The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (24 page)

“W
E WERE IN SHOCK
when we realized how many people he’d killed,” says Andrei Suprunenko, sitting behind his desk at department headquarters, wearing a black turtleneck and charcoal jacket, smoking promiscuously. His office is a disaster. It reeks of smoke and a permanent grime and there are garbage bags filled to capacity, a painting of a topless woman, a desk overflowing with loose-leaf papers, notepads, magazines. The investigator has a strange, protean quality: first angry, then pensive, then facetious. Asked why Pichushkin preferred the woods, he says, “Have you ever tried killing someone on the street in broad daylight?”

“In the beginning,” he says, “we only had 13 bodies. And then Pichushkin began to tell us that he’d killed more than 60 people.” Pichushkin told him about the well, the sewage main—his entire M.O.—and Suprunenko began to understand the fates of all those people who had disappeared. “He wanted to talk,” Suprunenko says. “All maniacs want to talk.”

He remembers Pichushkin talking about killing people. They would sit there, in one of the holding cells, Suprenenko on one side, Pichushkin on the other, under a fluorescent light, smoking. Pichushkin would wander when he spoke, meandering in and out of his exploits, his life-takings. Suprenenko says he always stared at Pichushkin when Pichushkin was talking to him. “It made him feel important,” he says. “I told him I admired him, and he liked that, and then he opened up. It was very important for Pichushkin that people think he was a hero, so I made him feel like a hero.”

What emerged from months of questioning, months of plying Pichushkin with sandwiches and cigarettes and pretending that he was a brilliant, cunning evil genius—an artist, really—was not the supernatural Maniac everyone had imagined but a faceless quantity, someone no one could latch onto or read or organize into a tidy, psychological portrait. He was like peering into a glass darkly and trying to find some edifice or substrate, something real and easily explainable, something three-dimensional, with a clearly delineated character and personality, with tastes and preferences and ideas about things and people, God, art, beauty, the human quest for meaning—and finding nothing. It was this nothingness, this maddening air or space or darkness that fueled the shock and confusion—on Khersonskaya Street, where everyone knew Pichushkin, and across Russia and everywhere else. Dave Reichert, who was the lead detective and, later, sheriff on the Green River Killer investigation outside Seattle in the 1980s and 1990s, says the public’s fascination with serial killers boils down to this inability on a fundamental, human level to understand them. “Nobody can figure them out,” says Reichert, now a Republican congressman from Washington state. “How can we as normal human beings begin to comprehend that kind of behavior. We never can answer that question.”

O
N
O
CTOBER
24, 2007, following his trial, Alexander Pichushkin was found guilty of murdering 48 people. Throughout the trial, he insisted that he’d actually killed 63 people—one victim shy of a complete chessboard but 10 people more than Andrei Chikatilo managed—but authorities could only muster evidence to prosecute Pichushkin for 48.

On October 29, Pichushkin was sentenced to life in prison. One week later, his attorney filed an appeal. Not long ago, he almost certainly would have been shot in the back of the head, the way executions happened in the Soviet Union, but Russia imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996. The Bitsevsky Maniac has prompted many politicians and talk-show hosts to call for bringing it back.

V
ALENTINE’S
D
AY
, 2008. The Maniac is in a cell on a closed-caption television screen, laughing. Actually, there are five television screens—four medium-sized televisions, to the left and right, and one large plasma television hanging behind everyone. The Maniac envelopes his audience. We are in the recently renovated Supreme Court of Russia, on Povarskaya Street in the center of Moscow, and almost everyone is here: Natasha Fyedosova, Pichushkin’s lawyer, Pavel Ivannikov, the three judges, the prosecutor in his royal-blue, military-style uniform, the babushkas and younger men and the girls, in glasses, jeans, whispering into their cell phones, who lost somebody, who are scared to look too closely at the television screens filled with the face of the Maniac, who looks bored, amused, angry. He stares. He has long digits. He never looks directly at the video camera in his cell. He is talking to someone we can’t see. With his black, button-down shirt and black T-shirt, and his hair, close-cropped, tussled, he looks almost fashionable. Then he stops laughing—he laughs infrequently and only for a second or two—and resumes staring. Beneath the stare is a grin, ironic, fleeting; the grin appears and disappears; it morphs into a frown, which morphs into a look of incredulity, which morphs into a stare. Now he is talking. The volume is turned low, and it’s hard to make out what they’re saying. Natasha Pichushkina is not here. Nor is Andrei Suprunenko. The television cameras and reporters circle round the families. There are one-thousand photographs being taken simultaneously—of the babushkas, eyes red, the courtroom, fluorescent-lit, with mauve wallpaper, a Russian tricolor behind the judges, the Maniac. The Maniac poses unwittingly in his television cage. “The Maniac in real time,” says one of the cameramen.

