The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (21 page)

As “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” plays on the radio in the background and the ocean crests by the side of the road, Todd tells Andres, “I was so angry when I came down and they wouldn’t let me have you.”

Andres says nothing. But he smiles a few minutes later when Todd cracks a joke about the snatchback, saying: “I was going to tell you, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’”

Gus drives past dilapidated shacks with corrugated-iron roofs, huddles of thin brown cows, and fields of banana plants, their bunches of fruit cradled in bright-blue plastic bags. After an hour, we arrive at Sixaola, a town that shares a narrow river with Panama and lies in the shadow of a border crossing. Trucks idle on a graffiti-covered concrete overpass that runs through the town. Gus’s plan is to get Todd and his family to Panama without passing through an official border stop. Presenting them to immigration officials in Costa Rica at this point is too risky.

Gus frets about finding his contact, a Nicaraguan who owns a motorboat in Sixaola. Luckily, “the Nica,” as Gus calls him, is at his home—a rickety contraption consisting of sheets of iron on a wooden base. The Nicaraguan goes off to fetch the boat. While we wait, Gus reverses the van, rocking it back and forth on the edge of an embankment, which is littered with rotting banana peels and tin cans. Finally, he manages to squeeze the van next to a pigpen in the backyard of the man’s home.

Andres gets out of the van. He plays with a purple band on his wrist and fingers his faux-hawk until a blue boat pulls up to the embankment. He steps into the rocking boat. The engine sputters to life. Minutes later, the captain hops onto Panamanian soil and ties the boat to a banana plant. Todd, Andres, and Helen walk across a stretch of swamp and step into a black pickup with tinted windows that Gus has arranged to have waiting for them.

I
T’S TIME FOR THE LITTLE LEAGUE
play-offs between the Red Sox and the Bulls at the Ocala Rotary Sportsplex. Andres—
HOPSON
displayed on the back of his dark-blue shirt—stands on the first-base line next to his teammates, listening to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with his hat over his heart. The music stops, and Andres’s coach shouts, “All right, gentlemen, let’s go out there and throw some balls!” Soon, Andres is up at bat. He goes down in the count, two strikes against him. He stares through his mirrored sunglasses at the pitcher, a scrawny boy with a mean right arm, and swings at the next ball. The bat connects and he races to first, sliding in safe.

It’s as if Andres never left Ocala. He wakes up every day at 7:10 a.m., takes a shower, and has a bowl of Lucky Charms. Then Todd drives him to the Cornerstone School, a private school with banners along its halls promoting mutual respect and appreciation—no put downs. Miss Candice, his third-grade teacher, says she has observed no ill effects from his absence. He does his assignments on time, and he is the Four Square star of the playground. Todd’s relationship with Helen broke down, however, not long after their return, and he asked her to move out.

Todd considered taking Andres to a psychologist, but he decided against it because the boy seemed fine. In response to my direct questions, Andres says that the Alvarados treated him well but that he doesn’t miss anything about Costa Rica. He didn’t play baseball in Siquirres. It’s “funner” in Ocala, where he plays baseball three times a week. He says he knew his dad would come for him. Andres doesn’t like to talk about Costa Rica. If anyone asks where he was, he told Todd upon his return, “I’m going to say it’s a long story.”

But as Jason Alvarado sees it, the story is simple. Helen Zapata and Todd Hopson kidnapped Andres. Andres, he says, had been adjusting well to Siquirres; he had even been president of his class. Jason says he doesn’t want to appear ungrateful to Hopson for raising Andres. Still, he believes Andres’s care should be a matter between him and the boy’s mother. “Now that his mother seems not to be able to take care of him, I don’t see why he has to stay” in the U.S., Jason says. “They have always known I’m the father. I have always been there for him emotionally and economically.” Todd, for his part, says that Jason never spent “one centavo” on Andres’s care; Jason counters that he sent money to Helen.

In theory, the U.S. State Department agrees with Jason’s view. “We cannot condone the violation of the law of another sovereign territory,” a State Department spokesperson says of private recovery attempts. Yet when Todd informed the State Department that he had, with Gus Zamora’s help, recovered Andres, the woman helping with his Hague application responded by e-mail, “We all breathed a collective sigh of relief on hearing that Andres and Helen are back home in Florida with you.” She went on to explain that Costa Rica had “a steep learning curve” about the convention, and said of Hopson’s application, “We frankly do not know how it might have worked in your case.”

Jason is giving them another chance to find out: in late May, he filed his own Hague application, requesting his son’s prompt return.

N
ADYA
L
ABI
is a freelance writer. A former staff writer at
Time
magazine and senior editor at
Legal Affairs,
she contributes to
The Atlantic, Wired,
and other magazines.

