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It does sometimes happen that way, of course, but rarely and only in the most obvious cases. Having set themselves the ambitious task of convicting the instigator of a crime in the absence of the perpetrators and corpses, the investigators must have realised that the entire body of evidence depended on an unproven motive. And that all the witness accounts and that every little detail in their deductions and conclusions had to be so convincing and so cast-iron that the judge and jury could have no reasonable doubt. Otherwise the prosecution was doomed to failure. If, of course, this were a routine prosecution with honest jurors, an impartial judge and prosecutors and detectives who uphold the law.
What actually happened? My colleagues have paid several visits to the scene. We have tried to establish the sequence of events and the investigation, and to evaluate Burtovoy's initial findings. Let's take a look.
The official sequence of events is as follows. On 20 November 2002, at about 8 in the evening a gang of masked men, identity unknown, entered the Gorins' home in the village of Raduzhnyy. At home were 14-year-old Dima Izmaylov, Olga Gorina's son from her first marriage, his half-sister Olga and also young Aleksey, to whom Pichugin was godfather. The terrified Dima grabbed a clock from a table and hurled it at the intruders, for which he was hit over the head with a pistol butt.
The gang shoved the children into the bathroom and barricaded the door with a chest of drawers. It was stuffy in the bathroom, so Dima used a screwdriver to punch several holes in the door for ventilation. By various accounts, Sergey Gorin's acquaintance Smirnov arrived for him between 5 and 7 in the morning. They were supposed to go to Moscow together. The gate was bolted and secured with a wooden stake on the inside, nobody was answering the phone, and Smirnov decided to wait outside. The Gorins' nanny arrived at 9 and said that the gate should have been opened long ago. A worried Smirnov climbed over the gate and discovered the children in the bathroom. There was dried blood on Dima's head.
That is what the prosecution said when it made the indictment public. Not all of the details got into the press. It emerged during the investigation, for example, that the children had overheard the masked men talking on the phone. One of them made a call and, in particular, called others by their nicknames - Wild Boar, Dog and Bull. About this, more later.
The provincial routine
This is what our inquiries established. After Smirnov realised that the Gorins were missing, he called the police. The same day, the case was handed to a senior investigating officer at the regional procuracy, Demidov. As soon as the alarm was raised, a team of detectives from the regional Interior Ministry travelled to the scene. Remember this detail: Demidov for some reason rejected their report. The police had probably done a poor job, so Demidov ordered a repeat examination the next day, the 22nd, to be carried out by a team of prosecutors.
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