Gennady Mikhasevich

Killers from the former USSR are always a tricky subject to research, as many details failed to make it past the Iron Curtain. This is certainly true in the case of Gennady Mikhasevic.

The story is quite extraordinary, but this brutal killer was unknown to the western media until Soviet news agency Tass reported in 1988 that Mikhasevic, a metal worker, had been executed by firing squad for “savagely kill(ing) women in the the Soviet republic of Byelorussia” the only other details revealed were that authorities had been investigating the murders since 1973, but “regrettably the investigation veered from the right track.”

The lack of information available to western reporters at the time was nothing unusual, news from Eastern Europe always had a sense of “Chinese whispers” due to the circuitous route any news had to travel to arrive at the desk of a western reporter, and also the fact that the former USSR certainly didn’t like to air its dirty laundry in public.

Despite the sketchy information, Mikhasevic has the dubious honour of being the first Soviet serial killer to be acknowledged by the former eastern superpower.

In recent years the details of the case have been uncovered due to the advent of the internet and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and with it the crumbling of the former USSR.

Much of the following information is taken from Michael Newton’s An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers – Hunting Humans.

Little is known of Mikhasevic’s early years, apart from the fact that he was born in the village of Ist, Vitebst Oblask, in 1947 and at some point served with the once-mighty Red Army.

The only real information starts to come at the point of his first murder, which occurred on May 14th 1971.

He was on his way from Vitebst to Polotsk to visit his parents. It was late and he had missed his bus. He was reportedly suffering from depression after a break up with his girlfriend, and had already gone to the trouble of making a noose from which to hang himself.

His thoughts turned from suicide to murder as he encountered a young woman on the lonely, desolate road.

It is not known how the murder actually took place, but police records claim that all of Mikhasevic’s murders followed a strict modus operandi. On the strength of this, and what is known of his later murders, we can only assume that he raped the young woman, before removing his scarf and strangling her to death with it.

No information is available to corroborate this story, or to describe the crime scene.

We know that Mikhasevic murdered again in 1971, and twice near Vitebst in 1972. Again, information is sparse, but points to similar situations to the first murder. The victims were, again, young women choked to death after being raped.

He left technical school the next year and went to work on a sovkhoz (a communist-run farm).He married in 1976, but according to police reports, the murders continued.

His methods changed slightly over the years, as many of his later victims were believed to have been lured into his car (a distinctive red Zaporozhets).
He, like many serial killers, has been described as a “solid citizen and a good family man”, and, to keep up this appearance, he never carried a weapon, even with murder firmly on his mind. He killed with every day items such as his scarf, pieces of twine etc.

It was not until 1980 that police finally began to suspect that the mureds had been committed by one person, they were still treating each as a seperate attack. A young investigator, Nikolay Ignatovich firmly stood his ground and managed to convince the authorities that this was the work of a serial killer, a phenomenon rarely heard of in this part of the world.

After tying together the testimony of many witnesses, the police narrowed the search down to a man who owned a red car, as this had been seen in the vicinity of the crimes by several witnesses. However, by this time Mikhasevic had become a druzhinnik (police volunteer) and was never suspected. In fact, he was often given the job of interviewing the owners of red cars throughout the area!

His position within the police also gave him the inside information on which line of investigation the police were about to use, meaning that he could easily stay at least one step ahead of the authorities.

In 1985, at the height of his “usefulness” to police, he killed 12 women in the kind of prolific spree that only a man who believes himself to be above suspicion would have the nerve to attempt.

It was, however, an attempt to further derail the investigation that would become Mikhasevic’s downfall.

He decided to further deflect the investigation away from himself by writing a letter to a local newspaper (the name of which unfortuantely cannot be found at this time) claiming to be a member of the “Patriots of Vitebsk” (a fictional underground organisation) and calling upon his “fellow members” to continue the uprisal against “lewd women.”

A similar note was also left next to the body of his last victim, giving the police two samples of handwriting by which to identify the killer.