Now one of the babushkas is saying, “Where is the body? Where is my body?” She is talking about her husband, who disappeared one night down a snowy path into the woods. The babushkas from Khersonskaya Street look scared in this place, which is steel, glass and marble. The judges ask Pichushkin if wants to say anything. Pichushkin utters three words during the whole proceeding:
Nyet, nyet, nyetuy
. “No, no, there’s nothing.” Pavel Ivannikov loosens his tie and says that even though his client has been convicted of some very heinous crimes, the judges should have mercy and reduce the sentence to 25 years. He says what he has to say.

The judges disappear into their chambers. Forty minutes later they reemerge and declare that the sentence stands. Pichushkin will never go free. Soon he will be moved from the jail in Moscow to a maximum-security prison in the north or maybe the Ural Mountains. They do not say where he will be sent to; this is the way they do things; only his mother will know, and she will not be able to see him often; it will be at least a one-night train ride away.

Now everyone is leaving the courtroom, and Pichushkin is putting his hands behind his back so someone we cannot see can handcuff him. He is disappearing. No one here will ever see him again. He is almost gone.

P
ETER
S
AVODNIK
has written for
The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Condé Nast Traveler, W, Time, The Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and a slew of other venues. He was previously based in Moscow and now lives in New York. His first book, on Lee Harvey Oswald’s two-and-a-half years in the Soviet Union, is slated to be published by Basic Books in 2011.

Coda

Alexander Pichushkin sits in a prison somewhere far from Moscow—to the east, in a vast forest. Condemned to solitary confinement, he lives a life of total privation: he has no one to talk to, and no one to kill. Russian prisons are notoriously grim—tuberculosis, HIV, violence, and hunger are rampant—and it would not be surprising if he dies before too long.

Meanwhile, Pichushkin’s mother, Natasha, is condemned to her own species of solitude. She still lives in the tiny, two-room apartment on Khersonskaya Street—where else would she go?—and everyone is still there: her grandson, Seriozh, and her daughter, Katya, and her daughter’s husband, Sasha. But there is a great and immovable death in this apartment, which is already so small and cramped one can barely breathe. Her son will always be a part of this place, even though he is no longer her son exactly; he is now a monster, and no one can forget that ever. In case she tries to, there will always be her neighbors, many of whom lost sons and fathers to Pichushkin, all of whom know who she is. She is no longer Natasha Pichushkina. She is now and will always be the mother of the Bitsevsky Park Maniac.

I think about the apartment on Khersonskaya Street sometimes, and Natasha and Seriozh, who can barely remember his uncle by now. After our first meeting, Natasha gave me the pins her son used to collect when he was a little boy. For a while, I kept the pins in my apartment, in Moscow, and then, before I left Moscow, I shipped the pins back to New York, and now they’re tucked away in a cardboard box in the back of my closet. Natasha gave me the pins, I imagine, because they remind her of someone she once loved very much. I keep them because they come from somewhere with a strange and terrible significance, and because I have no idea what to do with them.

FROM
5280

I
NSIDE A RUN-DOWN HOUSE
reeking of weed, two dudes in their thirties and a lady who could’ve passed for older or younger anxiously scurried about, each throwing together an overnight bag. One of the men was fat and freckled with receding red hair, the other was thin and bony with a receding blond mullet; both of them were covered in tattoos. The lady was visibly pregnant. Finally packed, but clearly unprepared for much of anything, the three spilled from the house into a late-summer afternoon, piled into a clunker of a minivan, and wheeled off. Before leaving their hometown of Dayton, Ohio, they made a pit stop to score an ounce of pot and some cocaine, and then hit the highway, heading as far north as any of them likely had ever been. It was Monday, August 21, 2000, and the gang was bound for St. Johnsbury, Vermont—more specifically, bound for the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium.

