How in 1909 the police hunted the blood maniac.
It is generally accepted that there were three maniacs in tsarist Russia. The first (most bloodthirsty) is the notorious landowner Saltychikha. The second - the Tsarskoye Selo murderer, who operated near the lyceum during Pushkin's studies there. And, finally, the third is a hereditary nobleman Nikolai Radkevich, who has been assigned the role of the first serial killer recorded in St. Petersburg by the name of Vadim Krovyanik. It took the police two and a half months to catch him. Rumor attributes three murders and two attempted murders to Radkevich. But at the trial, in the end, only one episode was proved.
Vadim Krovyanik.
Sinister stranger
On July 1, 1909, the body of a twenty-year-old prostitute, Anna Blumentrost, was caught in the Neva near the Kalashnikovskaya (now Sinopskaya) embankment. Her identity was identified by a wet substitute (yellow) ticket. When the chief of the Moscow detective police, Vladimir Filippov, was informed that twelve stab wounds were the cause of death, he immediately assumed that the matter was not good and troublesome.
The merchants of the murdered woman told the detectives that her last client was a man dressed in a long black coat and wide-brimmed hat with disproportionately long arms. Another feature was a beardless face. The agents of the detective police whispered with the traders of the Horse Market, where Blumentrost traded, but the trail had already cooled down by that time.
The next murder happened two weeks later. This time the victim was Ekaterina Gerus - the name was given when the prostitute was identified from Znamenskaya Square. The main witness, the corridor of the Danube Hotel on Ligovsky Prospect, told Filippov, who had personally arrived at the site, that on the night of July 14, the guests, who identified themselves as peasants Ivanov and Mishutin, ordered wine and sweets to their room. In the morning the bellhop saw that Mishutin, dressed in a black coat and hat, had left room one and, noticing the employee, threw into the open door of the room: "Shut up, Arisha, sleep." After paying and asking to wake up his companion an hour later, the "peasant" left, and the bellhop soon found the body of a woman in the room, on which they later counted twenty knife wounds. Experts found that the killer was torturing her with a knife, already dead, previously strangled.
Promotional video:
Vladimir makovsky. “Consecration of the brothel”.
Revenge on the beauties
Even prostitutes quickly found out that a maniac appeared in the city. At that time, Filippov only had a verbal portrait of the suspect and two special features: a "skipper's" beard and long arms. But soon the first piece of evidence appeared - the wanted person presented it himself.
The attack on the maid Zinaida Levina took place on the afternoon of July 24. "Coat and Hat" jumped out of the doorway and stabbed the woman returning from the market with a knife in the stomach. The second blow hit the shoulder. Passers-by prevented the villain from completing what he had begun. Running away, he dropped the knife.
Now the police had evidence, but along with it a gap arose in the coherent version - Levina was not a prostitute. The only thing that all the victims had in common was the dark hair color. Eyewitnesses said that before the attack on Levin, they heard an exclamation: "Revenge on the beauties!" Then it was suggested that the maniac hunts not only for prostitutes, but also for pretty brunettes of frivolous behavior in principle.
The day after the failed assassination attempt, he committed another. In the "numbers". But this time too, the dark-haired prostitute Clotilde managed to escape, and when the guard of the brothel from Kolomenskaya Street arrived at her cry, the attacker managed to jump out the window and hide.
The newspapermen immediately nicknamed the criminal “St. Petersburg Jack the Ripper” and caught up with such horror that even blondes were apprehensively moving along the streets of the capital.
Filippov leads the investigation
The knife found at the scene of the attack on Levin was popular with merchant sailors. Then Filippov sent out requests to the heads of the large ports of the Baltic Sea with a request to report on attacks on prostitutes.
As researcher Aleksandr Pilipchuk writes, in anticipation of answers, the detectives took up door-to-door rounds. The attack on Clotilde made it possible to conclude that the perpetrator selects victims within a radius of three kilometers from Znamenskaya Square. The personnel of the detective police then hardly exceeded 20 people, so Filippov did not hesitate to personally bypass brothels, taverns, brothels, hostels and hotels. Countless conversations with cabbies, janitors, servants, and regulars of taverns made it possible to compose a detailed verbal portrait.
The police began to realize that they were looking for a 20-year-old brute with long arms, a wide nose, a goatee and bushy eyebrows over deep-set eyes. During the rounds, the name Vadim Krovyanik was first heard. So the young man called himself, introducing himself as a nobleman, talking about sea voyages and starting strange conversations about the severity of the sin of debauchery. They also groped for the place of his possible habitat - Makonin's bed house on Poltava Street. However, here the trail was interrupted - in the shelter they said that a man similar in description had long ceased to appear, and his name was not Vadim Krovyanik.
The investigation has reached a dead end.
Sea trail
Finally, answers came from Riga and Koenigsberg - it turns out that there was also a surge in attacks on prostitutes with dark hair. Comparison of the lists of the crews of the Russian ships that entered these ports with the data on the residents of Makonin's shelter gave one coincidence - the sailor of the steamer Mstislav Udaloy, 21-year-old Nikolai Radkevich. It was found that he was a noble's son, at the age of 14 he was expelled from the Nizhny Novgorod cadet corps with a scandal. Then bad behavior prevented him from graduating from the Odessa navigational school, and he left the sailors himself. According to the police, the captain of the steamer identified the wanted "long-armed" and said that he often spoke of brunettes with irritation.
Having established the identity of the maniac, it remained to find him. The search led to a shelter on Kharkovskaya street. But Radkevich got ahead of the detectives and, without paying, left his refuge. In his room, the police found only a half-meter inscription on the wall - "Revenge to the beauties."
