Author Topic: Monsters from Russia and the former Soviet Republics  (Read 199 times)

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raul

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Monsters from Russia and the former Soviet Republics
« on: February 15, 2022, 08:05:23 am »
Soviet Serial Killers
From Author Robert Keller
Nikolai Dzhumagaliev (summary)
Metal Fang
dzhumagalev.jpg

Moscow was preparing to host the 1980 Summer Olympics, an event that the US was boycotting. Meanwhile, in the city of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, a serial killer was on the loose, a fact vigorously denied by the state-controlled media who insisted that such killers were a symptom of Western decadence and did not exist in the glorious Soviet republic.

Six women had already been slain, their brutalized bodies found discarded along a stretch of riverbank at a local beauty spot in Alma Ata. The mutilations carried out on the corpses was extreme, entrails pulled from ripped body cavities, heads hacked off in some cases and, perhaps most worryingly, chunks of flesh carved from the buttocks and thighs and apparently carried from the scene. To what purpose? The answer did not bear contemplating.

Despite the extreme brutality of these murders, the police in Alma-Ata appeared in no hurry to catch the perpetrator. All of the victims were prostitutes, a despised underclass in most societies but even more so in communist Kazakhstan. Prostitutes knew the dangers of the streets and had to accept the risks that went with their chosen profession. What the authorities were more concerned about was toeing the party line and keeping the gory details from an increasingly anxious public.

If the police had only cared to look, they would have found an obvious suspect right under their noses. Nikolai Dzhumagaliev had already served time for manslaughter when he arrived in Alma-Ata in the late 1970's. There, he took up a job as a laborer and soon established a small circle of friends. An articulate, clean-shaven, and obsessively neat man, he was considered handsome, even taking into account his one discerning feature, a set of false teeth made of white metal.

An introvert by nature, Dzhumagaliev nonetheless loved to entertain, as it gave him the opportunity to show off his culinary skills. He was an excellent chef, with meat-heavy traditional Kazakhstani cuisine his specialty. A particular favorite was a ravioli-inspired dish filled with pork, which never failed to garner praise from his admiring dinner guests.

No one seems to have questioned how Dzhumagaliev could afford to host such elaborate parties. Meat was a prohibitively expensive commodity in financially depressed Alma-Ata, with most families only able to enjoy it at a single meal per week. And yet, here was this humble laborer, able to dole out cutlets and sausages and meatballs as if he were a member of the politburo. If only those dinner guests had known what they were really eating.

In December 1980, another victim – the seventh in the series – turned up dead. Her severely mutilated corpse was found in the killer’s favorite dumping ground, down by the river. A couple of days later, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev, apparently on a whim, invited two local drunks back to his home for a meal. The men sat for a while drinking beer and vodka and swapping stories. Then Dzhumagaliev excused himself and announced that it was time for him to get cooking. First though, he’d have to gather up logs for his wood-burning stove. When one of his dinner guests offered to help, Dzhumagaliev sat him down and pressed another glass of vodka into his hand. Then he trudged out into the snow to gather up some fuel.

Dzhumagaliev’s other guest tottered into the kitchen, threw open the refrigerator door and reached in. Then he stopped in mid-motion and blinked. A woman’s dead eyes stared back at him from a decapitated head resting on a platter. On another plate, a coil of blue-gray intestines sat in a thin gruel of blood and bile. The man reeled back into a counter, clattering his host’s collection of cooking utensils to the floor in the process. In the next moment, he was staggering from the house, dragging his startled friend by the arm. They did not stop running until they reached the local police station.   

Nikolai Dzhumagaliev was arrested that same night. Dzhumagaliev seemed almost eager to share the details of his ghastly crimes, describing his first murder as follows;
“I had always loved to hunt and often went hunting, but this was my first time hunting a woman. I felt my heart pound within me as I ran after her. Hearing my footsteps, she turned around, but I caught up with her and put my arm around her neck, dragged her to the side of the landfill. She resisted, and then I cut her throat with a knife. Then I drank her blood. I warmed my hands on the woman’s body and stripped her naked. I cut the corpse’s breast into strips, removed the ovaries, separated the pelvis and hips. I then folded these pieces into a backpack and carried them home. I melted the fat to fry with, and some parts I pickled. Once I put the parts through a meat grinder and made dumplings. I grilled the heart and the kidneys, grilled the meat, too. The meat of this woman took me a month to eat.”

Thereafter, Dzumagaliev claimed, he killed at least one woman a month. The murders were not committed out of greed or lust, he said, but because he was on a mission to rid the world of “immoral women.” Asked for his definition of immorality, Dzhumagaliev said that it included women who had blonde hair, who drank or swore, or who had premarital sex.

Charged with seven counts of murder, Dzhumagaliev privately confessed to committing between 50 and 100 homicides. However, he would not be found guilty of any of them. A Kazakhstani court ruled that he was insane and committed him to a mental institution in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

In 1989, while being transported to another facility, Dzhumagaliev managed to overpower his guards and escape. He would remain at large until August 1991 when he was recaptured in Fergana, Uzbekistan.

Dzhumagaliev claimed that he had spent most of his two years on the lam in Moscow, where he’d killed “two women per week.” Crime statistics from the Russian capital do not support that assertion but it is almost certain that Dzhumagaliev did kill while he was on the run. Given his warped psychology and prodigious murder rate it is highly unlikely that he would have remained “dry” during his time at liberty.

Frighteningly, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev is currently a free man. He was pronounced “cured” in 2011 and released from captivity. His whereabouts, at this time, are unknown.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2022, 08:10:37 am by raul »

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