stabbed him 42 times and castrated him. This was outrageous and the public was getting angry.
Burakov decided on a new plan. He would select the most likely stations and then make surveillance obvious in the others, so that only those with plainclothes officers would seem safe to the killer. In other words, they would try to force him into action in a particular place, and in those places, they would record the names of every man who came and went. They would also place people in the forests nearby, dressed as farmers. It was a major task, with over 350 people who had to be in place and do their jobs for who-knows-how-long, but it seemed viable.
It seemed that the train station in Donleskhoz station might be a good place to set up a post, for example, since two of the victims had been found near there. Mushroom pickers generally used it during the summer, but not many other people. Two other stations were selected as well.
But even before the plan was enacted, the killer chose a victim from the Donleskhoz station. He killed a 16-year-old retarded boy, stabbing him 27 times and mutilating him before discarding his clothes. Part of his tongue was missing, as were his testicles, and one eye had been stabbed. When his identity was established, officers learned that he spent most of his time on the electrichka, the slow-moving train, but no one had seen him exit with anyone.
Burokov was in despair. They had a good plan and had it been in place, they might have caught the guy.

Victor Tishcenko, victim

Then another 16-year-old boy, Victor Tishchenko, was reported missing who had gone to the Shakhty railroad station to pick up tickets. Cullen writes that the handsome, athletic Tishcenko was larger than any other male victim thus far, weighing around 130 pounds. They found his body two miles south, in the woods and in the usual condition. It was where the mother and daughter had been found six years earlier. In the grove, there was evidence of a prolonged struggle.Burakov got moving. The snare was set, with everyone in place, but the killer killed again, undetected. This time, his victim was a young woman. She was number 36, and she had been beaten and sliced open, and part of her tongue cut off. But no one had seen a thing.
Yet there were reports of men who had been at the train station nearby. One name stood out. In fact, they were chilled by it. They had seen this one before. To that point, according to Moira Martingale in Cannibal Killers, over half a million people had been investigated, but this one had been interrogated before and only released because his blood type had not matched the semen samples.
And they knew the lab work had been faulty. This was the killer. They were sure of it.

Andrei Chikatilo: The Rostov Ripper

By Katherine Ramsland

First Hints

The first body found was mostly bones. A man looking for firewood in the lesopolosa, a rectangular “shelterbelt” or forested strip of land planted to prevent erosion, found the remains. While the area was only about 50 yards wide, with a path running through it, no one had seen this body until it was pretty well decomposed. There were small patches of leathered skin on some of the bones and some black hair hanging from the skull. The man who found the remains reported them to the militsia, the local authorities in this southern region of Russia
The body had no identifying clothing and had been left on its back, the head turned to one side. The ears were still sufficiently intact to see tiny holes for earrings, and those, along with the length of the hair, suggested that this victim had been female. It also appeared from her postmortem posture that she had tried to fight her attacker. It appeared that two ribs had been broken, perhaps by a knife, and closer inspection indicated numerous stab wounds into the bone. A knife had apparently cut into the eye sockets, too, as if to remove the eyes, and similar gouges were viewed in the pelvic region.
Whoever had done this, the police thought, had been a frenzied beast.
They did have a report on a missing 13-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk from Novocherkassk, a village not far away. Investigators called the uncle of the missing girl who had done an extensive search for her after she’d disappeared earlier in the month. He came to where the body lay to look at the remains.
Lyubov’s uncle, perhaps clutching to some small glimpse of hope, said his niece’s hair was not as dark and that the bones looked to him as if they had been there longer than she had been missing.

Major Mikhail Fetisov (police file photo)

