Vladimir Ionesyan

Ionesyan was born on August 27, 1937, in Tbilisi to a family of ethnic Armenians.[3] As a child, he sang well, and his parents actively encouraged the development of his vocal capabilities. In addition to secondary education, Ionesyan had a diploma from music school, thanks to which he, as a good student, was accepted in the Tbilisi State Conservatoire. In the second year of the conservatoire he went to work in the theater, where he worked until December 13, 1963.[4]

Details of Ionesyan's biography differ in various sources. According to one version, when Ionesyan was still in school, his father was sentenced to seven years for trading fraud, which is why, presumably, Vladimir went along the crooked path, which led him to the fact that in 1954, after graduating from high school, Ionesyan was caught for theft and sentenced to 5 years conditional imprisonment. In 1959 he was drafted into the army, as he, while studying in the university, had to give up training because of, as he said at the interrogation, "a purely nervous illness." When he came to the military registration and enlistment office for an examination, he was sent for examination to the first hospital in Tbilisi, where doctors gave a conclusion that he could not serve. He brought the documents to the military enlistment office, where a certain person, he said, destroyed them, as he was attracted to Ionesyan and did not want him to evade military service. Vladimir was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. At the trial, he tried to prove his innocence, but for some reason the person who destroyed his certificates did not call the court.

According to another version of the biography, Ionesyan received the first term for evading military service after school (in which his parents actively helped), because he believed that the service in the army would ruin his vocal talent, and this period was the same for two years. While he was serving his term, his father was arrested.

There is also a third version of Ionesyan's biography, set forth in the "Komsomolskaya Pravda", which brought excerpts from the records of his interrogation. According to these records, he received his first term for evading military service in 1959; on the criminal record from 1954, there was no such thing.

After the trial, Ionesyan was sent to a facilitated camp in Gori. There he behaved well and even worked as a cultivator, because of which he was sometimes released into the city. During one dismissal, Ionesyan did not return to the camp, because, unable to restrain himself nervously, he went home. After that, his imprisonment was replaced by one year of forced labor and soon was released. After liberation, Ionesyan was again drafted into the army and again sent to the central neurological dispensary, where he was told he could not serve due to his nervousness. After that, he finally received a military ticket.

After a while he married a graduate of the Tbilisi Conservatoire named Medea, and had a son with her. Having failed to find a well-paid job, he decided to engage in group theft, and was arrested. This time, the court, given his age and marital status, gave him 5 years of a suspended sentence. At the request of his wife, who wanted to protect him from communicating with friends and associates, Ionesyan moved to Orenburg, where he began working as a tenor (according to another source - a concertmaster) in the local Musical Comedy Theater. In November 1963, the theater troupe from Kazan came to work with a certain artist along with his wife, who, in turn, was a ballerina named Alevtina Nikolaevna Dmitrieva (b. 1942). The spouse and Dmitrieva settled near the Ionesyan family, and Vladimir and Alevtina soon began a romance. However, the theater management was unhappy with Dmitrieva's work, she was told that she was not suitable for the theater and still had to learn how to dance. As Ionesyan explained during the interrogation, for her this was a serious blow, with Vladimir deciding to help her, as he put it, "a very good person in every sense" and offered her to go with him to Ivanovo, where he had a friend who was a former director of the Orenburg operetta.

For the sake of Dmitrieva, Ionesyan decided to abandon his family and leave the workplace without a remand. Since Dmitrieva was not very interested in him, he lied that he worked for the KGB and, with the help of connections, managed to get a job at the Bolshoi Theatre.[5] It did not work out for the lovers in Ivanovo, and Vladimir began to persuade Alevtina to go to Moscow, telling her that he had an inheritance there, which was left to him from a deceased uncle who lived in Germany. In Moscow, they rented an apartment on Meshchanskaya Street near the Rizhsky railway station from a pensioner, whom they in the first hours of their arrival in the capital. However, there was not enough money to live - Dmitrieva was not taken by any of the capital's theaters - and Ionesyan decided to get money from robberies. He again lied to Alevtina that he had received a promotion and will often be forced to leave for "assignments". The fact that the "KGB agent" wore very modest clothes, Ionesyan explained to her that he was "under cover" and should not stand out.

