Flat turns morgue, turns shop, turns grave
A very unusual murder case took place in Moscow recently. It would have resembled...
Flat turns morgue, turns shop, turns grave
A very unusual murder case took place in Moscow recently. It would have resembled a typical murder-for-robbery case; only the victims were penniless drunks with no valuables to speak of. Nevertheless, the killer’s business acumen came to the fore – he sold his victims’ home appliances using the flat, still with the dead bodies in it, as a showroom.
The story took place in a three-room apartment in the east of Moscow. A 76-year-old woman and her 27-year-old grandson lived in the apartment with his 29-year-old girlfriend. All three drank heavily and often annoyed their neighbours with loud parties. Or they did until April 3, when suddenly the apartment went quiet. In fact it was too quiet and even their phone did not ring. A relative of the landlady became worried and arrived to check up on them – he was the one who called the police after discovering the three dead bodies in one of the rooms under a pile of old clothes.
The police have learned from neighbours that the poor drunks rented one of their rooms to a man named Volodya, who had arrived in Moscow from the southern Russian region of Kuban. The 23-year-old man worked as a sales assistant in one of the city’s shopping complexes until one day he was fired. The landlady, who had already bored the man with her never-ending drinking sessions, continued to demand the rent and their relations spoiled. A deadline was set for April 4, but a day earlier, after another drunken row, Volodya lost his temper and killed the entire family with a frying pan.
After clearing his debt, Volodya decided to credit his balance. He dragged the bodies into one room and hid them under a pile of clothing. He then published some classified ads in newspapers and sold most of the family’s possessions – the fridge, the washing machine, the TV, the video, the phone – in fact, everything. Investigators managed to find some of the buyers and they said that they had found the pile in one room suspicious, but Volodya explained that he was preparing to tidy up his home – hence the mess. With some of the money received from the ‘house clearance’ the killer returned to his hometown in Kuban where the police eventually tracked him down. Moskovsky Komsomolets
