Alexander Spesivtsev: The Siberian Ripper
In 1996, the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk was in decay. A former steel town, its people were not benefitting from the capitalist system implemented after the recent fall of the Soviet Union. The factories and coal mines had all gone bankrupt; most people were unemployed or what’s euphemistically called “under-employed” — struggling to work a series of part-time or temporary jobs to try and scrape together enough money to keep a roof over their heads and eat.
With such grinding poverty and no safety net, scores of kids and teens roamed the streets — some homeless, some fleeing abusive homes, and some simply left to fend for themselves while their parents worked long hours. When they began going missing, there was not much attention paid; many people assumed they had run away, and most were too busy trying to survive to care.
Police went on the assumption that the missing children and teens might have fallen prey to human traffickers, but their investigation turned up nothing.
As spring turned to summer, a woman living in the apartments at 53 Pionersky Prospekt called the authorities, complaining about a neighbor. She said the man constantly played loud music on his stereo, and there was a foul, rotten stench emanating from his apartment. But no one followed up on her complaints.
Later that summer, women washing their rugs in the nearby Aba River came upon a gruesome sight: a human head floating in the water. Over the next weeks, heavily decomposed heads, torsos, and arms would regularly wash up on the banks. More decomposed, dismembered human remains were found in a vacant lot; they would later be determined to be the remains of 15 children between the ages of 3 and 14.
The fact that children’s remains were found near a school raised an alarm with the police, finally.
The police thought they needed to look for a suspect that would have severe, violent mental health issues — perhaps he or she might have been institutionalized before. So they searched the records of all nearby mental health institutions for anyone fitting the profile who had been released and living in Novokuznetsk. Their search turned up nothing.
If the Oryol Special Psychiatric Hospital in Oryol Oblast, Russia, had accurate records, police would have found that one former inmate, Alexander Spesivtsev, fit the profile completely. He had been committed to the hospital in 1988, when he was 18, for a brutal crime. But according to Oryol’s records, Alexander was still safely in their custody.
As an infant, he had been born underweight, and remained sickly throughout his childhood. As a result, he had been bullied frequently; he became withdrawn and reclusive.
His home life was similarly chaotic — his father was an abusive alcoholic who eventually abandoned (or was kicked out of) the family, leaving Alexander’s mother, Lyudmila; and his older sister, Nadezhda. The three shared a tiny, one-bedroom apartment, and Alexander slept in his mother’s bed until he was 12.
Alexander, though quiet and withdrawn, frequently pulled pranks, engaged in petty theft, and painted graffiti on the concrete walls of their apartment building. Lyudmila, his doting mother, always defended her son, protesting his innocence or claiming some justification for his behaviors.
And she shared a rather macabre hobby with him: as an assistant to a local prosecutor, Lyudmila often had access to crime scene photos, which she would steal and bring home to look at with Alexander. They kept their favorites in a scrapbook.
By the time he was 18, he was obsessed with murder. But Alexander was not well, mentally. In his teens, he had a series of mental breakdowns requiring hospitalization.
After he was released, he moved into his own apartment, no. 357 at 53 Pionersky Prospekt, and adopted a large dog. His mother and sister visited him frequently to bring him money and food.
On one of his daily dog walks, he met a 17-year-old named Eugenie Gusnokova. They struck up a conversation, and soon, began dating. It was Alexander’s first real relationship. At first, he showed her his romantic side, reciting poetry, taking her on long walks, and buying her flowers. She began spending most of her time at his place — for all intents and purposes, she lived with him.
But his sweet, romantic facade began to fade with time. The two began to argue more and more, and Eugenie finally broke up with him.
Alexander was enraged and refused to accept the break-up. Before she could leave his apartment, he attacked her and chained her to a radiator. For weeks, he kept Eugenie captive in his home, torturing her. She was finally found when her mother reported her missing, and police went to ask Alexander about her whereabouts. There, they found Eugenie still alive, her body covered in bruises and bedsores. She was able to recount the horrors she had endured to police before dying of sepsis from her infected wounds.
