Суд мести

Nobody was punished for openly lying in court. Nor did the judge take an interest in the contents of the case. So what's the point of all our changes to the law? It's true that an arrest warrant is now issued not by a prosecutor but by a judge. But surely he would want to know on what grounds a man is being taken into custody? Surely he should ask what's in the file? Anyone reading this book could be thrown into jail in an instant in exactly the same way and without any evidence whatsoever.

Nonetheless, those who observed the hearing on 21 June say that prosecutor Lakhtin was showing a bad case of nerves. As soon as it was over he rushed off to phone through the news: "We've got the warrant!" It seems that even in the Basmannyy Court prosecutors were not entirely confident, given that the whole case rested on an absurdity. On 26 June, Pichugin was charged with the attempted murder of Kostina and organising the Gorins' murder. Burtovoy had written about the grounds for the arrest: "The investigation has sufficient evidence ..." But there was nothing in the file. Never mind evidence, there were no coherent documents at all! This the defence also discovered as they studied the case.

The investigation urgently needed some kind of solid pointer to Pichugin's criminality. Something that could be pushed through the court, although the hearing was in camera. On 24 June, officers at a top-security prison compound on Ognennyy island questioned Igor Korovnikov. On 26 June, Demidov returned from Korovnikov and laid the charges against Pichugin. What the prosecution had was the testimony of a murderer who had suddenly remembered that in 1999, five years before the Gorins disappeared, Pichugin had tried to recruit him to kill them.

I deliberately put all of the Procuracy General's evidence into a single sentence. Because it was hopeless. There was nothing else on which to charge Pichugin with murder. There still isn't. All the investigation's future efforts and the carefully coordinated testimony of Korovnikov, already doing life, and his gang were towards a single goal - proving that Pichugin and Korovnikov had discussed the matter back in 1999.

Are you with me? Not to prove that Aleksey had commissioned the Gorins' murder, but to prove that five years earlier he had discussed it with a serial killer.

Who was this crucial witness for the prosecution? How reliable was he as a witness? Had he decided to earn his passage back to Moscow, to enjoy the clean and lenient conditions at Lefortovo?

The serial killer

The men who had given this testimony against Aleksey had been convicted in summer 2000 of a number of crimes, committed under Korovnikov's overall guidance between October 1998 and February 1999. Less than six months, but they managed to get lots done. It all happened in and around Tambov.

On 13 October, they had been drinking. They picked up two girls and took them out of town to a forest, where they raped them and then throttled them with telephone cord to cover up their tracks. They also robbed the girls' bodies of jewellery and trinkets worth 5,100 roubles. They stripped the corpses and concealed them under some branches. The clothes they threw into a river.

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