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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did. Episode 156. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg Thun. On this fine autumn evening, I bid you to remain with me in old Soviet Russia.
Last episode ended with the discovery of one of Sergei Golovkin's gruesome crime scenes. Hardened detectives, no strangers to violent crime, were shocked and sickened, literally, by the sight of the gutted corpse of the murdered boy before them. In tonight's episode, we continue on this Russian serial killer's infernal downward spiral of depravity and evil.
Again, I have to give my listeners a fair warning. This episode contains graphic descriptions of abhorrent crimes committed against children. Listener discretion is advised. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are
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Samira, Skortnia, Shauna, Ted, Tim, Tony, Trent, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you. I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain.
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In less than a month after the discovery of the gutted boy, not far from the Odintsovu village of Zarashie, in the Mesher Skoye recreation area, detectives found the corpse of another brutally murdered 16-year-old boy. He, too, had been stabbed with a knife. The killer had stabbed the body 35 times and had then completely cut off the head.
The penis was also sliced off and was nowhere to be found. The boy, who was an athlete, had been murdered as he had been on his daily run along the lake. It became obvious that a very dangerous individual was stalking the Moscow region.
At the Odintsovo Department of Internal Affairs, a large investigative operational group was created, including employees of the prosecutor's office and the police. One of the young witnesses told the detectives that when he and a 14-year-old teenager who had turned up murdered were walking through the forest near the pioneer camp, they met an unfamiliar tall man with a scar.
The man had apparently been delighted to meet the boys and talk to them. The adult identified himself as Fisher, and confidentially told them that he had been convicted, but managed to escape from the gulag. And now the police were strenuously looking for him. Then something supposedly had angered the man, and he attacked the teenagers.
As the witness explained, he managed to escape, and run away and hiding in the bushes, he saw with his own eyes how the man calling himself Fisher killed his friend. This story from the very beginning looked too fantastic, too theatrical.
And given that a horror story about a certain Fisher was already circulating among the children in the pioneer camps by that time, this testimony was taken with a huge grain of salt. Nevertheless, it could not be left unchecked, and the search for Fisher, either a convict, or a chess player, or a fisherman, or perhaps the owner of such a surname, was launched.
According to the description of the boy, they were looking for a tall, broad-shouldered man, about thirty years old, with a scar on his face. He spoke with a dialect, and the witness described how the man had a tattoo on his right hand in the form of a snake wrapped around a sword and the word Fisher.
The story of the mysterious Fisher, with the ominous tattoo and menacing scar, would prove to be false. The task force had spared no expense in searching for him, and not a single unverified Fisher remained on the territory of the USSR. But there were no results.
The longer this search went on, the more descriptions of Fisher appeared, which sometimes contradicted each other. Fisher became multifaceted and acquired the status of a legend, a myth. As soon as a man approached Boyes, suspicions arose, and whether it was Fisher
There were numerous rumors about Fisher. In all pioneer camps, the Fisher horror stories were the highlight of the program. Children frightened each other, parents warned their children against communicating with strangers, and were themselves afraid of them. Fisher's name became a household name. It was written on the walls of houses, carved on benches. Songs were composed about Fisher.
Fisher's name thundered all over the country. Naturally, Golovkin himself had a very indirect relationship to this, but he did not fail to use the quote-unquote magic of his name and used it with pleasure later.
Before killing his victims, he informed them that it was he who was that legendary fisher, and enjoyed the horror that was reflected on the faces of the children who could not believe that their stupid childhood horror stories at that moment suddenly became a reality, and much more terrible than they even imagined.
Simultaneously with the search for the elusive Fisher, all kinds of criminals were sifted through the investigative sieve. A huge contingent of prisoners, previously convicted rapists and murderers, as well as homosexuals, people prone to outbursts of sexual aggression, were all scrutinized. No breakthrough came.
According to the period of the crimes committed, the Odintsovo killer coincided with the, in the West at least, much more famous Rostov Ripper. The methods, murder, dismemberment, mockery of the corpse, also largely coincide, although the direction was different.
If the Rostov Ripper, who, as my listeners know, was none other than Andrei Chikatilo, attacked both women, boys and girls, then here the selectivity was obvious. This killer chose only boys of a certain age. Police officers, trying to figure out whether these series of murders were somehow connected with each other, turned to scientists for help.
