Mikhail Popkov: police officer with a deadly sideline in murder and necrophilia, Popov inflicted unbelievably horrific mutilations on his victims.
Tamara Samsonova: 68-year-old female serial killer who mutilated her victims and may well have cannibalized their corpses.
Anatoly Onoprienko: a killer so brutal, so bloodthirsty, that the Ukrainian government mobilized an entire army unit to stop him.
Tamara Ivanyutina: a particularly malevolent individual, Ivanyutina killed anyone who offended her in even the slightest way, sending them to an agonizing death with her vial of thallium.
Andrei Chikatilo: the Soviet Union’s most fearsome serial killer. Chikatilo slaughtered at least 56 women and children, literally tearing them apart.
Irina Gaidamachuk: known as “Satan in a Skirt,” Gaidamachuk bludgeoned 17 elderly women to death, robbing them for money to buy vodka.
Vladimir Bratislav: inflicted such horrific mutilations on his 30 victims that the police refused to release the details, even after he was convicted.
Alexander Spesivtsev: Siberian cannibal who preyed on street children, slaughtering them in his filthy apartment and handing over their flesh to his mother to cook.
Sergei Ryakhovsky: a hulking killer known as the Hippopotamus, Ryakhovsky beat, knifed, and strangled his 19, mostly elderly, victims.
Soviet Monsters
Tamara Ivanyutina
In the early months of 1987, a school located in Kiev, Ukraine
suffered a double tragedy. Two staff members died in quick succession, both
with similar, inexplicable symptoms. The first of these was the school
“Partorg” (a role that encompassed responsibility for ideological education as
well as human resources); the second was the institution’s “nutrition nurse,” a
woman in her twenties, who had appeared to be in good physical health.
Doctors
who examined the two were baffled by their symptoms, which included chronic
joint pain and almost complete hair loss. Unable to determine the cause behind
these afflictions, they fell back on the diagnosis prevalent in Soviet medicine
at that time. According to their death certificates, both victims had died of
heart failure.
A short while later, on an afternoon in March of 1987, a Kiev hospital
was suddenly inundated with a rash of emergency admissions. Several desperately
ill children arrived almost simultaneous at the facility, all of them writhing
in agony. The youngsters had been picked up at various locations, although a
common link was soon established. They all attended the same school. Then, as
doctors fought desperately to stabilize their young patients, a call came in
from the school itself. Two adults – a teacher and a refrigerator repair man –
had been struck down by the same mystery ailment. An ambulance was immediately
dispatched to bring them to the hospital. Within 24 hours, both adults, as well
as two of the 11 children admitted on that horrific day, had died in
agony.
A link was quickly established between those deaths and the two that
had occurred earlier in the year at the same school. The question was, what had
caused them?
Initially, it was speculated that some sort of infection was
responsible. However, the symptoms displayed by the patients were inconsistent
with this. None, for example, had shown any evidence of fever.
Then, it was thought the victims had been exposed to some sort of
poison, radioactive material, perhaps. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster had
occurred less than a year prior. Had radioactive material somehow made it to
this Kiev school? Not wanting to take any chances, hospital administrators
contacted the Sanitation and Epidemics Station (Russia’s version of the CDC).
It wasn’t long before SES technicians in protective suits were wandering the
halls of the school with Geiger counters. The results, however, showed no signs
of contamination.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, the bloodwork of all the patients,
including the four who had died, was back. And the doctors were in for a
surprise. All had tested positive for the poison, thallium. Tests were then
ordered on the exhumed corpses of the two earlier victims and returned a
similar result.
With the discovery of thallium in the bodies, the symptoms made
perfect sense. But while that question was now answered, another was raised.
How had the victims come into contact with the deadly substance? SES officials
suspected accidental exposure, perhaps as a result of careless pest control
measures. The school building was thus subjected to a thorough sweep. No trace
of the poison was found.
That left only one explanation for the six deaths - deliberate
poisoning. What had started out as the suspected leak of radioactive materials
was now a homicide investigation.
As detectives descended on the school and began questioning faculty
and learners, their suspicions fell initially on a talented middle-grader who
was said to be obsessed with chemistry. The boy had once played a prank on the
gym teacher, coating his whistle with a mildly corrosive substance that had
caused the man’s lips to blister. However, the youngster had no possible way of
obtaining thallium and in any case had no motive for poisoning any of the
victims. Besides, another of those afflicted was the school chemistry teacher,
with whom the boy had a good relationship. That teacher had survived, despite
suffering debilitating symptoms. Under questioning, he provided investigators
with an interesting snippet of information. In addition to his role in the
chemistry department, he was also responsible for the school’s food inventory.