Coda

Around the time the article ran, Interpol issued a red notice requesting the arrest of Todd Hopson and Helen Zapata for kidnapping Andres. Todd’s not worried, however. He’s certain that Jason Alvarado’s Hague application will go nowhere. “Florida doesn’t recognize dual fathership. You can only have one father,” he says. “And I’m the legal father in Florida.”

Todd and Helen continue to live apart. In March 2010, Helen was arrested for possession of crack cocaine; Todd paid her jail bond. Helen says it was all a “misunderstanding.”

Despite his turbulent year, Andres appears to be thriving. According to Todd, he received an A-plus in two of his courses. He was also one of twenty-three kids in Ocala selected to try out for the Little League World Series. In February, Gus and his son visited Todd and Andres, and a local TV station interviewed them. But Andres won’t talk about Siquirres. As Todd puts it, “He’s turned the page.”

Jason Alvarado has not. He is pursuing his Hague application, and plans to give a deposition in Ocala in April 2010.

FROM
GQ

T
HE
M
ANIAC TRUNDLES THROUGH
a silent forest. He is a stout man, thick, with a heavy gait. He’s with a woman, name unknown, and they are enveloped by birch trees rising fifty, sixty feet into a white-gray sky. They are talking about something important. What is love? Is love for real, or is it a ruse, a make-believe ambrosia? She doesn’t know he’s had this conversation before. The Maniac is practiced. He has a very low voice, sturdy hands, thick wrists. When he talks he has an almost preternatural concentration. He wants to be understood. He never lies. This is important; in court, he will tell everyone: I always say exactly what I think.

She admits to him: She didn’t know he was so serious. The Maniac, after all, is a clerk at a grocery store. He had approached her maybe a half-hour ago, started chatting, making jokes, rambling, opining, discoursing on…intimacy. She doesn’t know he has a whole theory of intimacy. “The closer a person is to you, and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them,” he would later say. Then he’d offered her a cigarette.
She’d cupped the cigarette while he lit the match, then laughed at something he said. He suggested they take a walk in the park. She didn’t even know him, had no reason to trust him, but she wanted another cigarette. She said yes.

They walk over branches, wrappers, cigarette butts, past bottles, a stuffed animal, a used condom, a disposable razor. Somewhere far away they can hear trails of moving laughter, other people walking, carousing, but here, in this particular swath of wood, there is only the trees and shadows. They can no longer see the road. He says something—later he will try to remember, unsuccessfully, exactly what it was he said—and then he laughs. Suddenly, he thinks he sees something flash across her face, which is plain and unmemorable, like a terrible gestalt, like many disparate pieces of information coalescing into an anticipation of…what? She knows, of course, about the disappearances. Everyone does. By this point—late spring 2006—nearly fifty people have vanished into the woods. She knows about the park, the Maniac, the faceless animal no one knows or has seen or is even sure is a man or a single human being. They talk about him on television every night, constantly. He is part of the daily chatter coursing through the ancient apartment blocs that ring the park.

But the grocery clerk?

The grocery clerk. Suddenly she seems certain that the man with the low voice, the man talking to her about the anatomy of love, the sanctity of the human bond, is the Maniac. She stops walking. Suddenly she is very, very tired. She throws her arms around a tree trunk and falls to the ground sobbing, squeezing her eyes shut tight. The Maniac is startled. How could she have known?

Now there are pieces of bark pressed against her cheek, a scratch on her neck. She begins talking to herself. She is incoherent. He can’t remember what he said to her. What did he say? Later, in court, the Maniac will recount the penultimate moment with a great and fastidious love. As she clings to the tree, he can’t help it—it’s awful to say, he knows—but he starts to laugh again, and when she says, “Are you going to kill me?” he has no choice but to reply: “Yes.”

I
N THE MONTHS
following his July 2006 arrest, Alexander Yurievich Pichushkin, now 34, achieved the only goal he ever set for himself, a goal he shared with so many mass murderers before him: Around the world, he was hailed as a monster. He was feared and hated. His name became a symbol of death, and he was catapulted into the international pantheon of serial killers. All the big news organizations—CNN, the
New York Times
, the BBC—aired or published long stories about the most dangerous man in Russia. Criminologists, psychologists and serial-killer aficionados worldwide weighed in online with theories and speculations. Pichushkin had transcended Pichushkin. He was now the Maniac.

