Detective Tales from the Soviet Union

First Case

First case I want to tell you about happened in '93 and it is particularly interesting because no one managed to explain what happened there. I will add a few photos to this post, first has an apartment complex where it happened, second - an exact place where body was found (second stairwell, between the 3rd and 4th floors if you absolutely must know).

So, around 10 o'clock in the evening, an investigatory-operative group (in this small town it consisted of just random regular cops, but usualy had an investigator (translator's note: Soviet/Russian analogue of a detective rank) and an expert criminologist) was called in on report about discovery of a corpse. And this is what they saw on that staircase: a human body leaking a shitload of blood, head separated from torso and lying not far away, lacerations look as if someone "Chewed him" - according to my grandpa. His closes, that consisted of training pants, sweater and slippers, torn in a dozen of places, also some smaller injuries on his naked skin. It was instantly obvious that this corpse was fresh, which was confirmed by criminologist on the scene. Rigor mortis hasn't set in yet, which indicated that less than two hours passed since the moment of death. This was confirmed later, during the interrogation of victim's inconsolable widow, who lived on the 4th floor and who's door was like 3 meters from the body. By the way, she was the one who actually found and reported the corpse.

The widow was clearly an alcoholic, and already had time to get wasted, but nonetheless she did provide some information: her husband left the flat at around 9:30 in the evening to take out some garbage. When 15 minutes passed, she started to worry that he decided to stop and chat with his drinking buddies who usually sat near the entrance of the apartment complex, drinking. Windows of their flat provided no overview of the yard outside, if I recall correctly, so she decided to go downstairs herself to look for him. But the moment she left her flat she saw disfigured body of her husband in pool of blood. She failed to provide any more details during the later questionings. Now for the interesting part: interrogations of other inhabitants of that complex provided literally no additional information. Not a single one of them heard any ruckus, screams or sounds of fighting. Nothing. And that is considering the shitty non-soundproof doors people had back then. There was also indeed a bunch of drunkards sitting on a porch downstairs. According to them, they were hanging out there since around 8 in the evening and in all that time only some old lady, who lived on the first floor, and a single mother, who lived on the second, entered the complex. Both of them also heard and saw nothing. During that time, not a single person left the complex. By the by, my grandfather almost instantly suspected some sort of large dog. What else could dismember person in such a manner in the middle of civilization? Later investigation revealed that there were two dog-owners in that complex, but their dogs were not nearly big enough to inflict such wounds, which was also later confirmed by the coroner.

Head was indeed separated from the body as if with the teeth of a large animal, his spine was literally grinded in places. Also, one of his legs had very clear markings of jaws. According to coroner, it looked very deliberate, as if left there intentionally - every single tooth of both lower and upper jaw left a clean mark, which almost never happens in normal coroner's practice (that one sure never seen such a thing). Jaws indeed were similar to dog's, but a really big one, and there were 48 of those teeth marks there, while normal dogs only have 42 (sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less, but rarely and not by much).

Now couple of my own comments: large dog is indeed capable to separate grown man's head from his body in 15-20 minutes, I can confirm this as an owner of a large dog (no, my dog didn't kill anyone, but can chew through a large bone in around 10 minutes), but there would be a fuckload of noise and shouts (okay, if dog somehow managed to rip that guys vocal cords on the first bite, there wouldn't be many shouts, which I guess is possible, considering the size of those jaws), but how could no one notice a huge ownerless dog entering/exiting the apartment complex?

Such animals tend to be remembered. Another strange thing is that blood was only found near the body. There was no blood on the stairs themselves, neither above nor below. As if he was first put on the floor and then got his head calmly chewed off in silence. My dog attacked a homeless dog once, there was a lot of blood, it was fucking dripping from its jaws and chest all the way home and let me remind you that human has much more blood than a dog. Nothing like that here - everything is crispy clean. So we have something big that appeared on the staircase between the floors (that house had no garbage chute if you would like to entertain such a wild theory of it's method of movement), silently chewed grown man's head off, left a dozen injuries on his body without any signs of resistance, and then disappeared. So it goes. Officialy the case was explained by a wild dog attack and closed the fuck down, not before informing all the local dog-catchers that they should do their work better in the future.

© 1996 Archive66