It is not known how Mikhasevic failed to get wind of the police’s new tactic, but he provided a handwriting sample (as did every man in the area) which was to eventually incriminate him.

He was arrested in December 1985 and after an initial period of denial, he finally admitted to the charges, claiming that he had killed 43 woman over the last 14 years.

The case became something of a landmark in the fromer USSR, known as the “Vitebsk Case”, many believed that it uncovered the high level of corruption in public office, and incapability within the police.

The main reason for the case becoming such a benchmark is that, sadly, 14 men had been convicted of the murders, two of which were falsely executed.
Little is known of most of the falsely accused, but it seems only right to give the details of the ones we know about.

O.P Glushahov was sentence to ten years imprisonment in1974.
N.S Tereniv was wrongly executed in 1980.
V Gorelov spent six years in prison (years unknown) where he went blind.

Adding the destroyed lives of 14 innocent men to the 43 brutally murdered women, Mikhasevic left behind a story which epitomises human tragedy and the frailty of life.

Unfortunately there are no videos available to accompany this article.

“The Mad Bucher of Kingsbury Run”

Some of the most fascinating cases of serial murder are those which, even today, remain unsolved. The Jack the Ripper and Zodiac cases have captured the imagination of millions of people around the world, all of whom will have their own theories as to who committed those terrible crimes.

However, there is a similar case which never seemed to gain the same level of notoriety, despite the killer claiming more victims, and creating much more gruesome crime scenes than Jack the Ripper, and being hunted (and ultimately defeating) the legendary law enforcer Eliot Ness.

The name given to these murders by the press were the “Cleveland Torso Murders” and the killer was christened “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”. For the sake of brevity, the killer will be referred to as the “Mad Butcher” throughout this article.

The setting for these horrific murders was 1930’s middle America. Brought to it’s knees by the Great Depression, the city of Cleveland, Ohio, was at that time awash with transient workers, hobos, and displaced families from all over the US.

In “Dead Men Do Tell Tales”, author Troy Taylor sets the scene with a description of Cleveland, specifically the area of Kingsbury Run at the time of the murders.

“Kingsbury Run was a barren wasteland on the east side of Cleveland in 1935. It tore through the rugged area, sometimes plunging to depths of 60 feet, and was scattered with overgrown weeds, patches of wild grass, tumbling pieces of old paper, piles of garbage and even the occasional skeletal remains of an abandoned car. Along the edges of the ravine were ramshackle frame houses, built close together and of such shabby construction that they seemed to almost be teetering on the brink of collapse. As the ravine angled toward downtown, it emptied out into the muddy waters of the Cuyahoga River, where concrete and steel bridges, tanks and old factory buildings dotted the banks. Kingsbury Run was a forbidding and shunned place in those days and yet among the refuse and decay were small cities of homeless men, forced into the ravine by the blight of the Great Depression. They squatted there in cardboard boxes and in shacks made from scavenged wood, huddling near small campfires and trying to ignore the lonesome cries of the freight trains that passed nearby.”

The first body was found in September 1935 by two young boys who were racing along the ravine. The older of the boys, James Wagner, was first to reach the bottom, and must have been terrified to discover the decapitated body of a pale naked man.

When the police arrived to investigate, they also discovered that the victims genitals had been removed. And if this whole situation wasn’t gruesome enough, they soon found another body a short distance from the first.

This was of an older man whose head and genitals had also been severed.

In what must have been one of the most shocking investigations in police history, the heads of the two men were found a short time later. One had been partially buried and was only noticed as it appeared that a shock of hair was protruding from the soil, the other was found thrown into some bushes, along with the genitals of both men.

The corpses appeared to have been moved to the ravine after death and mutilation had occurred, as there were no signs of blood in the vicinity.