The head of the All-Union Scientific and Methodological Center for Sexopathology, Professor G. Vasilchenko, having studied the materials, gave them the following recommendations, and I quote, "...sexual actions of the criminal can be regarded as necrosadism, sadism in relation to corpses, selectively aimed at adolescents."
The case has something in common with the murders in the Rostov region. Generally, brutality, stab wounds, most traumatic injuries occur in the victim's anomalous or post-mortem state.
In all cases, the genitals are damaged or excised. Some change in the ritual in raising the age of the boy who attracts the murderer is possible, since in the Rostov region both the ritual and the age of the victims changed. All patients who have consulted doctors about sexual difficulties should be identified.
This is possible only with a total check of sexological case histories. It is necessary to pay attention to persons in contact with adolescents, such as teachers, educators, coaches, club leaders, and especially to those who left or were fired from this job. The search circle can be narrowed after determining the blood group and subsequent examination of the phallograph.
End quote. A note to my dear listeners. A phallograph is the method still used in the West where suspected or convicted sexual offenders have a measuring apparatus attached to their penis. The suspect is then exposed to various photos or video in order to determine whether he is aroused by them or not.
Typically, this method is mostly used to determine if a criminal is a pedophile or not. The specialists' recommendations formed the basis for the work of the detectives. In 1988 alone, 5,799 mentally ill persons prone to sex crimes were identified.
Later, the Rostov Ripper himself, Chikatilo, were targeted as a prime suspect in the Odintsovo series of murders. However, officers of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, seconded to the Rostov region, became convinced that the modus operandi of the Rostov murders was somewhat different from what they saw in the Moscow region.
neither the Rostov Ripper nor the murderers who underwent a thorough check were suitable for the role of the killer who by now was known as the Boa Constrictor. Golovkin himself, according to a later version of the investigation, hid from 1986 to 1989, and Russian authorities claimed he did not commit any murders in this period.
Golovkin was preparing for the further continuation of the hunt for children, but in other forms, more consistent with his perverted fantasies. While killing and raping in the forest, he could not fully enjoy the violence. He was constantly afraid that he would be detected. He wanted complete solitude and privacy. According to Golovkin himself in later interviews,
He said the following, and I quote, I wanted to torture the boys for a long time, and painfully, as I saw in my fantasies. I wanted to see their humiliation, to hear pleas for mercy, end quote. In 1988, he bought himself a car. It was the Soviet-produced VAZ-2103, in dark beige color.
He stored it in a garage located at a stud farm. He then dug a basement in the garage. Later Golovkin said, and I quote, I dug a cellar where I first intended to make a workshop, but then I got the idea to use the cellar for sexual acts and crimes. End quote.
Later, he concreted the floor, lined the walls with concrete slabs, fixed rings in the walls, attached a ladder to the ceiling on which any load could be suspended. Golovkin screwed two powerful lamps into the basement ceiling so that his bloody pleasures took place in bright electric light.
Preparing his abattoir, he relished in the anticipation of the joy he would feel once he got his first victim tied down. He was confident that the subspace beneath his garage would be ideal, so that he could be sure that no one would interrupt or interfere with his crimes. The category of boys had also changed. By now he was targeting those who ran away from home.
whom their parents would not immediately miss, whom they might not even look for. He often went in search of boys in the evenings. He looked for his victims using binoculars. There were several tricks in his arsenal. First, he always paid attention to smoking teenagers loitering around. He stopped, asked for matches, struck up a light conversation. He did it well.
He often suggested to the boys they rob a kiosk, steal cigarettes, vodka, and money. Oftentimes, the boy would accede to the criminal plan. According to Golovkin, this gave him a reason to justify the murder. If the child did not agree to unlawful actions, then Golovkin instantly lost interest in him, since he did not correspond to the image of a bully.
like those hooligans who had beat and humiliated him so many years ago.
He brought the boys looking for unlawful adventures in his trunk, explaining to them that it was necessary in order to successfully rob a place. Behind the garage doors, Golovkin, who had first seemed a harmless and rather timid person, turned into a beast. Here, slowly, he carefully prepared a ritual of murder.