Alexander was arrested and charged with murder. He was sent to Oryol, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia; he was also shown to have a high IQ. There, with medication and therapy, he seemed to be doing well — though his anger at the world still festered. After three years, he was released — but someone made a clerical error in his records, so it showed that he was still at the hospital. Because of this error, he was not assigned any follow-up care or supervision. Alexander was now free — and under no one’s watch.
In 1991, now a free man, he moved back into his apartment on Pionersky Prospekt. Besides the help from his mother, he engaged in petty theft and selling loose cigarettes for money. He started socializing with homeless people and beggars, sharing a drink and discussing politics and philosophy with them.
His favorite topic was the evils of democracy, which, in his mind, was one and the same with capitalism. He blamed the ills of Russian society on “democracy.” And soon he began blaming the victims of this brutal system: the homeless and unsupervised children. His anger at them seethed; he saw them as “debris” that needed to be cleaned up.
Then in February 1996, he met a 20-year-old woman a train station. He convinced her to come home with him, where they later started to engage in consensual sex. However, thanks to a botched “surgery” he had done while in the mental hospital, he couldn’t perform. Apparently the woman laughed at him, which enraged him.
As he had done with Eugenie, Alexander attacked the woman. He held her hostage for some time, beating and torturing her before finally killing her.
Soon afterwards he lured a second woman to his apartment for the same treatment. Some neighbors reported they heard screams, but with the loud music blaring, and knowing Alexander had mental-health issues, they thought the screams were his.
In the spring of 1996, he decided to start cleaning up the “debris.” He encountered six boys playing in a vacant lot and approached them with a deal: if they would help him burglarize an apartment, he would pay them.
The boys agreed, and Alexander led them to the grey building at 53 Pionersky Prospekt. Pretending to jimmy the lock open on his own apartment, he opened the door to no. 357. Once the door was open, he told the boys the valuables were probably in the bedroom. Once the boys were all inside, he began stabbing them, killing them instantly. Once he had finished them off, he piled their bodies on one side of the bedroom and draped a rag over them. He left them there — feet away from the bed where he slept — for four days before dragging them out into the hallway.
A week or so later, Lyudmila arrived for her regular visit. But when she saw the bodies of six boys piled in her son’s hallway, she didn’t call the police. Instead, she began chopping them up. She loaded the pieces into buckets, which she hauled down the nine flights of stairs and out to the Aba River, where she dumped them.
From that point on, Lyudmila became part of her son’s criminal “hobby.” She, as a small, elderly woman, could easily lure people up to his apartment. Once Alexander was done with them, she would chop up the bodies and dispose of the remains by burying them in vacant lots or dumping them in the Aba River.
But Alexander’s bloodlust was becoming more than his mother could handle, and the bodies were piling up faster than she could dispose of them. So, in order to get rid of the remains more effectively, they began cooking them in soups and stews, which they ate. They would frequently give the scraps to the dog, along with the juicy raw bones from Alexander’s victims.
As summer turned to fall in Novokuznetsk, the number of missing children (as well as some adults) continued to rise. The body parts found in the river and the vacant lot couldn’t be identified without DNA — and in post-Soviet Russia, DNA tests were too expensive for most police departments, including Novokuznetsk’s.
Then, in late September, three more girls went missing: 15-year-old Olga Galtseva and her friends Nastya, also 15, and Zhenya, 13. Unlike most of the other missing children, these three weren’t homeless, and their parents notified police. Police discovered that Olga had had a minor operation done on Sept. 24, and afterwards, her friends had snuck her out of the hospital. Through canvassing the area, they found a shopkeeper who remembered seeing the girls that afternoon. She said the three seemed fine and happy. She also said that she saw an old woman approach the girls, and after speaking a moment, the girls took the woman’s bags and left with her. The shopkeeper described the woman as being short, with dark hair.