The freckled fat guy was James Boggs, but everyone called him “Boomer,” short for “Boomer the Beast,” which was ornately inked on his forearm. The house and minivan, a 1985 Chevy Astro, were his. Only a few months earlier Boomer had finished a 10-and-a-half-year prison stretch for drug trafficking, and when he’d gotten out, as he recently told me, “My momma gave me two grand to get me a house and get me on my feet,” and Boomer had applied his momma’s scratch to purchasing the crib and modest ride. The skinny guy was Roger Dale Kinney. At the time, at least, he was Boomer’s best bud, his “dawg,” as Boomer puts it. They’d met on the inside. Kinney had been pinched on an aggravated assault. Doing time, they’d found they had the same interests: tattoos and drugs; and likewise, that they hated the same things: “colored” folk and prison. They’d become so tight that when Kinney got out, Boggs not only let his dawg move in with him, he also welcomed the dawgette, Kinney’s lady, “Tish,” who was due to give birth in four months.

After they got out of the joint, Boomer and Kinney had managed to land legitimate work, installing cable for the local Time Warner operation. The gig was something they did more to shut up their parole officers than to make money. As far as Boggs and Kinney were concerned, the only real paydays were the tax-free lump sums that came from illegal action. And in those endeavors the ex-cons had made a pact to “hit a lick” as partners. Boomer had been the one who’d met with the contact that hired him for this museum gig, but it was a given that Kinney would be in. Make no mistake, though, Boomer wasn’t crazy about Kinney’s lady tagging along, what with her being a pregnant chick and all. But Kinney had pointed out that Tish could be the getaway driver. Boomer said “fine,” provided “she understands she don’t get a cut.”

Keeping with Boomer’s plan, the gang drove straight through the night. Making only necessary food and fuel stops, they cracked wise about their incipient job. “We’re on a buffalo hunt,” Boomer said, laughing himself red-faced and adding, in his best TV Tonto voice, “We come to kill the great white buffalo.” The joke got funnier as they got more and more stoned. Boomer and Kinney did the smoke-and-coke on the road trip, and as the minivan rolled into St. Johnsbury about 1 p.m. on Tuesday, August 22, some 20 hours after they’d left Ohio, they were sufficiently out of their minds. Yet they were not so far gone that they couldn’t see that St. Johnsbury was just about the sleepiest scene in the universe. “I’ve never seen nothing like this except for on the TV,” an awestruck Boomer said, gazing out of the minivan at the quaint storefronts and citizenry. “It’s like Mayberry,” he said. Boomer didn’t even see any cops: “Where’s Barney Fife?”

At last they came upon the Fairbanks Museum. Founded in 1889, the brownstone Victorian building sat atop a hill overlooking the town. Seeing it, Boomer got to thinking that this place might be too quiet for the likes of them to get inside, get to the buffalo, and get out without drawing attention. They parked nearby and Boomer got out alone, reached past his sagging beer belly into the pocket of his drooping pants, pulled out the admission fee, and went inside to case the joint. The Fairbanks was all wooden and musty, a two-floored, gorgeous, churchlike curiosity shop packed with display cases of oddities and artifacts, everything from textiles to taxidermy. Boomer saw the surveillance cameras, which his contact for the job had assured him would not be working. Boomer didn’t see a single security guard. Near as he could figure, there weren’t but maybe 10 people in the whole place. The floorboards creaked under Boomer’s boots as he looked for his mark.

And then there it was: the skeleton of a massive bison. The bright white bones rendered a creature some 10 feet long and six feet tall, identified as the “Sacred Buffalo.” Even Boomer could see it was a magnificent spectacle. It was positioned with head held high, as if the beast were alive and upon hearing Boomer’s approach had raised its skull and snorted. Boomer moved right up close to the buffalo, eased himself alongside a couple of people who were looking at the thing the way he figured smart people who go to museums look at art. He saw the hundreds of tiny carvings in the bones. It was just like in the picture in that
Sacred Buffalo
book the contact had shown Boomer. All over every inch of the bones, even the tiniest ones, were etched scenes of tiny Indians doing Indian things.