   A few hours later, Major Mikhail Fetisov arrived from militsia headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, the closest large city.   He was the leading detective, or syshchik, for the entire region. He asked for records of other missing persons in the area and ordered military cadets in training to search the surrounding woods. He also ordered the remaining skin on the hands be fingerprinted.The next day, the searchers found a white sandal and yellow bag containing the brand of cigarettes that the young girl had set out to purchase. Then fingerprints of the corpse and the schoolgirl’s book covers confirmed that this body was Lyubov’s. DNA analysis for body identification was several years away, but from what evidence they had, they could be sure it was the missing girl. The medical examiner hypothesized that warm temperatures and heavy rain had afforded the accelerated state of decomposition.
Despite a thorough search around the remains, no evidence was produced that could help to identify the person who had killed her, and the dress that Lyubov had worn was missing. That meant that no trace evidence could be collected from it. It was thought to be a random attack, nearly impossible to solve.
According to Robert Cullen, author of a well-known book on the case, most murders in that area of Russia fell into one of two categories: intimate killings, in which a person got into a rage or a drunken state and murdered someone he knew, usually a family member; and instrumental murders done to take something from the victim. But no one in the girl’s family was a clear suspect and she’d had nothing of any value on her person.
There was a path near the body that people traveled often, and a road only 75 yards away. This had been a crime of some risk, with evidence of overkill. Although sexual crimes were considered manifestations of self-indulgent Western societies, there were plenty of signs that this incident had been just such a killing.
It became clear later from the autopsy report that she had been attacked from behind and hit hard in the head with both the handle and the blade of a knife. Perhaps she’d been knocked out right away. At any rate, she had been stabbed at least 22 separate times and mutilated in other ways. (In Hunting the Devil, told by Richard Lourie partly from the killer’s perspective, the number of wounds was 41.)
The police came up with ideas and began looking for possible suspects: those who were mentally ill, juvenile delinquents, or someone with a history of sex crimes. They tried to find out whom Lyubov had known and how she might have encountered this killer.
One man, convicted in another rape, learned that he was a suspect and promptly hanged himself. That seemed to put an end to the investigation. There were no other viable suspects, and for all they knew, the killer had found his own form of redemption.
But then another victim was discovered.

The Division of Especially Serious Crimes

Less than two months after the discovery of Lyubov’s remains, a railroad worker who was walking near the train station for Shakhty, a small industrial town 20 miles away, came across a set of skeletal remains. It appeared to have been there for approximately six weeks and was soon identified as an adult woman. The body had been stripped, left facedown, with the legs open. What made investigators take note was a key similarity with the murder of Lyubov: multiple stab wounds and lacerated eye sockets. That was a rare manifestation of murder.
Since no one of this approximate size and gender had been reported missing, no identification was made.
Only a month later, a soldier gathering wood about 10 miles south of that spot came across more remains, also of a woman lying face down. She had been covered with branches, but close inspection showed the pattern of knife wounds and damage to the eye sockets. She, too, remained unknown.
The linkage was obvious. A serial killer had claimed at least three victims. But no one was admitting that, especially not to the press. Officially what they had were three separate unsolved murders. (They actually had seven that year, Richard Lourie says, but they would not know that for some time to come.)
Major Fetisov organized a task force of 10 men to start an aggressive full-time investigation. He intended to get to the heart of this and stop this maniac from preying on any more female citizens. Among those he recruited was a second lieutenant from the criminology laboratory named Viktor Burakov, 37, and his perspective is presented in Cullen’s book. He was the best man they had for the analysis of physical evidence like fingerprints, footprints, and other manifestations at a crime scene, and he was an expert in both police science and the martial arts. Known for his diligence, he was invited aboard the Division of Especially Serious crimes in January 1983. Little did anyone realize then just how diligent he would prove to be… and would have to be.

Viktor Burakov (police file photo)

   That same month, a fourth victim was found. She appeared to have been killed about six months earlier and was near the area where the second set of remains was discovered. She, too, had the familiar knife wounds, but some female clothing was found nearby and assumed to be hers. She was possibly a teenager.All they knew at this point was that the killer—whom they now called the Maniac—did not smoke (or he’d have taken the cigarettes found near Lyubov), and that he was a man. He had some issue with eyes, but whether it was based on superstition or a   fetish or some other consideration authorities had no idea. At any rate, as Cullen points out, gouging out the eyes indicated that the killer spent some time with the victims after they were dead.
With no definite leads, the unit decided to look back in time and see if there might be other victims. Burakov’s first real task was to head an investigation in Novoshakhtinsk, a farming and mining town in the general area, where a 10-year-old girl had just been reported missing.