More puzzling was that the body of the older man seemed to have been covered in some kind of chemical, as if the killer had tried to preserve is victim, and had discarded the body when the decay became too advanced 

The body of the older man was never identified, but police eventually managed to identify the younger victim. He was Edward Andrassy, 28, who had a small criminal record and lived in the Kingsbury Run area.

Another strange clue as to the identity of the killer came when forensic detectives remarked that the decapitations had been carried out extremely neatly and “professionally” suggesting that the killer could be a surgeon or a butcher.

This lead, however, amounted to nothing, and the police began what would be a long and fruitless search for the man the press had nicknamed “the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. 

The next victim wasn’t discovered until December, when a local resident went to investigate the howls of a neighbourhood dog and discovered that it was trying to rip open and eat the contents of a basket left by a fence.

Having told a neighbour the basket contained “hams”, the two peered into the basket to investigate more closely. The “hams” were actually the arm and torso of a woman!

The unfortunate victim was later named as Florence Polillo, an “overweight and unattractive” prostitute who was well known around the neighbourhood.

This discovery caused the police to reassess their line of enquiry, as they had been convinced that the murders had some kind of homosexual motive, now with the body of a woman being discovered, the nature of the case had changed.

This also spurred the memory of some of the investigating officers, who recalled the discovery of a female torso on the banks of Lake Erie the previous year. The victim of this earlier murder was named “victim zero” and was added to the ever-growing list of the “Mad Butcher’s” victims.

The sense of public hysteria was soon to be soothed by the arrival in Cleveland of the legendary law enforcer, Eliot Ness, fresh from having “cleaned up” the streets of Chicago from organised crime.

However, it would soon be apparent that the only person who wasn’t convinced that Ness would get his man was Ness himself!

The killing resumed the next summer, with the head of a young man being found on the 22^nd June, again by two young boys, wrapped in a pair of trousers near a bridge in Kingsbury Run. This time the body was found around a quarter of a mile away, and the blood at the crime scene indicated that the victim had been decapitated at the scene.

The victim could not be identified, but was described as being in his mid-twenties, and “heavily tattooed.”

Another body was found three weeks later by a hiker, again it had been decapitated, but it was in a more advanced state of decomposition than the previously discovered corpse and was impossible to identify. Police ascertained that this victim had been killed some time before the previously discovered cadaver.

Later that year, another body was found which bore all the hallmarks of the earliest victims. A man of around thirty had been decapitated and his genitals removed. This body was also sliced neatly into two pieces. A hat lying nearby gave police a rare clue, as it contained initials. It was identified by a local housewife as one which she had given to a homeless man who was living in a nearby “hobo camp.”

The trial went cold for a while, but the mood in the city was certainly hotting up, with the press whipping the residents into a frenzy of fear and mistrust. The police and local government bore the brunt of the criticism.

In February 1937 another body was found. In a very similar crime scene to that of “victim zero”, a young woman was found dismembered, again on the banks of Lake Erie. She was never identified, but the discovery of another body soon after brought some much needed luck to the weary investigators.

Like the body found by the hiker, this was another previously undiscovered victim who was also badly decomposed, but her distinctive teeth led to her being identified as Mrs Rose Wallace, a local woman.

The ninth victim also seemed to have brought some luck to the police, as the body of an unidentified young man was found in a river, decapitated and badly mutilated (the head was never found). This time, witnesses claimed to have seen two men in a boat the night before the discovery, near to the area where the body was found. This lead, however, also failed to produce any results.

Again the killer went to ground, but resurfaced after several months as the body parts of a young woman, wrapped in burlap sacks, were fished out of the river.

This time, the killer would go for more than a year without leaving any more corpses.

The final two victims were found the next year, the dismembered body of a young woman was found in a lakeside dump, and the body of a decapitated man wrapped in a quilt was found during the investigation.

Neither victim was ever identified.

This appeared to be the final straw for Ness in his fruitless search to bring the killer to justice. He was convinced that the killer was selecting victims from the transient hobo camps, and was possibly living there himself, so Ness took the bold step of ridding Cleveland of these camps, burning down the shanty villages and forcing the vagrant population to move on.

