The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (63 page)

As drug gangs are at work in the area, it had been mooted that the missing women were addicts or small-time mules, who were executed because they knew too much. In November 2004, the FBI report accused unnamed narcotics traffickers for the torture and death of 17-year-old Lilia Garcia in the February 2001. Her body was found 100 yards from the spot where eight other victims were discovered. Then there are the juniors, or perhaps a cabal of rich and powerful sadists whose wealth puts them above the law.

Meanwhile Abdul Sharif won a judicial review in the Elizabeth Garcia case. The murder conviction was upheld, but his 30-year sentence was reduced to 20. However, the prosecutors say that Sharif may be charged with other murders. But as he has already been in jail for over 11 years, fresh charges are hardly going to stop the killings.

In 2004, a federal special prosecutor was appointed. Her remit extends to investigating the incompetence of the local police. But so far she has drawn a blank. However, a $2.7 million fund to aid the families of the victims has been established. Amnesty International has criticized the Mexican government’s efforts to investigate these crimes and the United Nations has condemned Mexico’s record on violence against women. But nothing helped. There were more than 28 related murders in 2005.

On 15 August 2006 Edgar Alvarez Cruz was arrested by US Marshals in Denver, Colorado and charged with 14 of the murders. Jos Francisco Granados and Alejandro Delgado Valles, aka
El Calá
, have also been arrested in connection with these 14 murders. Two of the men are said to be drug addicts and the third a psychopath. Even if these men are found guilty as charged, it seems that there are plenty more serial killers at large in and around Ciudad Juarez.

Even if they are caught, many will escape justice as much crucial evidence has been lost, incinerated or even intentionally destroyed, some in exchange for money for suspects seeking to clear their names, according to a recent report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. In the winter of 2003, homeless men took refuge from the harsh cold inside the warehouse housing many of the case files. To keep warm, the men used the files as fuel, or so the story goes.

The following year, an official was appalled by the smell that permeated the warehouse. He discovered the source of the stench was clothing, caked with blood, worn by one of the victims, a ten-year-old girl whose corpse had been dumped in the desert. Nauseated by the odour, the official, a crime scene investigator, ordered the clothes washed and deodorized with fabric softener.

“I was aghast,” said an investigator for the Human Rights Commission. “We lost crucial hair, fibre, prints, semen and God knows what other vital potential evidence.”

Far from an isolated incident, this is part of a pattern of the mishandling of evidence that will make solving the killings even more daunting for a new crop of investigators and will ensure the perpetrators remain at large. In a review of the investigation by the special prosecutor’s office, some 177 state officials were found to have been responsible for negligence or omission in the original investigations. However, none of these officials has been brought to justice by the state authorities as the statute of limitations has been applied in their favour. Others have been forced to resign after refusing to fabricate evidence or documenting the use of torture in the investigation.

Portugal’s Lisbon Ripper

A Portuguese serial killer is being hunted across Europe. Known as the “Lisbon Ripper”, he is being sought by police in Portugal and other four countries where he has killed.

The Ripper first struck in Lisbon city in July 1992. The victim was found with her throat cut. She had been disembowelled. Soon after a second victim was found within 50 yards of where the first had been dumped and in March 1993 a third body was discovered.

The killer then seems to have travelled further afield. Over the next four years, victims appeared in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and the Czech Republic. All were young, drug-addicted prostitutes. In each case, the method of killing was identical. This has convinced the Portuguese police and Interpol that the same man was responsible. Victims have been strangled or had their throat cut. Then they have been disembowelled with a piece of glass. He does not appear to have raped his victims.

Detectives also travelled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in an attempt to link the Lisbon Ripper murders with a string of similar unsolved slayings there in 1988. The theory is that he was a member of New Bedford’s large Portuguese population who left the city and continued his twisted ways back in his native Portugal, then out across Europe. Police believe he may have been a long distance lorry driver. However, no solid link was ever established.