Confusion

Olga Stalmachenok had gone to a piano lesson on December 10, 1982. No one had seen her since. Burakov questioned her parents and learned that she got along with them and had no apparent cause to just run away. However, the parents had received a strange postcard from “Sadist-Black Cat” telling them their daughter was in the woods and warning that there would be 10 more victims that coming year. Burakov dismissed this as a sick prank, but still feared that the girl was dead.
Then on April 14, four months after her disappearance, Olga’s body was found in a field about three miles from the music conservatory where she had gone for her lesson. Her nude body was lying in a frozen tractor rut on a collective farm. The police left her in place until Burakov could arrive to see the crime scene for himself. Because she had been killed during the winter, the snow had preserved the corpse, so the pattern of knife wounds was clearly visible on her bluish-white skin. The skull was punctured, as were the chest and stomach. The knife had been inserted dozens of times, as if in a frenzy, moving the organs around in the body cavity. The killer had especially targeted the heart, lungs, and sexual organs. And as with the others, this offender had attacked the eyes with his single-bladed knife.
Without a doubt, Burakov knew that he was looking for a vicious, sexually-motivated serial killer who was attacking victims at a quickening rate, drawing no attention to what he was doing, and leaving no evidence. There were no resources that Burakov was aware of to utilize. Men who killed in this manner were supposedly few and only top-ranking officials knew the details of those investigations.
Burakov, who followed the long route from the conservancy to the place where the body was left, believed the killer had a car. He also felt sure the man did not frighten people when he approached. There was nothing overt in his appearance that would alarm women or children. That would make him harder to find, though he surely had some sort of covert mental disorder that hopefully some people noticed.
They decided to focus fully on investigating known sex offenders in the area, specifically where they were on December 11. Then on released mental patients, and then men who lived or worked around the conservancy who owned or used a car. Also, handwriting experts came in to compare the Black Cat card against samples from the entire population of that town. It was tedious work, with no promise of yielding a single clue. Yet doing nothing was guaranteed to provide no clue, so at least they had a start.
What they did not know, according to Lourie, was that a 15-year-old boy had also been killed in a similar manner near Shakhty, then left to be covered by snow. He would not be found for some time.
For the next four months, nothing turned up of any value, although they realized that snow could easily cover what might have occurred, and then it was discovered that the killer had struck again. In another wooded lesopolosa near Rostov-on-Don, a group of boys found some bones in a gully. Again, they could find no missing-persons report, and an examination of the bones not only linked this crime with the others but revealed that the girl (it seemed) had had Down’s syndrome. That made things a little easier, despite the horror of realizing the killer had lured a mentally retarded child with no possibility of defending herself. They could check the special schools in the area to make an identification.
A 45-year-old woman was also murdered in the woods over the winter, but no one linked her to the lesopolosa series. That would come later.
The girl turned out to have been 13, attending a school for children with her condition. No one had missed her, since she often left, so no one had reported her. But her case took a back seat to the next body, discovered in September in a wooded area near Rostov’s airport, two miles from victim No. 6. However it was an 8-year-old boy. He had been stabbed, like the others, including his eyes, and it turned out that he had been missing since August 9. Like the little girl going to piano lessons, he had ridden on public transportation.
This new development puzzled everyone. With what little was known about killers, the basic analysis was that they always went after the same type of victim. This man had killed grown women and young children, girls and boys. The investigators wondered if they might have more than one killer doing the same kind of perverse ritual. It seemed impossible, but so did the idea that so many victim types could trigger the same type of sexual violence in one person.
Then Burakov learned that the killer had finally been apprehended. It was over. He went to the jail to learn what he could about this man.

Confession

The suspect was Yuri Kalenik, 19. He had lived for years in a home for retarded children and had then been trained to lay floors in construction. He remained friends with older boys in his former residence and one day when they were riding on a trolley, the conductor caught them. Grabbing one boy, she wanted to know what he knew about the recent murders and he told her that Yuri had done them. So based on the squirming accusation of a mentally slow boy who was trying to free himself from punishment, the officials believed they had broken the case.
Yuri was arrested and interrogated. He had no right to a lawyer or to remain silent. He barely knew what was happening to him. Nevertheless, he denied everything. He had not killed anyone. Yet the interrogators kept him there for several days, believing (according to Cullen) that a guilty man will inevitably confess. It soon became clear to Yuri that to stop being beaten he would have to tell them what they wanted to hear, so he did. And then some. He confessed to all seven murders, and added four unsolved murders in the area to his list. Now all the police needed was supporting evidence. This young man was quite a catch.
Viktor Burakov accepted the task of further investigation. Yuri seemed a viable suspect, because he had a mental disorder and he rode on public transportation. And why would he confess to such brutal crimes if he did not do them? At the time—and even today—there was little understanding of the psychology of false confessions. Less intelligent people tend to be more susceptible to suggestion, especially when fatigued, and they will tell interrogators whatever pleases them—usually supplying whatever clues they hear from the questions. Sociologist Richard Ofshe recounts case after case of suspects who admitted to things they did not do, despite the harsh consequences, and Wrightsman lists several studies of people exonerated by DNA evidence who had confessed to the crime for which they were imprisoned. Most juries do not believe people will confess falsely and they accept a confession as the best type of evidence against someone.
Even better, when a suspect can lead police to the site of where someone was murdered, that’s considered good confirmation, and Kalenik did just that with several of the incidents. Nevertheless, Burakov was not convinced. He saw that Kalenik did not go straight to a site, even when he was close, but appeared to wander around until he picked up clues from the police about where they expected him to go. Burakov did not consider that to be a good test. Upon examining the written confession, he was even less convinced. It was clear to him that Kalenik had been given most of the information that he was expected to say, and had then felt intimidated.
It was difficult to know just how to proceed, but then another body was found.

