Nigel Cawthorne - The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

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.

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.

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.