He is believed to be tall, white, and aged between 35 and 40 at the time of the European killings. He has a pathological hatred of women and is thought to be suffering from AIDS, perhaps contracted from a drug-addicted prostitute.

Russia’s Rippers

Police in the Altai administrative district of central Siberia have been searching for a serial killer responsible for the murders of at least five teenage female applicants to the Altai Technical University. Ksenia Kirgizova, Anzhela Burdakova, Yulia Tikhtiyekova, Liliana Voznyuk and Olga Shmakova disappeared between 26 June and 15 August 2000 after sitting entrance exams at the university campus in the Siberian city of Barnaul.

Two other women – the mothers of the university applicants – have also gone missing. Some bodies of women killed in the area have been found in ditches, in woods and in the Obj river near Barnaul, a city of 700,000. The police set up check points, questioned thousands and conducted widespread searches, but no trace of the five young women could be found. Then in October 2000, two bodies suspected of being those of students Ksenia Kirgizova and Anzhela Burdakova were found in a forest 25 miles from Barnual. Investigators later positively identified one of the bodies as Kirgizova’s.

Investigators believe the killer has been active around Barnaul for several years and has been responsible for an undetermined amount of unsolved murders. Forty-year-old Alexander Anisimov was arrested, but committed suicide in mysterious circumstances after several days in custody.

On 5 February 2001, a man identified only as Alexander, a 30-year-old driver for the Barnaul police department’s drunk tank, was arrested after a 22-year-old Barnaul University student told the police she had jumped out his apartment to escape. She said that Alexander had made sexual advances in his apartment the previous evening but she rejected him. In the morning, she managed to escape by jumping off a balcony while Alexander was in the bathroom. A recent police search of the suspect’s apartment found about 300 photographs of sexual orgies and a collection of women’s underwear. However, despite intense speculation, city prosecutor Nikolai Mylitsin dismissed him as a suspect in the abduction of the five girls.

“When a man is accused of sexual violence we check whether he had anything to do with all unsolved rape and murder cases,” he said.

Then on 10 February, the police in Novosibirsk, 120 miles north of Barnaul, arrested three men and one woman on suspicion of kidnapping and murder. An official said the suspects have confessed to abducting and killing a 16-year-old Barnaul resident named Irina Serova. But she was not one of the five girls who went missing while applying to enter Altai State Technical University. The three men, aged 20 to 27, and the 27-year-old woman were charged with kidnapping and forcing girls into prostitution.

Roman Kuminov, a senior investigator overseeing missing person reports in the Altai district, said the gang is thought to have lured girls from across Altai with promises of well-paid jobs before selling them as prostitutes.

If convicted, the suspects face up to 15 years in prison, he said.

Kuminov did not say whether murder charges would be brought against the group, although two bodies believed to be the missing girls’ have been found. Kidnappings have become common across Russia and especially in Chechnya, but few suspects are detained.

Russian police in the city of Perm in the Urals had little more luck when hunting a serial killer who claimed seven victims in less than three months in 1996. On 28 August, Perm’s police chief Andrei Kamenev said: “His latest victim was a woman who was raped and stabbed in an elevator shaft in the same Perm neighbourhood where six other women have been attacked in recent months.”

Police believe that one person is responsible for all the crimes, but the only suspect was not recognized by victims who survived the attacks. This was all the more disappointing as in June the police had arrested a man in Perm who they charged with murdering and disfiguring six women. The murders took place over a single month. In each case, the attacker struck the victim in the head and mutilated her face.

Meanwhile a serial killer was stalking the streets of Moscow. Between dusk on 21 July and dawn on 22 July 2003, four women were murdered in the capital of the Russian Federation. That brought the body count to ten for that month.

The first six victims were strangled. At midday on 1 July, 28-year-old Yulia Bondareva had taken a walk with her boyfriend in the botanical gardens. After the couple parted, Yulia set off towards the underground. An hour later, her body was discovered. She had been gagged with a piece of her own shirt, beaten, raped and throttled.