Doing his best to be inconspicuous, Boomer surveyed the exhibit space. The best exit option was way in the back.
That’s a pretty substantial run
, he thought. And what, he wondered, was outside that door? As the contact had described to Boomer, the Sacred Buffalo was in something akin to an open foyer on the first floor. Above, on either side of the display, were the second-floor balconies, also filled with pieces and open to the public. It wouldn’t be a problem getting up there, and Boomer could see there were plenty of chairs. But the chairs appeared to be heavy, and the balcony was a good 20 or so yards removed from the Sacred Buffalo. It wasn’t going to be an easy feat to accurately hurl a chair down on the thing. A dude would have to be pretty lucky to hit the Sacred Buffalo, let alone hit it so good that the chair would smash up the son of a bitch.

R
UNNING HIS
A
RT
M
ART
in the heart of Boulder, Rick Rippberger had seen all kinds of people walk into his store. Buyers, sellers, artists, browsers, they waltzed in buttoned-down or looking like hippie holdovers, some appearing not all that different than the street performers outside on Pearl Street. But Rippberger had never seen anybody like the man who strode into his place on that day in early 1994. The guy was about six-and-a-half feet tall, 250 pounds, muscular, with some of the broadest shoulders Rippberger had ever seen. The man’s tan, weathered face was the face of an Indian, or at least Rippberger’s idea of an Indian: high cheekbones, prominent nose, narrow, piercing eyes, a long ponytail. In between his cowboy boots and white cowboy hat he wore all denim, except for an oval-shaped belt buckle that might have weighed two pounds.

The man moseyed about the store’s inventory—lots of sculptures and paintings of cowboys and Indians, horses, and more than a few buffalo—and then approached Rippberger. In the voice of an Indian, or at least in the slow cadence and understated tone Rippberger associated with Indians, the man introduced himself as the South Dakota–based artist James Durham. “Big Jim” is what folks called him. Art Mart was selling some buffalo-hide robes Durham had made, and he had come to discuss the pricing, wanted to make sure he was being fairly compensated. With that business handled, Big Jim said he had another piece that might interest Rippberger. Durham clarified: It was not a finished piece; rather, it was still just a “vision.” Durham believed if he were able to complete the work, it would be spiritual and good and might well change the world. Only thing was, to realize the vision he needed financing. Intrigued by Big Jim, Rippberger invited him out for a meal to hear more.

Durham talked a bit about himself, said he was mixed-blood Indian and pureblood Vietnam veteran and biker. He spoke of his visions: One day, not so long ago, he and some Vietnam-veteran brothers he’d met in 1988 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., came together in a lodge back East to join in a sweat, that ancient American Indian ritual of purification, and to pray to the Creator for other veterans. Some of the vets brought their families; Durham’s wife, son, and daughter came along. Reluctantly, Durham allowed his seven-year-old son, Nick, to join the vets in the lodge.

Midway through the sweat, as Big Jim told Rippberger and would later put in writing, his son passed out. When Nick awoke, he told his father he’d had a vision of his dad in a big green field, wearing buckskin clothes, hair below his belt, with bushy eyebrows. In the boy’s dream, Durham had his
chanunpa
—a ceremonial pipe—in his left hand. He was standing on a prairie looking at millions of buffalo. The herd approached Durham and split, creating a path for one big bull buffalo that walked right up to Durham and spoke to him. It was another language, but Durham and this buffalo chatted for a while. As Big Jim wrapped up the story of his son’s dream: “Finally, [the buffalo] started to walk away, but then he stopped. He turned his head back and looked at [me]. He said something to [me] and
[I] nodded. Then he walked backed into the herd and just disappeared into the millions of them.”

Rippberger would be the first to admit he’s no expert on American Indian culture. He grew up in Boulder and did well financially as the owner-operator of a service station and Potter’s Restaurant. In time, Rippberger sold off the businesses and invested in real estate and other ventures, including the Art Mart, which he co-owned and operated with his wife. Still, Rippberger knew enough about the Trail of Tears and the White Man’s role in it to feel sympathy, even a smidge of culpability. In American Indian art, he saw mysticism and nobility and suffering. And so, in Boulder, a town of artsy, politically correct progressives, Big Jim couldn’t have found a more receptive audience than Rippberger, who was enthralled as Durham spoke of a second vision.