Whether by luck or good judgement, this seemed to do the trick, and the murders would finally cease.

However, the murders had been stopped, but the killer had escaped from the clutches of the most famous lawman in US history.

Once again, the story can be taken up by Troy Taylor.

“The Cleveland Torso Murders were officially never solved, but that has not stopped scores of crime historians and curious readers and investigators from speculating as to who the “Mad Butcher” actually was. Detectives in the case believed that they were close to catching the killer several times. They spent many hours searching for the killer’s “laboratory”, believing that the Butcher was slaughtering his victims in a convenient location and then dumping the bodies somewhere else. At one point, they believed they had found it. They found a photographic negative that had been left behind by one of the early victims, Edward Andrassy, and when it was developed, it showed Andrassy reclining on a bed in an unknown room. The photo was published in newspapers and was identified as being the bedroom of a middle-aged homosexual who lived with his two sisters. Detectives searched the house and blood on the floor of the room and a large butcher’s knife hidden in a trunk. Unfortunately though, the blood turned out to be the suspect’s (he was prone to nosebleeds) and the knife showed no traces of blood on it. To further prove the man’s innocence, another Butcher victim turned up while the man was in jail for sodomy and it became obvious he was not the killer.”

To taunt Ness further, a letter was sent from Los Angeles to the Cleveland Press newspaper, which read;

You can rest easy now, as I have come to sunny California for the winter. I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance. I shall astound the medical profession, a man with only a D.C.

What did their lives mean in comparison to hundreds of sick and disease-twisted bodies? Just laboratory guinea pigs found on any public street. Nobody missed them when I failed. My last case was successful, I now know the feeling of Pasteur, Thoreau and other pioneers.

Right now I have a volunteer who will absolutely prove my theory. They call me mad and a butcher, but the truth will out.

I have failed but once here. The body has not been found and never will be, but the head, minus its features is buried on Century Boulevard, between Western and Crenshaw. I feel it is my duty to dispose of the bodies as I do, it is God’s will to not let them suffer.

X

Despite no head ever being found in the give location, amny believe that the letter is genuine, and was sent simply to taunt Ness in front of the the baying public and the hostile press.

Ness was adamant until his death that he was “reasonably certain” he knew who the “Mad Butcher” was, and despite a trickle of bodies being found in the city over the next couple of decades, none of them bore the unmistakeable characteristics of the “Cleveland Torso Murders.”

There are many theories as to the identity of the killer, some of these can be found in the excellent article by Troy Taylor which was the inspiration for my work. The article can be found at http://www.prairieghosts.com/torso.html

Below is a link to radio show which discusses the case of the Cleveland Torso Murders.

Johann “Jack” Unterweger

Joining Vlado Tanevski in the tiny group of killer journalists is Johann “Jack” Unterweger. This is a remarkable case, yet one that seems to have avoided the media limelight or the epic Hollywood treatment.

Born in 1950 to a young Austrian prostitute, Unterweger was put into the care of his grandfather, an abusive alcoholic. Little is known about his early years, but his teenage years were a tangle of petty crimes and violent behaviour.

In 1966, at the age of 16, he was arrested for assaulting a prostitute, something which would occur many times before his drawn-out crime spree was eventually over.

Ten years later, Unterweger committed his first murder. The strangulation of Margaret Shaefer was the first of a long list of murders attributed to Unterweger. However, this should not have been the case, as the young killer was sentenced to life imprisonment for this early foray into the realms of murder.

It was, however, prison life which created the Jack Untgerweger which was to become a national celebrity. While serving his life sentence, he learned to read and write, and wrote his best-selling autobiography, Fegefuer (Pergatory).

This gave the Austrian prison authorities something of a dilemma, this man certainly seemed to have been reformed during his years in prison, and as a popular writer and darling of Viennese society, the pressure was on the prison system to do something unusual. They would make an positive example of a prisoner.

