Nikolai Fefilov

On July 17 and 18, acquaintances of Khabarov named Vtoroy and Yenkov were questioned, who said that they had seen him in the vicinity of the murder scene on April 28 or 29, then Yenkov began to assert that he had seen Khabarov on April 29 at 15 o'clock. Full-time rates with Khabarov's witnesses were not held, and the contradictions in date and time were not solved. Other acquaintances and relatives of Khabarov claimed that he came to the village of the 8th kilometer of the Old Moscow Tract, but after April 28 he did not appear there. Khabarov's mother said that on the following day, her son was home all day.

In 1989, Georgy Khabarov was posthumously rehabilitated from the murder of Lena Mangusheva.

Nikolai Borisovich Fefilov (Russian: Никола́й Бори́сович Фефи́лов; 1946 – August 30, 1988), known as The Urals Strangler (Russian: Уральский душитель), was a Soviet serial killer. Between 1982 and 1988, he killed 7 women and girls in Sverdlovsk, 6 of which were rape-related.

The last crime the maniac committed occurred in the Oktyabrsky District. On April 25, 1988, in the Mayakovsky Central Park of Culture and Rest, Fefilov tried to rape and then strangled a young woman. He took a wristwatch, a purse with money, a gold ring and glasses from the deceased. While trying to hide the body, Yevgeny Mordvyanik, a senior lieutenant of the internal service of the Interior Ministry who happened to be near the crime scene, detained him.

The next crime was committed in the Zheleznodorozhny District. On May 22, 1987, not far from the VIZ train station, Fefilov raped and strangled 19-year-old Elena Kook with a belt. He then abused her corpse, inserted a stick into the girl's genitals and cut off her breasts. He then threw her body into the bushes near the railway embankment, where it was found the next day.

On May 26, 1986, near the stadium near the Staro-Moskovsky tract, Fefilov raped and strangled a student of the Ural State Medical University, Olga Timofeeva. As in the previous two cases, the maniac outraged the corpse, inserting a stick into the genitals, but also cutting off her breasts. He then covered the body with some branches, taking a wristwatch, gold ring with a stone and sports trousers from the victim. Timofeeva's body was found two days later.

On May 6, 1985, on the lakeside of the Staro-Moskovsky road, Fefilov raped and strangled a 21-year-old art and technical school student named Larisa Dyachuk. He then proceeded to abuse her corpse, again, inserting a stick into her genitalia. The girl's clothes and items were then scattered around the crime scene. Fefilov did not hide the body, but took the ring, medallion, wristwatch and medical scalpel from the victim. Her corpse was found on May 17.

A month later, the two underage Yashkin brothers, who were forced to confess to Dyachuk's murder, were detained and named two of their acquaintances as accomplices. The Yashkins were kept under arrest until the autumn of 1985, but they failed to prove their involvement in the murder.

Three people were arrested - the mentally challenged Galiyev, Karasyov (in 1985 he was suspected of murdering Dyachuk, as it was he who found the body) and the also mentally challenged Vodyankin. Soon, all three confessed to the murder of Elena Kook, with Vodyankin also confessing to the four other murders committed near the Kontrolnaya bus stop.

On May 11, 1984, not far from where Mangusheva was murdered, Natasha Lapshina, a 5th-grade pupil of the 41st school, became the maniac's next victim. This time, Fefilov not only raped and strangled the girl, but outraged her corpse by inserting a stick into her genitals. The girl's body was then thrown into a water-filled ditch, and her clothes were scattered around the country road. Fefilov took a case filled with markers from Lapshina's rucksack. Her body was discovered the following day.

During the investigation into the murder of Yakupova, her neighbors in the hostel said that the girl complained about the persistent courtship of Mikhail Titov. At the end of May 1984, he was detained for harassing girls on the street. It later turned out that he was registered to a psychoneurological dispensary.

On March 23, 1983, the Sverdlovsk Regional Court convicted Georgy Khabarov of rape and murder against Lena Mangusheva, also incriminating him in other crimes, sentencing him to death. On April 27, 1984, he was executed.

At the time when Khabarov was kept on death row, at the "Kontrolnaya" stop, the real maniac committed a new crime. On August 7, 1983, Fefilov raped and strangled with a belt a 22-year-old female student and VIZ worker Gulnara Yakupova, hiding her body in the bushes and her clothes in a raspberry tree near the stadium near the Staro-Moskovsy road. Yakupova had arrived in Sverdlovsk from Bashkiria, so her disappearance was not immediately noticed. The girl's body was found on October 7. After the murder, the killer came to the crime scene three times - on August 30, September 23 and on October 8th or 9th.

Fefilov committed the first murder in a forest belt near the Staro-Moskovsky road, in the area of the Kontrolnaya bus stop in Verkh-Isetsky district, on April 29, 1982. His victim was a 5th grade student of the 41st school named Lena Mangusheva. Fefilov raped her, and then strangled the girl with a pioneer tie, covering the body with branches afterwards. He took the rucksack from the deceased girl, from which he stole a pencil case and two textbooks, and then threw it into the toilet of a gas station.

Despite the contradictions in testimony and lack of evidence, Khabarov was brought to court. On September 24, 1982, the Sverdlovsk Regional Court found Georgy Khabarov guilty and sentenced him to 14 years imprisonment. He was charged with the rape and murder of Lena Mangusheva, as well as the attempted rape of another victim and the battery of a third.

After the trial, Khabarov wrote a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court of Russia, in which he claimed that on April 29, 1982, he was not near the area of murder, denying the charges of murder and attempted rape, claiming that during the investigation he had been accused of physical and psychological abuse by law enforcement officials. At the same time, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR received a cassation complaint from the mother of Mangusheva, who asked to cancel the conviction and to impose the death penalty on him. To her complaint, she attached a collective letter to the workers of one of the enterprises of Sverdlovsk, demanding that Khabarov be executed. On November 22, 1982, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR considered both cassation complaints. The sentence of the Sverdlovsk Regional Court was canceled, the case was sent for a new consideration from the trial stage to the same court, but in a different composition.

On May 5, according to a Sverdlovsk resident, a 28-year-old intellectually disabled man named Georgy Khabarov who was released in 1970, was responsible for attempted rape, previously convicted for three years for robbery. At the first interrogation, Khabarov said that on April 29, when the murder occurred, he was at home all day. But on May 7, after a series of interrogations, he was forced to confess to the rape and murder of the girl. However, he incorrectly indicated the crime scene, the method of murder (he claimed that he had killed her with a knife), inaccurately described the appearance of the murdered girl, her underwear and the missing rucksack, which was still not found, and often changed his testimony.

After school, Fefilov joined the army and was demobilized in 1966. At the same time, he fell in love with his neighbor, but the girl rejected him. This is suggested as a reason for the subsequent killings. A few years later, Fefilov married, and two daughters were born in the family. He worked as a printer at a publishing house of the "Ural Worker" newspaper. He was constantly in conflict with his wife because he could not get a separate apartment, while the family was forced to live in a communal. On the day Fefilov committed the first murder, another quarrel had occurred in the family.