Sasha Spesivtsev

Twenty-seven year old Russian Sasha Spesivtsev took it upon himself to begin a war against those children he saw as detrimental to society. He was responsible for the murders of at least 19 street kids who he then took home and cooked and ate with the aid of his mother, Lyudmila.

At the time of his arrest Sasha was an unemployed black marketeer and former mental patient living in the Siberian town of Novokuznetsk. His method was to lure homeless children from the streets and train stations to his home.

It was only when he began to discard of body part onto the river Aba in summer 1996 that police became suspicious that a serial killer was roaming the streets of Siberia.

However, since the victims were homeless children there was not much weight put into the police investigation. Had police acted on complaints by Spesivtsev’s neighbours they may have been able to save the lives of many children. One of Spesivtsev’s neighbors continuously complained to police of the putrid stench of decay and deafening rock music coming from his apartment.

Police ignored the complaints, they saw it more as a cleanliness and civil problem rather than suspected homicide. No officer ever came to investigate the complaints nor even look up the history of th eman in questions. Had they done so they would have discovered that in 1991 a teenage girl had been found dead at the man’s apartment.

Finally after repeated complaints police did investigate a year later and found 15-year-old Olga Galtseva on the couch of Spesivtsev’s apartment with multiple stab wounds to her stomach and chest, she was still alive but barely.

Before passing away Olga told police that she, together with two other 13-year-old friends, helped the cannibal mother carry some bags to the apartment. Once the girls were inside the unit they were trapped by Sasha and a fierce dog. Police assumed that that the other two were dead but due to a lack of funds were unable to look for them in the gardens around the apartment block nor do tests on any body parts they found.

Police did however hapharzardly look around the apartment and found to their horror body parts strewn everywhere. In the bathroom they found a headless corpse and on the living room floor, in plain view, was a human rib cage. All in all they found evidence of 19 different murders. Enough to try Spesivtsev for serial murder.

The prosecutor for the trial, Alexei Bugayets believed that during the course of time they would add more bodies to the tally. Bugayets told newspapers that a thorough search of Spesivtsev's apartment revealed at least 80 pieces of bloodstained clothing. He said tests established that none of them contained blood from anyone in Spesivtsev's family.

Sasha, described by authorities as an "intellectual" who has written some books on philosophy, previously had been released from a psychiatric hospital. He was committed after being convicted of murdering his girlfriend.

In prison he spends all his time undergoing psychiatric testing and writing poems about the evils of democracy. Asked how he justifies his crimes, he rhetorically answered, "How many people have our democracy destroyed?... If people thought about that, there wouldn't be any of this filth. But what can you do?" His mother, on the other hand, has withdrawn into herself and has not uttered a word since her arrest. Sasha, burdened with the heart of a true black marketeer, wants to sell his head to some institute so they can study his brain, and get paid, "in advance, in cigarettes."

Bibliography: News articles from time of the trial

Written by Korey Sifuentes

Copyright © 2002  by [The Crime Web].

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Original Written: January 30, 2002

Updated: January 30, 2002