The last death
The murder of Maria Butoshnikova on September 17, 1909 at the Kiao Hotel on Simeonovskaya Street (now Belinsky) was the last in the "track record" of the St. Petersburg maniac and … the only one in Nikolai Radkevich's conviction.
But it was not the police who stopped him, but a bellboy named Yakov Kazenov. When Krovyanik tried to leave the scene of the crime according to the already known scheme, Kazenov did not open the hotel door for him, but first went into the room to make sure that everything was all right with the girl. Two and a half years later, the bellboy told in detail what happened next in court:
"Where is she?" - I ask. Then he rushed at me. “She is ready, and you will be,” he said, and grabbed me by the throat and slammed the doors with his other hand. I began to scream, and he probably wanted to stick his hand in my mouth, but I managed to bite his fingers and began to gnaw what was urine.
As a result of the struggle, Krovyanik knocked out Kazenov's tooth, but he managed to escape, smash the window, the second license plate and the maid came running to his cries for help. The three of them were able to detain the criminal.
The police called to the scene found the murdered woman on the sofa in the room. She was completely naked, covered with her own shirt and dress, as well as a sofa cover. All the rags were soaked in blood, 35 wounds were counted on the body - in the chest, abdomen and genitals. Later it turned out that at first the criminal tried to strangle the woman.
During the examination, a knife was found at the detainee, and under the bed was a piece of note paper on which was written: “Revenge on the beauties. Money was taken for the labor of sending it to the next world, and because the dead do not need it. The killer of this woman and E. Gerus in the Danube Hotel, I, Vadim Krovianik. September 17 ". On the reverse side was a note in pencil: “At the hotel. I would not have killed her if not for her greed for money. Strangled in a fit of anger. There was an intention to kill earlier. Vadim Krovyanik after the case."
It should be noted that such an inconsistency was characteristic of the accused Radkevich. Later on, he refused to be involved in the murder at the Danube Hotel and at the trial often refuted himself. By the way, no ink or pen was found in the hotel room "Kiao", from which it was concluded that he had made at least the first entry in advance.
The ideal of murder
The trial began on March 10, 1912 and lasted two days. In addition to the murder of Maria Butoshnikova, Radkevich was charged with an attempt on the corridor Yakov Kazenov. The hall could not accommodate all the onlookers. A reporter for the Peterburgskaya Gazeta described the defendant's appearance as follows: “The accused was taken out by five guards. This is a tall, hefty fellow. His appearance is more than unpleasant: a high forehead, thick hair standing high on his head, a face devoid of vegetation and only along the edge of the lower jaw in the form of a thick fringe is a beard, a wide nose, large, colorless, somewhat bulging eyes, thick lips. Looking at him, one can only say that he is either abnormal or a terrible villain."
The agent of the detective police acting as a witness, Kasovets, said that he was present at the questioning of the defendant after his arrest. And he confessed to the murder, saying that "the passion to kill a beautiful woman seized him for a long time, and he was looking for an opportunity."
The testimony of Radkevich's mother, who did not come to the trial, but her words were read out in the process, is noteworthy. The woman handed the police a letter from her son, received the day before the murder of Catherine Gerus at the Danube Hotel. In a message written on July 11, it was said that if on the 13th she does not receive a telegram from him, it means that he is not: "If I stay alive, I will become a criminal … The telegram can be in one word:" It's over! " This means that I am a criminal. Suicide or crime is the "finale" of my life."
- Why didn't you send a telegram? the chairman of the court asked Radkevich.
“There was no money,” the accused answered. - At that time I was in great need. I was wearing a summer coat, and underneath was a naked body.
Four psychiatrists could not come to a consensus regarding "Vadim Krovyanik", calling him on the verge of illness and health and clearly showing signs of degeneration. Dr. Mendelssohn told the court about the "ideal murder model" that Radkevich shared with him:
“In a room covered with pink wallpaper, flooded with pink, a beauty lies among the flowers, he approaches her, squeezes her throat with his left hand, and inflicts a wound in the side with his right hand with a dagger; when the blood pours out, hold out a handful of hands and smell the warm blood."
Not to a madhouse
On March 12, Nikolai Radkevich delivered the last word before the jury. He made a special emphasis on the fact that he is mentally healthy, and if, as experts say, he is also a degenerate, then he is not at all guilty of this and will never become different:
- I have a life sentence among the mad. What kind of life is this ?! I do not want the middle - or hard labor, or freedom! If it’s a madhouse, then it’s better to hang yourself.
The jury deliberated for 1 hour and 40 minutes. By their verdict, they acquitted Radkevich in the attempt on the corridor Kazenny and found him guilty of the murder of Butoshnikova, deciding that he had committed it in his right mind. The court sentenced him to 8 years in hard labor. As the reporters wrote, after the announcement of the verdict, "Radkevich remained completely calm, he even thanked the defender."
Police failure
Although among the merits of the head of the detective police Filippov is the capture of Krovyanik, and history determined Radkevich the role of a brutal serial killer, he was legally responsible for the death of only one woman. The preliminary investigation tried to prove his involvement in the events at the Danube Hotel, but to no avail. All efforts of Filippov were also in vain - the evidence collected was not enough to impute to Radkevich not only attacks in the ports of the Baltic Sea, but also in St. Petersburg. And it is not yet known how this story would have ended if it were not for the bellboy Yakov Kazenov, who at the cost of his tooth stopped the murderer Maria Butoshnikova.
According to one version, in the fall of 1916, Radkevich was killed by criminals at a convict stage.
Author: Julia Nikitina