Unterweger was released after just 14 years of his life sentence.

His fame grew every day upon his release, and he was soon a well known journalist and TV panellist. He was seen as something of an expert on the prison system, and the world of crime in general.

His new found fame also led to a constant string of glamorous girlfriends and a champagne lifestyle.

His stardom reached its peak when his autobiography was made into a feature film. Every newspaper and media outlet wanted Unterweger to work for them.

However, things were about to change. After only two years of freedom, Unterweger was linked to a series of prostitute murders around Austria. Although police could find no evidence to make an arrest, the famous journalist was constantly under police surveillance, apart from when he made a business trip overseas.

As well as the six prostitutes killed in Austria, strangled to death with their own undergarments which were tied in an unusual slipknot, thousands of miles away, the LAPD were experiencing a spate of prostitute murders.

Unbelievably, Unterweger had recently travelled to Los Angeles on “business”, claiming that he was researching an article on the different ways prostitution is viewed in the US and in Europe.

The eureka moment came when a retired detective was readong of the murders in Austria, and immediately recognised the killers “signature”, the unusual slipknot.

It was Unterweger, he was sure.

Having made the relevant calls, detectives began to look into murders around the globe, as Unterweger was a frequent traveller.

It was discovered that he was indeed in LA at the times of the murders, and even stayed in the hotel which was the last place two of the murdered women were seen alive.

Unterweger went on the run with his 17 year old girlfriend, leading police on a chase through Europe, Canada and the US. He was eventually caught in Miami, Florida and transported to Los Angeles to face the courts.

However, as California has a death penalty, and the evidence against him was circumstantial, Unterweger was allowed to be repatriated to Austria to stand trial for the six murders committed in his homeland.

All of the evidence against Unterweger was circumstantial, fibres found from his trademark red scarf on one of the victims, receipts and sightings from places in which the murders were committed, the fact that he had no alibi for any of the murders, and, of course, his previous crimes.

This led to one detective stating that “either Unterweger is guilty, or he is the unluckiest man in the world.”

Unterweger was found guilty by six of the eight jurors (which is enough in Austria, only a majority is needed) and sentenced (again) to life imprisonment. This time there would be no chance of parole. Unterweger would die in prison.

His death came significantly sooner than most people expected, in fact, it came six hours after his conviction. Using a cord from his drawstring trousers, Unterweger hung himself from the light fitting in his cell.

In the kind of finale perhaps expected of a journalist of his magnitude, unable to deny himself the big Hollywood ending, the former media star used the same unique slipknot used on the victims to end his own life.

 

John Leake, a leading journalist has spent years researching the life of Jack Unterweger, and has written a book, Entering Hades, which tells the story in the detail which it deserves. The website to accompany his book can be found at http://www.enteringhades.com/

 

Unterweger was eventually found to be guilty of 9 murders, but is believed to be responsible for 13. The victims of the 9 definite murders committed by Jack Unterweger are listed below.

 

Margaret Schaefer

Margaret, age 18,  was murdered in 1974. A bra had been used to strangle her to death.

Marcia Horveth

Marcia was murdered in 1974.  there was no formal sentence for this case because Unterweger had already received a life sentence.

Brunhilde Masser

Brunhilde was murdered in 1990.

Blanka Bockova

Blanka was murdered in 1990. Her remains were found on September 15, 1990.

Shannon Exley

Shannon was murdered in 1991, in Los Angeles. A bra had been used to strangle her to death.

Irene Rodriguez

Irene was murdered in 1991, in Los Angeles. A bra had been used to strangle her to death.

Peggy Booth

Peggy was murdered in 1991, in Los Angeles. A bra had been used to strangle her to death.

 

Below is a link to a three part documentary, Jack Unterweger “the Vienna Strangler”.

Breaking News – Wesley Shermantine

This particular case is fascinating, in that it is still on-going, and the news surrounding the murders committed by Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog is constantly being updated on a day-to-day basis.