Operation Lesopolosa

In another wooded area, the mutilated remains of a young woman were found. Her nipples had been removed—possibly with teeth, her abdomen was slashed open, and one eye socket was damaged. She had been there for several months and her clothing was missing. Kalenik could have been responsible for this one, whose identity remained unknown, since he was free at the time, but not the next one, found on October 20.
She had been murdered approximately three days earlier, while Kalenik was in custody. He definitely did not kill her, but her wounds were similar to those of the other victims. Whoever had killed her was growing bolder and more frenzied in his surgical removal of parts. This victim was entirely disemboweled, and the missing organs were nowhere to be found. However, her eyes remained intact. She might not be part of the series, although she did ride the trains. Perhaps the killer had changed his method or had been interrupted.
Four weeks later and not far away from that site, a set of skeletal remains was found in the woods. Her death was estimated to have occurred some time during the summer, and her eyes had been gouged out.
It wasn’t long before the 10th unsolved murder turned up, just after the turn of the year into 1984. This one was a boy, found near the railroad tracks. He was identified as Sergei Markov, a 14-year-old boy missing since December 27. For the first time, thanks to winter’s preservative effects, the detectives, led by Mikhail Fetisov, were able to see just what the killer did to these young people.
He had stabbed the boy in the neck dozens of times—the final count would be 70—and he had then cut into the boy’s genitals and removed everything from the pubic area. In addition, he had violated his victim anally. Then it appeared that he had gone to a spot nearby to have a bowel movement.
Clearly the jailed Kalenik was not responsible and the maniac who was perpetrating these crimes was still very much at large. In their rush to close these cases, the police had made a mistake.
Fetisov decided to retrace the boy’s steps on the day he had disappeared. Beginning in a town called Gukovo, where the boy had lived and from where he had gone that day, he boarded the elechtrichka, or local train. In the same town was a home for the mentally retarded and the teachers there reported that a former student, Mikhail Tyapin, 23, had left around the same time as the boy and had taken the train. He was a very large young man and barely knew how to talk. Once again, the police got a confession.
Tyapin and his friend, Aleksandr Ponomaryev, said they had met Markov, had lured him to the woods, and killed him. They had also left their excrement. Tyapin, in particular, had numerous violent fantasies, and he claimed credit for several other unsolved murders in the area. But he never mentioned the damage done to the eyes. And he and Ponomaryev confessed to two murders that were proven to have been done by someone else.
The police were now thoroughly confused, and Fetisov had some doubts, while Burakov felt certain they had not apprehended the killer they were after. All of the so-called confessions were flawed. He believed that only one person was involved, that this person was a loner and not part of a gang, and that he was clearly demented in some subtly perceivable way.
Then they had their first piece of good evidence. The medical examiner found semen in Markov’s anus. He had been raped and the perpetrator had ejaculated. When they apprehended the killer, they could compare the blood antigens. This would not afford a precise match, but could at least eliminate suspects. In fact, it eliminated all of the young men who had confessed thus far. They all had the wrong type of blood.
But then the lab issued another report, claiming it had mixed up the sample. The type did indeed match that of Mikhail Tyapin. That meant that the odds were good that they had Markov’s killer.
Yet bodies still turned up.

Tanya Flowerday: Snuff Victim? (Continue)

Snuff

As anybody who has seen the movie 8mm now knows, a snuff film is a video recording of someone, usually a woman, being murdered as part of violent pornography. What nobody seems to know, is whether these movies actually exist, or whether they're simply the stuff of urban legend.

Roy Hazelwood

Sexual predators often have a predilection to somehow record their crimes. According to Roy Hazelwood and Stephen Michaud, in Dark Dreams, child molesters and sexual sadists seem particularly fond of creating a visual documentary of their deeds, although the actual murder is usually omitted. But snuff movies are not merely the recording of sex-related murder. Snuff movies are sold as pornography. While someone like Jeffrey Dahmer took photographs of the men he murdered in his apartment in Milwaukee as he cut them open and dismembered them, posing them in different postures, he did this for his own sexual pleasure. It undoubtedly excited him as he did it, and later he was able to use these photographs to relive these special moments through fantasy and masturbation. Although some of these pictures are available on the Internet today, Dahmer did not record these acts to sell it. Snuff movies, on the other hand, are created with financial profit as a significant motive. Of course, a third party who somehow obtains a recording made by a sexual predator may then sell it as snuff, but technically it is only then that it becomes snuff. Although the same actions are depicted, the distinction is important, since it speaks to significant differences in motive.