Based on the fact that the woman was shopping on foot, they deduced she had to live nearby. That, along with the description, helped them to identify the woman as Lyudmila Spesivtsev.
A month after the girls disappeared, a plumber who worked at the apartments at 53 Pionersky Prospekt called the police. He needed to enter apartment 357 to unclog a drain, but the residents wouldn’t let him in, which was a crime.
So the police went with the plumber to apartment 357. At first, the resident wouldn’t open the door. A man’s voice told them to leave; he said he had mental problems and couldn’t handle visitors.
But the plumber needed to get inside. So the police kicked the door in.
Inside, they were immediately greeted by the stench of rotten flesh. The walls were covered in blood spatter. A human ribcage, stipped of meat and organs, sat on the carpet in the living room. In the corner, Alexander’s dog chewed on a human bone.
In the bathroom, a human torso lay in the tub. And on the couch lay a bloody girl, barely clinging to life. It was Olga.
As police searched the apartment more thoroughly, they found 80 pieces of bloody clothing belonging to men, women, and children, along with 40 pieces of jewelry. They also found a stash of Polaroid pictures of naked victims chained to the radiator. But perhaps most damning was a diary written by Alexander.
Later, they would find the torso’s missing head; it was floating in the apartment building’s water tank.
Meanwhile, Olga was rushed to the hospital for treatment; she had a broken arm and multiple stab wounds to her chest. Once she could speak, she described something from a slasher movie.
She said she and her friends had agreed to help the old woman with her bags. But once they were inside the apartment, Alexander began attacking them with a knife. Nastya fought back and hit him — which angered him so much he killed her right then.
Olga and Zhenya, he chained to the radiator, only inches away from the body of their friend. For a month, he kept them prisoner, beating them, burning them with cigarettes. He raped them repeatedly.
He also tortured them psychologically, taunting them and making fun of their cries. At one point, he forced them to cut the flesh off Nastya’s body and eat it.
He disemboweled Nastya’s corpse in front of Olga and Zhenya, then flushed her intestines down the toilet — likely causing the clog the plumber was called to fix.
Then he sicced his dog on Zhenya. The dog tore the girl’s throat out, killing her. Alexander then forced Olga to dismember her friend’s lifeless body. Alexander cooked her flesh in a soup, which he made Olga eat.
All the while, Olga said, Alexander’s mother and sister knew what was happening. They would come by frequently and just ignore the dead body rotting on the floor and the two naked girls chained to the radiator. They even ate some of the soup he made with Nastya’s flesh.
Sadly, Olga died soon after giving her statement.
But Alexander was still at large; as soon as the police began kicking in his door, he climbed out the window to the fire escape, which he used to get on the roof, where he fled.
However, police did have Lyudmila’s home address, and they arrested her. Three days later, they found Alexander and arrested him, too.
Under interrogation, both Alexander and Lyudmila confessed to their crimes. In addition to his confession, police had Alexander’s diary, in which he had described killing 19 people. Police suspect there were as many as 80 victims, based on the bloody items of clothing found at his apartment.
However, Alexander recanted his confession at trial. So, without the confession, the prosecutors could only link him definitively to four murders. He was ruled insane by the court and sent to Kamyshin Regional Hospital, a high-security mental institution.
Lyudmila, as part of her confession, took police to the various sites where she had dumped the bodies. For her crimes, was found guilty of being an accessory and sentenced to 15 years in prison. However, she was released in 2008, after only serving 13 years. Because of her infamy, she and Nadezhda — who was never charged with any crimes — were forced to move to a rural village some 40 minutes south of Novokuznetsk. Even in her new home, her neighbors keep her under constant surveillance, reporting her movements on social media.
Apartment 357 was locked up after police finished processing the crime scene. It was never rented again. It is rumored to have an evil presence, perhaps the spirits of the people killed there.
As for his victims, only a few of their remains were ever identified. Until DNA testing can be done, the others may never be identified.