The fascination surrounding the Maniac reflected the enormity of his crimes, which seemed somehow deeply Russian—oversized. Ted Bundy was convicted of 30 homicides; Jeffrey Dahmer, 15; Ken Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, 10; the Canadian pig farmer Willie Pickton, 26. Jack the Ripper was believed to have been guilty of between 11 and 15 murders; David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, got away with six. The Maniac was convicted of 48. He claimed he’d actually killed 63 people, and there have been reports he may have killed more. A definitive tally is unlikely. No matter the precise figure, Pichushkin inhabits an exclusive club. Only a few serial killers have been more prolific, including Andrei Chikatilo, also Russian, with 53 victims, in 1994, and Yang Xinhai, who was convicted of taking 67 lives in central China from 1999 to 2003. In the annals of serial killers, Alexander Pichushkin is one of the greatest monsters who has ever lived and killed.

The press—first the Russians, then foreign reporters—called him the Bitsevsky Park Maniac and then the Chessboard Killer because the police supposedly found a chessboard in his apartment—incorrect—and because Pichushkin is Russian, and Russians are supposed to like chess. It’s true the police found a piece of paper with a chessboard drawn on it and the names of Pichushkin’s victims and the dates of their murders scrawled into the squares. But “Chessboard Killer” is misleading. It suggests Pichushkin would have stopped killing when he reached 64, the number of squares on a chessboard, as if his mission was to fill up a chessboard of death, as if he thought of murder as a game. No one close to the victims or the investigation believes this. During the trial, Pichushkin told the court that “for me, life without killing is like life without food for you.” He killed because that is what he did. He had no “signatures” like, say, Robert Lee Yates (who shot all his victims in the head with a .25-caliber handgun) or Jerry Brudos (who amputated various body parts). He never sent the cops or journalists any coded, Zodiac-like messages. He drank heavily, the way many Russian men without prospects drink cheap vodka and sometimes beer and smoke endlessly and expect to die in their late fifties, and he worked at the grocery store. He had no friends or girlfriends, no perversions other than bloodlust.

“He’s a regular guy,” says Andrei Suprunenko, an investigator at the Prosecutor General’s Department of Homicide and Armed Robbery. “He’s strong. He exercises. He used to lift weights. He doesn’t even have any tattoos.” Suprunenko, a trim and balding man with a blonde moustache and large, pale eyes, spent months questioning the Maniac after his arrest. He probably knows him better than anyone, including Pichushkin’s own family. He insists the Maniac is a very boring person, a very ordinary person, maybe the most ordinary person in the whole world.

B
ITSEVSKY
P
ARK IS A LONG
, rolling forest filled with birch trees, streams, clearings, crossings, the occasional path or bench or green garbage bin. There is an equestrian complex and a psychiatric facility. In the winter, it’s popular with cross-country skiers. The woods extend from Balaklavski Prospekt, on the north end, to the MKAD, the multilane beltway that encircles Moscow, several miles south. It encompasses just over 5,500 acres. (New York’s Central Park occupies 843.) Surrounding the park are tens of thousands of people living in anonymous apartment blocs, which are massive and speckled with satellite dishes and clotheslines. Many people here call this part of Moscow—rusting, concrete, a half-hour by metro from the center of the city—the
zhora mira
, or “asshole of the world.”

Natasha Pichushkina, the Maniac’s mother, moved into a two-bedroom
khrushchovka
at 2 Khersonskaya, entrance No. 2, on the fifth floor, a six-minute walk from the north end of Bitsevsky Park, when she was eleven years old. That was 1963. The five-story
khrushchovki
were the Soviet Union’s first public housing projects and named after then-premier Nikita Khrushchev, and even though they were cramped, dark, dank, charmless and overflowing with tenants, they were the first single-family homes most of these families had ever lived in. They were an improvement. Natasha Pichushkina grew up on Khersonskaya Street. She had a family of her own there and knew everyone on the block. So did her son, Alexander Pichushkin, the Maniac, and until the night he was arrested, he lived most of his life at 2 Khersonskaya, where he slept on a couch in the first bedroom, which doubled as a living room. Natasha slept, alone, on a queen-sized bed ten feet from her son. Her husband, Pichushkin’s father, moved out before his son had turned one. (The couple apparently maintained contact and, in fact, had a second child, but they never lived under the same roof again.) In the second bedroom were Pichushkin’s younger sister, Katya; her husband, also named Alexander; and their son, 6-year-old Sergei, or Seriozh. Everyone except the Maniac is still there.

Pichushkin rarely left the neighborhood. Ten of his victims lived in the same four-building complex where he lived—four from 2 Khersonskaya; two from 4 Khersonskaya, next door; three from 6; and one from 8. Unlike the later, massive, public-housing projects, the buildings here are low-lying, compact, with single-lane roads coming in and out and narrow strips of park in between. It takes two minutes to walk from 2 Khersonskaya to 8 Khersonskaya. Everyone knows everyone else: the babushkas, the girls who work at the newspaper kiosk, the kids kicking soccer balls in the courtyard, the old men smoking cigarettes.