Not long after the sweat, Big Jim fell asleep and dreamed he saw a buffalo skeleton standing in the middle of a big room with a high ceiling and a wood floor. He noticed pictures carved onto all of the bones. Then the buffalo skeleton turned and spoke. “
Pilamayapelo
,” it said, meaning, “Thank you.” When Big Jim awoke, he told Rippberger, he picked up a sketchbook and drew the scenes he had seen on the bones. They were the seven sacred rites of the Lakota people, and a rendering of the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Suddenly, as Durham put it to Rippberger, the visions made sense: The Creator wanted him to scrimshaw, or carve, all of the pictures he had dreamed onto the skeleton of a buffalo, and to share the buffalo’s teachings, the Lakota tribe’s religion, with the world.

Durham showed Rippberger the divinely inspired sketches he’d done, and estimated it would cost about $30,000 to get the project going, with a few thousand dollars here and there afterward. Big Jim was confident that the finished piece would be a sought-after museum exhibit, and that the money from such a tour would repay Rippberger his initial investment and likely turn a profit. Rippberger was sold. It sounded like a chance to be a part of something “humanitarian” and maybe make some money. He liked the idea so much that he had an idea of his own. Rippberger wanted Big Jim to meet a friend, Peder Lund. The guy had an office in Boulder, across the street from Rippberger’s old service station. Lund had money and knew a thing or two about promotion, as he was the owner of a unique publishing house, Paladin Press, which published books like
Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors
and
How to Become a Professional Con Artist
.

O
NE MORNING LAST FALL
, Peder Lund walked into the conference room of his Paladin headquarters and plopped a cardboard box on the table in front me. Stuck on the side of the box was a computer-generated shipping label that read:
HOW TO MAKE
$100,000
A YEAR AS A PRIVATE DETECTIVE
. It was obviously a box that had once contained copies of that particular title his company had published, but was no longer used for that purpose; as Lund himself had written on it in black marker, the box now contained “Buffalo B.S.” “It’s all yours,” he said, turning to leave, as if the box were a rotting cadaver. “Have at it. I’ll be back in a while to see if you have any questions.” A quick scan of the box’s contents revealed a Buffalo LLC agreement; two art appraisal reports—one from 1997, another from 2000; a thick deposition transcript of James G. Durham in “Sacred Buffalo Inc. vs. Paladin Enterprises Inc.” and a handful of newspaper clippings with headlines like “Police try to flesh out attack on buffalo skeleton.”

Rippberger first came to know Lund at the pump. Before Rippberger bought that gas station, he worked there. As a skinny kid with glasses, he would be manning the station and the handsome, curly haired Lund would drive up in whatever his latest sports car was. Lund and the kid would chat. Rippberger thought Lund had a pretty sweet life. “Some of the time when he’d come in on a Saturday morning,” as Rippberger said to me recently, “it was hard to tell if he was starting his day or ending his Friday night.” They’d pick up their conversation when they bumped into each other around town and became rather friendly. Rippberger’s admiration for the dashing Lund grew as he learned that Mr. Nightlife had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, and had parlayed those interests into Paladin Press, a successful imprint specializing in books about weapons, defense, covert operations, and unusual (and sometimes illegal) professions.

Just as Rippberger had predicted, when he and Durham met with Lund, Lund indeed thought the scrimshawed buffalo sounded like a grand idea. Of course, as Rippberger had also figured, if not counted on, Lund had some ideas of his own for what was quickly becoming the Sacred Buffalo project. Paladin has published hundreds of titles, covering everything from jewelry to jihads. Regardless of the subject, virtually all of the books have had two things in common: a tantalizing subject and a pretty incredible story line. That’s not to say the books were always well written. Being the shrewd former commando he was, it seemed Lund tried to find book material that was interesting on its face, at least to his audience, along with a paint-by-numbers plot, precisely so he wouldn’t have to worry much about the writer lousing up Paladin’s investment.