Ionesyan never planned his crimes beforehand. Pretending to be a controller from Mosgaz or an employee of ZhEkA No. 13, he went to apartments, took reading from meters and checked gas burners. While choosing the place of the future robbery, he was guided not so much by the rich decoration of the apartment, but by the number of people in it. As a weapon he used a tourist hatchet, bought from GUM. Oustretched outer detail was the ushanka, which Ionesyan, unlike the overwhelming number of Muscovites, tied at the back of the head, and not on the top, which immediately gave investigators a tip to the fact that the killer was a non-resident. Nevertheless, there are cases when Ionesyan put on a kepi instead of an ushanka.[9]

Several residents of the Marina Grove told the police that they saw how on the day of the murder a young man of southern appearance with a turned off TV in a sheet had left the street in a truck. The district commissioner Malyshev had also seen it, and managed to remember the first digits of the truck's license plate - 96. The detectives quickly learned the full number - MOG 96-26. The driver admitted that he really had driven a man of Caucasian appearance and dropped him off between the Trifonovskaya and Meshchanskaya Streets.

Survey of tenants from nearby houses was carried out. A woman who lived on Shchepkina Street reported that her neighbor has a niece with her husband who looks like a Caucasian, had recently brought a TV and immediately sold it to a tenant from a neighboring house. While investigating the tenant, police found out that it was the same TV that disappeared from Ermakova's apartment. Ionesyan's apartment was ambushed, but Alevtina Dmitrieva was detained instead of the murderer himself, telling the detectives that Ionesyan was working for the KGB and is on a secret mission (during the arrest, Ionesyan himself introduced himself as a KGB major). A quick check, led by the then chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, showed that Vladimir Ionesyan was not listed. Dmitrieva was put in solitary confinement, and confessed that her cohabitant went to Kazan, where after a while she was supposed to come too. At the station it was Ionesyan who was to meet her "on demand". As bait, instead of Dmitrieva, they sent a MUR employee instead.

Ionesyan's detention was supervised personally by the Minister of Public Order Protection of the Tatar ASSR Salikh Yapeyev. On January 12, 1964, without any difficulties, the murderer, nicknamed "Mosgaz", was arrested on a platform of the Kazan railway station.

In the documentary film from NTV "Open, Mosgaz!", evidence is provided that Ionesyan talked personally to the General Prosecutor of the USSR Roman Rudenko, who on his behalf took the killer to the office of the then state of head Nikita Khrushchev. According to this version, while looking at Ionesyan, Khrushchev ordered: "In order that in two weeks he should no longer be here...".

Ionesyan's trial was short-lived and was of a closed nature. In fact, the fate of the accused was resolved before the trial. Since his brutal crimes were widely publicized and shocked the public, the Ministry of Public Order Protection proposed that the investigation be completed as soon as possible, that a court be held and the execution sentence be passed to Ionesyan. The correspondence of the police authorities with the Central Committee mentioned the proposal "to sentence Ionesyan to death by hanging and for the sentenced to be done publicly." Other, more sophisticated punitive measures were also suggested. First Deputy Chairman of the KGB Philipp Bobkov, while in retirement, mentioned in 2001 that he received letters from citizens and labor collectives, which, in view of the terrible cruelty committed against children, demanded that the criminal be hanged publicly or quartered in Lobnoye Mesto.[13]

The plans of the leadership of the CPSU Central Committee, however, did not include a broad coverage of the process, which some workers of this organization also insisted on. At the same time, the nationality of the offender was taken into account, the need to avoid the heat of passion on this sensitive soil. This letter was sent for signature to the heads of the administrative departments of the CPSU Central Committee and Central Committee of the RSFSR, Mironov and Laputin: "We believe that the desire to make the upcoming trial sensational is not justified. In our opinion, it would be advisable, in accordance with the law on jurisdiction the Ionesyan case be considered in the Supreme Court of the RSFSR...The trial of the press, radio and television should not be covered, limiting itself to a brief report on the verdict in the central press. The Procuracy of the USSR (Comrade Rudenko) and the Supreme Court of the USSR (Comrade Kulikov) support this proposal. We ask for consent."

The investigation and the trial took only two weeks. On January 30, 1964, the Supreme Court of the USSR issued a verdict: the death penalty. In the verdict of the court it was clarified that "the verdict is final and can not be appealed." The petition for a pardon was immediately rejected, and on the next day, on January 31, 1964, at 23:00, Vladimir Ionesyan was executed by firing squad at the Butyrka Prison.

Alevtina Dmitrieva was recognized as an accomplice, although Ionesyan shielded her during interrogations, claiming that she knew nothing about the murders, and even her fault, according to later testimonies of forensics experts, was not proven by the court. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but later in 1972 (or in 1974) she was released early.

• Modestov, N. (1997). Maniacs... Blind Death: the chronicle of serial killings (in Russian). Moscow: Nadezhda-I. ISBN 9785861500418.