In the beginning, in 2001, 2002, people just disappeared—pensioners, bums, local fixtures—and no one really noticed. Or, in some cases, family members would wait the requisite three days and then file a missing-person report with the militia, but the militia rarely did anything. No one on Khersonskaya or at the kiosks and vegetable stands on Kakhovka or any of the cops who were supposed to patrol the apartment blocs and metro stations north of the park made any connections. And then, inevitably, the families started talking to each other. There were fears, speculations. Nobody knew anything; therefore, everybody did. The babushkas on the apartment stoops would wonder aloud about the disappearing Lyoshas, Nikolais, Viktors.
Lyosh gedeye?
(Where’s Lyosha?)
Nashyol rabotu v Khimkeye.
(He found a job in Khimky.)
Daladno. Vozmozhno on umer.
(Bullshit. He probably died.)
On piyaniy.
(He’s a drunk.) One theory held that the Chechens were to blame. Chechen construction crews sometimes kidnap able-bodied men and force them into slave labor. No one knows how often this happens; it happens. So, for a while, people blamed the Chechens or maybe the Azeris—anyone
chorniy
, or “black,” which meant anyone not Slavic. But then, in November 2002, an invalid named Alexei Pushkov vanished. Then they didn’t think it was the Chechens anymore.

Then, in early or mid-2003, the people on Khersonskaya began to think that it was someone they knew. There were too many connections between those who had gone missing. By then, the count had reached fifteen or twenty. No one had come back; no one expected they would. That’s because the people on Khersonskaya, like so many Russians squeezed into crumbling housing complexes, understood something that Westerners cannot really understand: In this place, only certain people matter, and they were not those people. All the authorities cared about was order—snow-plowed streets, a metro that ran on time, quiet,
stabilnost
. If you impose order on the serfs—and make sure they have a slab of meat, a shot of vodka and a woman to sleep with at night in a small, dry, warm cave—you can go to bed assured they won’t revolt. Russians know this and wallow in it, and on Khersonskaya Street and the streets and apartment blocs around Bitsevsky Park, they knew they were alone and no one cared what happened so long as they stayed put. The disappearances were signs of their smallness. With each disappearance, they became smaller, more fearful. The rumors metastasized. They thought it might be a woman. Or a pack of killers, with knives. Or a psychiatric patient who had escaped from the nearby institution. Or the mafia. These were the things they said when they drank and smoked on their apartment stoops, or ran into each other in the stairwells of the old
khrushchovki
or the grocery store, and wondered where the men were disappearing to.

Then came November 2005. That was the month Nikolai Zakharchenko, 63, turned up dead in the woods. He was the first body. He was the first one who hadn’t just gone missing, but was found, tagged, determined beyond any reasonable doubt to have been murdered. For the first time since the disappearances started four years earlier, the people on Khersonskaya and up and down the wide, gray boulevards, began to see the ghastly threads like connective tissue that seemed to connect all the faces that had disappeared or been forgotten, and they imagined that something terrible had happened. That was when the outline of a horrifying possibility emerged and a new terror began rippling through the apartment blocs, the icy boulevards and metro stations on the orange and gray lines that hug the park, which was now a haunted ground, snowy and forbidden. That was when “Bitsevsky Park Maniac,” or “Bitsa Maniac,” entered the local lexicon and then the national discourse and then, eventually, the global airwaves, the chat rooms brimming with anonymous posters waxing cryptic about the invisible monster prowling the wilds of southern Moscow.

I
T IS
D
ECEMBER
2007. It is snowing and perfectly black outside. The neon billboards and the Ladas—boxy, Soviet, four-door—on the
prospekt
, the boulevard, are far away. Natasha Pichushkina is sitting on her son’s bed in the family’s apartment at 2 Khersonskaya, and she is crying. She is a small woman, about five-four, with dyed reddish-purplish hair, a weak voice, and a wanness, a sickliness, that has been ironed into her face. An odor—sweat, cooking oil—pervades the whole apartment, which is cluttered with DVDs, old furniture and an ancient refrigerator bearing two faded photographs of her son at 8 or 9. It’s dark except for the bluish glow coming from the television. On the other side of a narrow doorway, her grandson Seriozh is playing a video game that involves hunting down barnyard animals. Natasha is saying that Alexander—Sasha, the Maniac—used to be close with his nephew, but Seriozh hasn’t seen him in almost a year-and-a-half and he’s beginning to forget him. Seriozh was four, she says, the last time he saw his uncle. “He used to ask, ‘Where’s Sasha?’” she says. “But now he doesn’t. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know who he is.”