That clue set alarm bells jangling with detectives. Suddenly the
connection they’d been missing appeared crystal clear. All of the deaths were
somehow connected to the school kitchen. The nutrition nurse; the Partorg who
oversaw all of the school workers, including the kitchen staff; the chemistry
teacher, who was responsible for food inventory; the technician who had been
called in to fix the school’s broken refrigerator the day he fell ill; the
metal shop teacher who had assisted him in the job; the children who had all
eaten in the cafeteria. If there was a mass poisoner, investigators decided, he
or she was to be found working in the kitchen.
The detectives’ first step before interrogating the kitchen staff was
to speak to the SES workers who had carried out the Geiger sweep of the school.
Had they noticed anything unusual while processing the kitchen area? Several of
them had. A dishwasher, Tamara Ivanyutina, had made a nuisance of herself
during the procedure, following the technicians around, constantly under their
feet even after the area had been cordoned off. She’d been asked to leave
several times and eventually had been removed forcibly after she became insolent
and abusive.
While all of this was going on, a second team of detectives was working
the investigation from a different angle, making the rounds of various
geological labs in Kiev, trying to trace the source of the thallium. They soon
hit paydirt. After finding a discrepancy in the inventory at one facility, they
began interrogating lab technicians and soon extracted a tearful confession
from one of them. The young woman said that she had given about 50 milligrams
of Clerici solution to a friend of hers, something she’d been doing regularly
since 1976. The friend had told her that her parents required it for pest
control. Pressed for the friend’s name, the young lab tech said that it was
Nina Maslenko. Nina, as it turned out, was the sister of Tamara Ivanyutina.
Tamara Maslenko (later Ivanyutina) was born in Tyumen, Siberia in
1942. Her parents, Anton and Maria, had been relocated there from war-torn
Ukraine during WWII. They would spend several years in the unwelcoming
backwater before returning eventually to Kiev, via the Ukrainian towns of
Kherson and Tula. It was a decades-long sojourn, during which the couple had
six children. They arrived back in Kiev in the early 80s to take up residence
in a crumbling ruin of a building, where they shared an apartment with several
other families. By then, four of their offspring had cut all ties with the
family. It is not difficult to understand why.
Anton and Maria Maslenko appear to have been a particularly malevolent
couple, who sought to instill in their children an ideology based on hatred and
self-interest. Succeed at any cost and crush those who stand in your way; trust
no one and let no slight go unpunished. This was their ethos, one that their
remaining children, Nina and Tamara, readily bought into.
And that philosophy was more than just theoretical. Crammed into their
overcrowded apartment, the Maslenkos were soon involved in disputes and
squabbles with their neighbors. Those who made enemies of them, invariably,
were not long for this world. One man was poisoned because his TV was too loud;
a woman was killed after making an ill-advised remark about the squalid
condition of the Maslenkos’ living area. Then Nina entered into a marriage of
convenience with a much older man and he died within days of the wedding,
leaving her a spacious apartment in the Kiev city center. She then seduced a
younger beau but began poisoning him after he refused to marry her. The man
survived but was left incapacitated and impotent.
Neither were these the first victims of the Maslenko clan. Anton is
believed to have committed his first murder as far back as the 1930s. He would
later admit to poisoning a female relative in the Seventies. The woman had had
the temerity to suggest that he should prepare himself for the worst after
Maria was hospitalized with a serious illness. “She dared imagine the death of
my beloved wife,” Maslenko would later confess, “so I killed her.”
What is perhaps most shocking about these murders, is the casual
indifference with which they were committed. Yet for all of the psychopathic
exploits of her parents and sister, Tamara was the worst of the bunch.
The first murder that can be definitely attributed to Tamara was that
of her husband, a truck driver who she’d married in haste and thereafter
decided was below her station. Seeking a way out, Tamara had given no thought
to divorce. Why concern yourself with such trivialities when there was a supply
of thallium at the ready? The truck driver had departed on a road trip carrying
a batch of sandwiches prepared by his wife and had never returned. Thereafter,
Tamara had set her sights on a recent divorcee, seven years her junior.
Oleg Ivanyutina was instantly attracted to the pretty but overweight
Tamara. It is easy too, to see what attracted her to him. His parents had a
free standing house with a large backyard on the outskirts of Kiev. Tamara, who
had ambitions of raising livestock and operating a butchery, undoubtedly had
her eye on that property.
But it was soon clear that the elder Ivanyutins did not like Tamara.
In truth, she was a difficult person to like – combative, rude and obnoxious,
interested in nothing other than getting her own way. The Ivanyutins were keen
on a grandchild, which Tamara, by now in her early forties, seemed incapable of
producing. When they suggested adoption, Tamara balked. Eventually, frustrated
with the situation, they gave Oleg and Tamara an ultimatum. They had a year to
produce a grandchild, by whatever means. Failing that, the Ivanyutins would
write Oleg out of their will and bequeath their house to some distant relative.