He undressed and forced the victim to undress. Then he forced the boy to be shackled to the wall or the table in the middle of the little slaughter room. Once the boy was securely locked in place, Golovkin would take his time. He would use a knife to slowly torture the young boy, slicing deep cuts all over his body, causing extreme pain and fear.
In between sessions of physical torture, Golovkin would anally rape the boy, without lube causing internal bleeding, until Golovkin climaxed. Then he would continue the torture, until he once again felt he could commit a rape to completion.
After several hours of unimaginable pain, horror and humiliation, Golovkin would slowly strangle the child while looking into the eyes of the terrified boy, seeing the life literally go out of him. Once the boy was dead, Golovkin would continue the mutilation of the body, removing intestines, slicing off the penis, the testicles and oftentimes the head and hands as well.
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By July of 1990, the body of one of the many missing children in the area was found. A dismembered corpse, or rather separate skeletal parts of the body, bone remains scattered and taken away by animals, were found in an area outside the cities of Zvenigorod and Istra. It took the police officers several days to collect the remains.
The examination established that presumably these were the remains of a student of Pereshchuskoia Secondary School, Sergei P., who lived in the village of Kriokovu Odintsovo District. The child had been reported missing since the 23rd of September 1989. He was last seen at a bus stop, going to go to Moscow.
At that time, the survey of bus drivers and conductors did not give any results. Apparently, the boy never got on the bus, and perhaps had preferred to hitchhike to Moscow. It took three years to ascertain clearly what exactly happened that day. From the materials of the criminal case, and I quote...
At about 6 p.m., Golovkin put 15-year-old Sergei in his car at the Pereshchukov railway station in the Odintsovo district, fraudulently brought him to the garage, and forced him to go down to a specially equipped basement. There, threatening with a knife, he stripped the boy and committed several violent sexual acts with him in various forms.
Then Golovkin tied his hands behind his back, threw a rope loop around his neck, and strangled the boy. Then, mocking the corpse, the killer hung him by his legs from the ceiling, cut off his nose and ears, severed his head, inflicted many knife cuts on the body, and cut out the internal and genital organs.
With the help of surgical knives and an axe, Golovkin dismembered the corpse, cut out soft tissues, fried them on a blowtorch and ate them. He kept the severed head in the garage. He opened the skull, burned out the brain and gradually separated the skin and soft tissues. Later, Golovkin showed Sergei's skull to other victims for intimidation purposes.
In August 1990, another boy disappeared near the military town of Vlachiska, and again the investigation remained for a long time in complete ignorance about the further fate of the child. October 1990. Two more boys go missing.
The parents of the pupils of the Maluvja Škemskaja Secondary School, a 6th and 9th grader, reported the disappearance to the police. For more than eight months, the parents lived in painful anticipation of the black news. Dismembered corpses of children were found on the 16th of July 1991.
On the 22nd of August 1991, Nikita Bogdanov, a teenager born in 1976, a resident of the Nevelin State Farm, disappeared on his way to visit his step-grandmother in the village of Gorky Ten.
As Golovkin later admitted, in August 1991, on Rublevo-Ushpenskoye highway, near the village of Ushpenskoye, he put a boy in his car. Golovkin offered the boy to take part in the robbery of Rkialsk, but a tool needed to break into it supposedly had to be taken from his garage. Having lured the teenager into his garage, Golovkin tortured, raped and murdered the boy.
After committing acts of sodomy, he hanged him, dismembered the body, bled the body into a bath, and amputated the penis and testicles. Golovkin was not satisfied with these experiments. He also removed the skin from this unfortunate boy and salted it. He took the remains in two steps into the forest, to the area of the Polyana boarding house, and buried them fifty meters from the country road.
He burned the victim's clothes near his garage. No more than 50 days later, on the 13th of October, the remains of Nikita Bogdanov were exhumed. The terrible death of another child, no matter how cynical it sounds, gave the investigation valuable new information.
In August 1991, Moscow and the Moscow region were literally flooded with police and the military. In connection with the creation of the State Emergency Committee and the attempt to remove the president of the USSR, M.S. Gorbachev, in the days when the child was abducted, a state of emergency was declared in the country.