Stephen Michaud

Do real snuff movies exist? Many sites on the internet advertise them, but it seems highly unlikely that even a few, if any, of these would be real. After all, it would constitute the best evidence of a crime that is punishable by death in the places that have a death penalty and a life sentence in those that don't. And, as Hollywood has proved time and again, it's not difficult to convincingly portray murder on film. There have been a number of commercial movies about snuff movies, such as Mute Witness, 8mm and the low budget Snuff which, according to Scott Stine in his article 'The Snuff Film: The Making of an Urban Legend', popularized the concept in the first place. There has even been a video game called Manhunt, which saw the player as a murderer stolen from his execution by a snuff movie director to star in his next film (even though the developers chose to define snuff as multiple murder and discarded the pornographic aspects). Snuff movies themselves, however, prove much harder to come by.
Several newspapers contacted various experts in law enforcement in South Africa and none of them could confirm an instance of true snuff. Superintendent Martin Aylward, national spokesperson of the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit (FCS), told Beeld that he didn't know of a snuff movie having been made in that province in the past. Supt. André Neethling, head of FCS in the province of Gauteng, concurred, saying that recordings of sexual crimes have been recovered but never of murder. Sr. Supt. Gerard Labuschagne, head of the Investigative Psychology Unit, had not heard of a snuff movie discovered in South Africa either, but told Independent On-Line of October 16, 2003, that it wouldn't surprise him to find one. "People are killed all the time for no apparent reason. Would it be such a big step to put it on film for resale purposes?"
South African law was caught off guard. At the time of Tanya Flowerday's murder, the Films and Publications Act appeared uncertain about films depicting real murder. In fact, it wasn't stipulated as illegal to own or even import such movies. Since a snuff movie per definition contains explicit and serious sexual violence, it would be unlikely to receive a certificate from the Film and Publications Board, thereby making it illegal to distribute or present publicly. Of course, being involved in the making of the film would translate into complicity to murder at best and would consequently be a crime.

The Nigerian Connection

Hillbrow, an area of Johannesburg

The investigation took Insp. Steinhöbel into Hillbrow, an area of Johannesburg that once was cosmopolitan in a good sense but has since deteriorated into a cesspool, and into its belly of drugs and prostitution. It led to at least one arrest. Onyebachi Mbanefo, a 33-year-old Nigerian and known drug lord, was taken into custody on October 9, 2003, in Hillbrow. Although he was arrested on drug charges, the Flowerdays were notified of his arrest and a source revealed that he was being investigated in relation to Tanya's murder. The police refrained from any meaningful comment, but the suspect's computer hard drive and several video cassettes were confiscated and sealed in evidence containers.
The criminal element of Nigeria seems to have found fertile soil in the post-1994 free and open society of Africa's southernmost country. Drugs and — oftentimes forced — prostitution are the preferred methods of making money on the streets of South Africa's cities.
During October of 2004, police received information from a girl that her sister was being kept as a child prostitute in Durban in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Following her rescue, police learned that it was part of an organised Nigerian syndicate dealing in drugs and child prostitution. A special task force was formed, including members from the Durban and Johannesburg Child Protection Units. They investigated the syndicate for a month and then began a series of crackdowns.
During the second half of November, 28 child prostitutes were rescued and 67 Nigerians arrested in Durban and Johannesburg. Most of the Nigerians were illegal immigrants. Almost all of the girls were between 10 and 15 years old. Some were lured with money or drugs, some were runaways, some had been sold by their parents, and others were kidnapped.
The syndicate targets the poorer communities. Once they have a girl, she is immediately moved to another city, and the girls are also ferried between the cities of Johannesburg, Durban, Bloemfontein and Cape Town, depending on the demand for sex. Detectives were concerned that girls may even have been taken to Nigeria.
A 14-year-old girl freed in Durban related how she was systematically lured deeper and deeper into debt by a Nigerian drug dealer in Gauteng. When she owed him thousands of rands, he demanded payment. Since she couldn't repay him, she had to work for him. At some point he gave her to other Nigerians until, finally, she ended up in Durban. Here her life consisted of sex and drugs, as she told the Rapport of November 27, 2004: "Our wake‑up call is three rocks [cocaine crystals], which we get each morning for free. Then we have to earn money to buy more rocks. You just want more and more and all the money you get is given for rocks."
Many of the girls are imprisoned in flats where they are controlled through drugs, usually heroin or cocaine. The Nigerians lock them inside a room and always keep the key in their pockets. Here they pimp the girls, easily making R2,000 ($328) a day with one girl, of which she only gets enough to buy the drugs she needs.
Following the revelation that a snuff movie might have been made of Tanya Flowerday, the 3rd Degree team conducted their own investigation into the Nigerian sex trade. They also spoke with a former drug addict who used to be involved in the Nigerian drug scene. He gave the following account:
"The Nigerian dealer will offer you money for the lady friend. They'll normally say, 'At some stage you came in with ... with a friend or a girlfriend'. They'll say, 'That girl you had here last week, I'll offer you a thousand rand cash and cocaine and heroin worth two-thousand rand if you just bring her around.' When you ask what they're gonna do with the lady, they'll say, 'No, we're just gonna chat to her and smoke with her upstairs. We're gonna give her free drugs.' On the one occasion I arrived in time and the lady was crying hysterically. I asked her what happened. She said to me she's just been raped by five guys. I said, 'How'd this happen?' She said, no, she went upstairs and ... they gave her some heroin, some cocaine, the next thing five guys came in, they kept her mouth closed and then raped her."
He also stated that such acts are recorded, using a laptop computer and a camera, often in hotel rooms. "So, yes, they film it." He also claimed to have taken such CDs to the airport or to other Nigerians.
In a world of forced child prostitution and filmed gang rape, is producing a snuff film really such a stretch? In the final analysis, there is only one way to know for certain, and that is to find the tape.