Before dawn the following day, the police discovered the body of 17-year-old Kseniya Medintsevaya dumped in the courtyard of a kindergarten. Her face was smeared with blood and her dress was ripped open. Again she had been raped, beaten and strangled. She had last been seen alive at 11 p.m. in her apartment the previous night.

On 4 July, the naked body of 28-year-old Irena Gera was found several miles from the centre of Moscow where she lived. She had been raped and strangled with the strap of her handbag.

The next victim was a 25-year-old Ukrainian prostitute named Alexandra. She was found strangled in her apartment on 8 July. One end of a belt was tied around her neck. The other was attached to a door handle.

Near Alexandra’s apartment, the police found the partially clothed body of 32-year-old teacher Elena Tolokonnikova on 11 July. Last seen out with friends the night before, she had not returned home.

Then on 15 July, the decomposing body of a woman was found near a pond. The remains were not identified. However there were signs of the handiwork of the same killer. Like the other victims, she was short, slim, with a fair complexion and long, light-coloured hair.

The seventh victim was 17-year-old student Tatyana Nikishina. She was killed on 21 July. Her assailant had tried to rape her. Then he strangled her with her bra and left her body in the northwest of the city. Police did not release the names of the other three victims slain that night. However, the killer seems to have begun to adopted a variety of methods. One was bludgeoned as well as strangled, another purely bludgeoned, hit by a blunt object from behind, and the third was killed having her head smashed against concrete. The youngest victim was 17; the oldest 35.

Moscow police have organized a task force to investigate the murders, but did not, at first, admit a serial killer was at work, due to the various methods of strangulation and bludgeoning he had employed. Some victims were strangled with ligatures, others manually. Some were beaten; some sexually assaulted. Seven of the ten victims were found in the northern section of the city, but the other three were killed several miles away in the northeast. There was no single MO.

At least six were well educated. One, Alexandra the Ukrainian prostitute, was not. She was the only one to be found indoors. She had been soliciting in a nearby market that day and could have picked up what she thought was a client, or she might have been followed home. There were other inconsistencies. Yulia Bondareva, the first known victim, was attacked and killed in a public park in broad daylight, while the others were killed at night. Why had Irena Gera travelled from her home to the city’s northern section where she was attacked and murdered? And why did Kseniya Medintsevaya leave her apartment in the middle of the night?

Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said that the ten women were killed by different assailants, claiming that three men had already been arrested. And a senior police official characterized the bunching of murders as “coincidence”.

Then on 23 July, a man stepped from a wooded area and grabbed a female pedestrian by the throat. He pulled her to the ground and dragged her into the bushes. A woman looking out of the window of an apartment opposite called the police, who caught the man. He was an immediate suspect in Moscow’s string of unsolved murders. However, he was soon dismissed as a copycat. On 28 July, while he was in custody, the body of a 42-year-old woman was found in a schoolyard northwest of the city. She had been raped and strangled. As in the case of 17-yearold Kseniya Medintsevaya, she had been dumped outside a kindergarten. A pattern appeared to be emerging.

Investigators found three victims who had survived similar attacks. In each case the assailant had concealed himself in bushes or behind a fence, then sprang out on the unsuspecting victim as she walked past. They also provided detailed descriptions of their assailant. He was a white male with short hair, a thin face, small eyes, bushy eyebrows, a large nose and thick lips. Aged between 35 and 40, he was between five foot seven and five foot nine, and wore jeans and a dark T-shirt.

These details were never released to frightened Muscovites, who drew their own conclusions. Women remained indoors while the men were sent out to do errands. They knew that, if a serial killer was at work, he was killing at a terrifying rate. But he could not be found.

Then in mid-June, the body of a woman was found in Bitsa Park in the south of the city. The following day, her work colleague at a small grocery store in southwestern Moscow Alexander Pichushkin was arrested. A loader there, he confessed to killing the woman and said that he had planned to kill as many as 64 people.