It was an ill-advised threat, one that amounted to a death sentence
for those issuing it.
Oleg’s father was the first to die. He fell ill soon after eating a
meal prepared by his daughter-in-law. His wife followed him to the grave just a
few weeks after the funeral, having suffered many of the same symptoms – joint
pain, abdominal cramps, hair loss, and ultimately heart failure. Despite
symptoms that seemed to suggest otherwise, both deaths were put down to
coronary problems.
With her in-laws out of the way, Tamara finally had her hands on a
property big enough to realize her dream. Shortly thereafter, she began raising
pigs. By all accounts, she was a good farmer, her animals fat and healthy. Her
husband, meanwhile, appeared to have contracted the same disease that had taken
his parents. He began steadily losing weight, lost all of his hair, and began
suffering severe pains in his joints. Barely into his mid-thirties he looked
twice that age and could only walk doubled over and supported by a cane.
Despite her burgeoning business, Tamara continued to work at her lowly
job as a dishwasher in the school cafeteria. The reason for this was simple.
Keeping livestock was an expensive undertaking and she lacked the funds to buy
feed for her pigs. Working in the cafeteria gave her access to untold
quantities of food that she could pilfer and carry home. She was hardly subtle
about it either. She stole without any attempt at subterfuge. Almost daily,
she’d be seen leaving the school premises carrying large, heavy bags.
Often, she’d be seen stalking the cafeteria floor chasing slow eaters
from their meals which she’d then scoop up into one of her bags. On one
occasion, two young children – a first-grader and a fifth-grader – approached the cook for some scraps to take
home to their pet. Tamara was furious. She waited for the children outside and
angrily demanded that they hand the food over to her. Within days of that
incident both of the children became seriously ill, suffering joint pain and
hair loss. They would remain so for over a year as Tamara continued to feed
them small doses of poison, not enough to kill but certainly enough to keep
them in agony. Even against children, she held a grudge for a long time.
But Tamara’s wholesale thievery had not gone unnoticed. The school’s
nutrition nurse had eventually had enough and confronted her, instructing her
to stay away from the refrigerators and the stoves and to stop harassing the
children. When Tamara ignored this instruction, the nurse went to the chemistry
teacher responsible for food inventory and he, in turn, reported the matter to
the school Partorg. Tamara was hauled before the local Communist Party
Committee, where she suffered a humiliating dressing-down before being released
with a warning. Not long after, the nurse and the Partorg became ill and
ultimately died. The chemistry teacher suffered similar symptoms but survived.
With her accusers dispatched, Tamara decided on a new ploy. She
sabotaged the cafeteria’s refrigeration units, hoping that the food would spoil
and that she’d then be allowed to take it home to her pigs. But the school was
quick to attend to the problem, summoning a repairman that same day. Tamara
then poisoned a pot of buckwheat soup that she knew would be given to the
repairman for his lunch. The twelve children that were also poisoned, she
considered collateral damage. She had never liked children anyway.
But the mass poisoning had been a major miscalculation on her part.
With evidence of thallium in the bloodwork of the victims and eyewitness
testimony as to her strange behavior, Tamara was placed under her arrest. When
a vial of Clerici solution was discovered at her house, the game was finally up
for the serial poisoner.
With Tamara now in custody, attention turned to her parents. The
police, however, had very little evidence against them at this point, aside
from the fact that they had procured the thallium. But then Maria Maslenko made
it easy for them. She tried to kill a neighbor with a batch of poisoned
pancakes (the woman’s only offense appeared to be that Maria was jealous of her
war veteran’s pension). Fortunately, the woman was suspicious of Maria’s sudden
show of generosity and rather than eat the pancakes she packed them up and took
them to the police. Tests would prove that they were tainted with enough
thallium to kill several times over.
All four members of the murderous Maslenko clan would eventually be
tried for murder. Nina would face only one charge, for killing her elderly
husband. She was sentenced to the relatively light term of 16 years for the
crime. Anton and Maria Maslenko were also convicted. Their sentences of
thirteen and ten years respectively would amount to life in prison, as both
died behind bars.
As for the primary focus of the murder inquiry, Tamara Ivanyutina was
found guilty on multiple counts and sentenced to death. The Soviet state was
not in the habit of making public statements about executions but it is
believed that she was put to death by a bullet to the back of the head sometime
in the late eighties. She would be the last woman executed in the Soviet Union.
Subsequent to the execution, investigators began looking into
suspicious deaths in other places where the Maslenkos had lived before arriving
back in Kiev. In each of those cities, they found numerous unexplained deaths
directly connected to the family, although no further charges were ever
brought.
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