"Blackout'"

But then Grimsley changed his story again. He had misled her, he told Insp. Steinhöbel. There was no snuff movie. There were no Nigerians. A variation of his original story, it had only been him.
On June 13, 2003, he had bought heroin for R150 ($24.50) in Hillbrow, which he mixed with tobacco and smoked. Later he also smoked marijuana and drank alcohol. Tanya phoned him from Julian's Bistro, asking him to come and fetch her, which he did. They stopped at his parents' home, so that he could get something to eat to counteract the alcohol he had ingested.
"In the kitchen we began to kiss," he said, according to the Beeld of September 4, 2004. "Before I could put my hands on her buttocks, she pushed me away and said we couldn't go on. I didn't eat and she asked me to take her home."

An Opel Kadett, similar to Grimsley's car

In Darrenwood, Grimsley stopped his Opel Kadett, ostensibly to apologize to Tanya for his behavior. He tried to kiss her again, but she refused. So he decided to smoke a heroin cigarette instead. Tanya didn't condone drug use, and they argued when she realized that it was heroin he was smoking. She tried to grab the cigarette from him and they wrestled. According to Grimsley, Tanya was shouting at him about the drugs in his car.
And then, Grimsley "completely blacked out", according to The Star of September 1, 2004. "Once I came to my senses, I was seated on top of the deceased, my hands around her throat with one leg of her pants undressed and my pants unbuttoned. I do not know how long I had blacked out."
He realized that Tanya was dead. So he redressed her, pulled her from his car and dragged her to where she was later found.
He had no memory of raping her, beating her or throttling her.
In other words, it's that old favorite, "I don't know what happened. The gun just went off." The problem is that guns can't go off on their own; they need something, usually a finger, to pull the trigger. The problem with Grimsley's heroin-induced blackout is that he would have needed to ingest two to three times the amount of heroin he was used to in order to have a blackout, according to a drug expert who later testified at Grimsley's trial. Another expert, Sophie Ditsi of the Sanpark Rehabilitation Centre, told the Beeld of September 3, 2004, that heroin, a member of the opiate drug family and classified as a depressant, "slows down brain functions and the person doesn't react normally. It leads to tiredness, lethargy and emotional instability. Like someone who drank too much, a heroin user won't just hit someone. How do you rape someone while you're under the influence of heroin? It's impossible."
Then, after the "blackout" and the large amount of heroin still pulsing through his veins, Grimsley managed to find enough sense to redress Tanya's body, place her in a seated position, steal her cellular phone, and throw her jacket from his car some distance away. Pretty organized for someone supposedly out of control only moments before, who now has to deal with this shocking situation.
It's not congruent with the autopsy results either. The nature and extent of Tanya's injuries make it highly unlikely that she had been murdered inside a car, especially a small-sized one like an Opel Kadett. Not only was she badly beaten with a blunt object over numerous areas of her body, but she was raped both vaginally and anally, with enough violence that the pathologist found clear evidence of both sexual assaults. It doesn't seem particularly believable that all this happened not only in a small hatchback car, but while Grimsley was in the midst of a heroin-induced stupor.
So why the story about a snuff movie? "It's an addict's natural instinct to lie," he would later tell the court, according the Beeld of September 7, 2004. "I read about snuff movies in You [magazine]." He didn't want to accept responsibility for his actions and wanted someone else to take the blame. This was also part of the reason for his suicide attempt. "If I was dead, no one would've known what happened," he would tell the prosecutor during cross-examination, according to the same paper. "Everyone would've been in the dark."
Insp. Steinhöbel received a further explanation. Each time she interrogated him about the snuff allegations, she would fetch him from the Johannesburg Prison and take him to the Linden police station's holding cells, where he could see his family.