Naturally, both the movement from the city to the region and the appearance of non-resident citizens in the near Moscow region were difficult. Therefore, with a high degree of certainty, it could be assumed that the crime was committed by a local resident, who also had a car and a place where he could commit his atrocities.
Another important point was that the skin removed from the boy was salted with unrefined feed salt. Only a limited number of people could have access to such quantities of salt. All this determined the further directions of the search. The investigation focused its efforts on the search for a local resident, the owner of a vehicle related to the livestock industry.
But inspections of local residents did not give any definite results. Strange as it may seem, in the extensive lists of suspicious persons compiled as a result of these checks, there was no place only for the main culprit of all the events that took place. The fact is that Golovkin still had a Moscow residence permit. But in order not to waste time on trips to Moscow and back,
On the territory of the stud farm he was allocated a room on the second floor in one of the administrative buildings. Golovkin's dwelling was an ordinary room, a sofa, a wardrobe, a desk littered with documents bearing the legible signature of the animal breeder Golovkin. The windows of his room overlooked the fields, covered with emerald grass.
Behind them, on a low hill, stood the stud farm's office and the inconspicuous box of its green garage. Looking out the window, Golovkin could see the symbol of his power every day. Golovkin, according to his registration, was considered a Muscovite, and thus, at that moment, did not interest the law enforcement agencies.
The investigation received new terms of operation in 1992, when the notorious Vladimir Ilyich Kolesnikov was appointed head of the main directorate of criminal investigation of the Ministry of Eternal Affairs of the Russian Federation, who personally detained in 1990 the most famous and elusive psychopath of the USSR, Andrei Chikatilo.
The crimes committed by the elusive Fischer had a wide public response and it was viewed as necessary to take prompt measures to capture this criminal. So it was that on the 2nd of April 1992, the case was taken over by the senior investigator for especially important cases under the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, Senior Counselor of Justice Yevgeny Bakin.
Bakin had the necessary experience in searching for psychopaths. Since in the late 80s, he was involved in the investigation of the Chikatilo case. An investigative operational group was created again, which included mostly fresh personnel. The search was headed by the senior operative of the GUUR of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, Police Major Vladimir Chakai.
At that time, these were dozens of volumes of a criminal case, which included three episodes. The murders of teenagers in 1986, but there were still similar murders in 1989, 1990 and 1991. On the 3rd of April, Bakin brought these cases together. Bakin stated in a later interview the following, and I quote,
When I studied the case and the available information on the crimes committed in the Odintsovu region against adolescents, I had a version that the last murders were committed by the same person. In addition, it became clear that serious changes had taken place in the life of the criminal.
In 1986, he did not have a quote-unquote clinic, a permanent place where he could butcher corpses. He went to hunt children.
But there was an element of chance in it. The boa constrictor never knew in advance who would be his victim. He filmed anyone, practically the first one he came across. He could stand and watch whoever gets caught. Then, in 1986, the boa constrictor killed where he attacked. He practically did not hide the first dead bodies.
A tuft of hair was removed from the burial of the remains of a teenager named Nikita during an inspection of the scene. An expert study found that they did not belong to the victim. It was the hair of another teenager killed a year earlier. These circumstances indicated that the offender had dealt with the victim in one place, the quote-unquote clinic.
Another simple conclusion suggested itself. The killer took corpses to the burial place by transport, since there were no settlements nearby, only concrete road and forest all around. End quote.
Thus, it became clear that the boa constrictor had acquired a quote-unquote clinic later on, and there he could calmly dismember corpses without fear of being caught off guard. Then the boa took out their remains to the forest. It was clear that he was not killing there, i.e. the burial site was not the site of a murder and subsequent dismemberment.
Operatives had already begun to work out more purposefully the version about the identity of the criminal. Particular attention was paid to residents of the city of Zvenigorod, the villages of Zavuronki, Golitsuni, Gorki, Pershkuzhkovu, but by then they took note of everyone who fit into the generalized psychological and social type. The profile was as follows.
The suspect acts alone. He is tall, has the skills to work as an anatomist in a morgue or slaughtering livestock and wild animals. The wanted person most likely has a car, garage or shed for personal use. The investigation intensified, but the disappearances of children and adolescents did not stop.
I don't know.
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Next episode, number 157 in number, will continue and finish this saga. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you. Good night, and good luck.