To really understand the events which have led the identification of two more bodies within the last 24 hours, we need to start at the beginning.

Shermantine and Herzog are known as the “Speed Freak Killers” and were charged with three joint murders (Shermantine was also convicted of a fourth murder which saw him sentenced to death).

Their nickname was due to their high intake of methamphetamine, a factor which many believe caused they two to commit such violent and unthinkable crimes.

The murders for which the two were sentenced took place in the eighties and nineties, and began when the blood of a missing woman, 25 year old Cyndi Vanderheiden was found in Shermantine’s car.

She had last been seen in the company of the two men before eventually being reported as missing.

The two were arrested and during subsequent questioning were also linked with three more murders committed in the area during the eighties.

They eventually confessed to both the Vanderheiden murder, and the deaths of two men shot in a car in 1984.

Shermantine also admitted the murder of 16 year old Chevelle “Chevy” Wheeler, who disappeared from Franklin High School in 1985, after she told friends she was joining Shermantine on a visit to his parents’ cabin in San Andreas.

Herzog was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Shermantine was handed down the death sentence.

However, due to a technicality, Herzog was released after just 11 years after an appeals board found that his confessions appeared to have been coerced.

He was paroled to live in a trailer park just a stone’s throw away from the prison, but was soon to find himself anything but absolved of his murderous past.

Shermantine had long since hinted that there were more bodies, which still lay undiscovered.

In 2011, bounty hunter Leonard Padilla offered to pay Shermantine $33,000 to reveal the locations of the missing bodies. On hearing that his former partner in crime had agreed to this, Herzog committed suicide, by hanging himself outside the trailer which had become his last place of freedom.

Shortly after, Shermantine started to send letters and maps to the Stockton Record, a local California district newspaper. These were passed on to the authorities and at least three more bodies were quickly found in an abandoned well.

Two of these bodies were eventually identified as Kimberly Billy, and Joann Hobson.

Many believe that there will be at least another 12 sets of remains, as many girls and young women went missing during this time.

Shermantine, however, denies any active part in these murders, claiming that he simply helped Herzog to dispose of the bodies. This would seem unlikely, but as Herzog can no longer offer his side of the story, this is set to become a long legal conundrum.

Sadly, in the last twenty four hours, two more bodies have been recovered due to information given by Shermantine.

The skeletal bodies of a 16 to 18 year old girl and a 28 to 32 week old foetus have been found in an undisclosed area.

I will, of course, keep you informed of any developments in the case.

This case is remarkable in that it shows the true power of a letter sent to the right place. Without this correspondence, the remaining victims would have never been found, and Herzog would have been enjoying his freedom, and knowing that he got away with multiple murders.

Shermantine remains on death row at California’s San Quentin Prison, and is in regular contact with Leonard Padilla and the Stockton Record, who (in a ground-breaking piece of journalistic inspiration) chose to tweet live from an interview with Shermantine.

*****************************UPDATE*********************************

The latest victims are now believed to be a black 14-18 year old girl, and her unborn child, although no names have been released as yet. Next to the bodies was a ring bearing a set of initials (also, as yet unreleased).

According to Leonard Padilla, Shermantine is currently refusing to give any more information because his payment (in the form of a TV, sweets, and beads for his art class) has not yet materialised.

Padilla believes this to be a temporary setback, and is calling for Shermantine to be released from his cell to help in the search for victims (under close guard of course!)

Govenor, Jerry Brown had signed legislation making this possible on July 17th of this year, but authorities have yet to use this vital resource.

More information can be found at http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-shermantine-refuses-to-help-until-demands-are-met-20120803,0,3365918.story

The original letters sent to the Stockton Record can be viewed and downloaded as pdf’s at http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2012/03/13/wesley-shermantine-letters-to-cbs13/

One thing is for certain, this will not be the last time I will be writing about this case.

Below is a short video showing the excavation of a body after a letter sent by Shermantine gave the exact location.