Trial

Until December 17, 2003, Ronald Grimsley made numerous appearances in the magistrates' court as the case was postponed for various reasons. Then the case was referred to the Johannesburg High Court, where the postponements continued. Throughout this period he remained in custody.
On March 17, 2004, Grimsley was allowed to be sent for psychological evaluation on request of his attorney. On April 19, a trial date was set for August 30. Due to a full court roll, however, the trial would actually only start on the 31st.
Grimsley was charged with murder, rape, indecent assault and aggravated robbery. Although he initially pled guilty, following consultation with his attorney, Charles Thompson, he changed his plea to not guilty, claiming that he was not of sound and sober senses at the time of the crime.
State Advocate Joan Spies argued that Grimsley had become angry when Tanya rebuffed his advances and refused to have sex with him. He then brutally forced himself on her, ultimately killing her. The prosecutor managed to unsettle him during cross-examination, causing him to erupt, "I'll go sit in prison for life! I'll accept twenty-five years!" according to the Beeld of September 4, 2004.
On September 6, according to the Beeld of the next day, Grimsley ended his testimony by saying, "I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Flowerday, If it's your wish that I die, I will."
The Flowerdays responded simultaneously with, "It's too late!"

Tanya's parents leave court

Later that day Mr Justice Fritz van Oosten ordered Grimsley to undergo psychiatric evaluation for 30 days at the Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital in Klerksdorp. He wanted the psychiatrists to determine the merits of Grimsley's "blackout" defense and whether he had known what he was doing during the murder.
On November 10, Grimsley was sent for another month's evaluation, since only two psychiatrists had evaluated him and the law requires that it be done by three mental professionals.

Internal Investigation

A week into the new year, fresh headlines exploded onto the front pages. This time it had nothing to do with snuff movies, but dealt with police corruption.
Insp. Christelle Steinhöbel was arrested on January 7, 2005.
An informant who had helped her with the Tanya Flowerday case, Heinrich Rheeder, accused Insp. Steinhöbel of defrauding him. The South African Police Service had approved an amount of R12,000 ($1,967) as payment for his work on the case. However, Insp. Steinhöbel had only given him R1,800 ($295). Apparently, he only realized the true amount that he should've received during a visit from other police officers. Rheeder claimed that, instead of the official form, the detective had given him a photocopied page to sign as receipt. The two police witnesses, as required, weren't present. His signature on the form that she had given to the police, confirming receipt of the R12,000, was a forgery.
This wasn't the real beginning of Insp. Steinhöbel's woes, however. In September of 2004 she had granted an interview to a journalist from the women's magazine, Sarie. This was against regulations, since only official police spokespersons may speak with the media, unless explicit permission is granted. Some of her statements in the article also antagonized senior detectives and officials. Consequently, not long after the magazine appeared towards the end of October, she was transferred to another unit, pending investigation.
On May 5, 2005, the fraud and theft charges against Insp. Steinhöbel were dropped, since forensic analysis by handwriting experts had shown that the "forged" signature was in fact authentic. The internal investigation related to the Sarie article, however, remained in place.

Aftermath

On May 29, 2005, another internal investigation was initiated against Insp. Steinhöbel, this time because she supposedly did not have the necessary approval for certain warrants she carried out. She was summarily suspended without salary or benefits. Denying the accusations, she decided that she'd had enough. Her marriage had deteriorated, her children had been ridiculed at school, and the police treated her like a pariah. Even though she loved working on homicide cases, after 16 years of service Insp. Steinhöbel "bought" her resignation for R200 ($33). She left for the Free State, where she had grown up, and bought a tea garden and nursery with her mother. Although she doesn't necessarily believe that a snuff movie exists, she does feel that Grimsley did not kill Tanya on his own. However, her plans to follow up on the investigation have been denied.

A younger Tanya Flowerday

Ronald Grimsley's trial finally continued on July 25, 2005, more than two years after Tanya's life was taken away from her. Dr. Paul de Wet, a psychiatrist from Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital, testified that he could find nothing to indicate that Grimsley did not understand the difference between wrong and right on the night of Tanya Flowerday's murder. He admitted that blackouts do indeed occur, usually in reaction to an excessive amount of alcohol, but Grimsley's account did not correspond to the nature of such a blackout. For instance, his memory of the events following the murder was almost perfect.
As Grimsley was leaving the court, the torture of the past two years wrenched through Tanya's mother. "Grimsley, can you not die, for God's sake!" she yelled to him according to The Star of July 26, 2005.
The next day, on July 26, Mr Justice Fritz van Oosten found Ronald Grimsley guilty on all four charges, labelling the defendant a "poor and unimpressive witness", according to the Beeld of July 27, 2005. He dismissed the "blackout" defense.
During mitigation, Grimsley told the court that he had fallen three storeys at the age of fourteen and had to be hospitalized for six months. He had to learn how to walk and talk again, and struggled to make new friends. The only peers who accepted him were those who smoked cigarettes and marijuana. That was when he had become involved in drugs. He told the court that he was sorry and again apologized to the Flowerdays. His attorney, Charles Thompson, implored the judge to forego the prescribed minimum sentence and proposed 18 years for the murder, to be served concurrently with the other sentences. Grimsley, he maintained, had exhibited remorse.

Tanya as a youth

Delores Flowerday was not convinced. "He took my daughter's life," she told the media, according to the Beeld of July 27, 2005. "She was eighteen years old and couldn't even drive a car yet. Now he gets a second chance and he's not even sorry. He still says he can't remember what he did to her. All he's sorry about, is getting caught."
Judge Van Oosten seemed to concur. He sentenced Grimsley to life for murder, 18 years for rape, 10 years for indecent assault and two years for theft. The sentences would be served concurrently. "A young girl was callously murdered after a cruel attack," the judge said according to the Beeld of July 28, 2005. "Her rape and indecent assault can only be classified in the worst category of sexual crimes I have seen in my career of thirty years."
Did Ronald Grimsley murder Tanya on his own? Was there a video camera? Is there a tape somewhere? We'll probably never know for certain. Since there appears to be not a single case of an actual snuff film having been found anywhere in the world, it seems unlikely. Although it is possible that Grimsley's life and that of his family may have been threatened, that fear motivated him to first attempt suicide and then recant his claims of Nigerian drug dealers and snuff movies, there is no evidence to support such a scenario.

Tanya as a young girl, poses with her parents

And Bob and Delores Flowerday? Their beloved daughter, their only child, is dead. Not only was this precious life that they had created together destroyed, but the dreams they had for her had been turned to ashes. They won't see her managing a second branch of the take-away delivery business. Bob won't lead his daughter down the aisle to marry a man who loves her. They won't witness a life being created inside of her, and later hear that little life call, "Grandma! Grandpa!"
A year after Tanya's death, Bob Flowerday told the Beeld of July 23, 2004, "Anyone who says it gets better with time to accept your child's death, doesn't know what they're talking about. It doesn't get better. It only gets worse. You just learn to hide your emotions better."
Note: Dollar equivalencies calculated at $1 = R6.10. This doesn't yield a monetary value that is directly comparable, however.< /EM >

References

DiMaio, VJ & DiMaio, DJ (2001). Forensic pathology (2nd ed.). Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Hazelwood, RR & Michaud, SG (2002). Dark dreams. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Stine, SA (1999, May/Jun). The snuff film: the making of an urban legend. Skeptical Inquirer. Retrieved January 11, 2006, from the World Wide Web <http://www.csicop.org/si/9905/snuff.html>.
Sue, D, Sue, D & Sue, S (1994). Understanding abnormal behavior (4th ed.). Boston: Hought Mifflin Company.
To recount the story of Tanya Flowerday, I have relied on the following sources:
Tanya Flowerday (2003). 3rd Degree.
Swanepoel, M (2004, Nov). Gewone ma op moordenaar se spoor. Sarie, pp. 62-68.
Swanepoel, M (2005, Sep). Leigh Matthews-saak ruk lewens. Sarie, pp. 68-72.
The electronic archives of Beeld (<http://152.111.1.251/argief/berigte/beeld>), Rapport (<http://152.111.1.251/argief/berigte/rapport>) and Independent On-Line (<http://www.iol.co.za>). The latter also contains articles from the following newspapers: Cape Times, The Mercury and The Star.