Gennady Mikhasevich

He was finally arrested in December 1985. After initial denial, he confessed and was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in 1987. His case became notorious in the USSR (“The Vitebsk Case”, “Витебское дело”), as it revealed how corrupt investigators had tried to close cases quickly: by the time Mikhasevich was finally arrested, 14 people had already been convicted for the crimes Mikhasevich committed, and a couple of them had been sentenced to death and executed for crimes they did not commit.

The investigation started to advance in the 1980s, as the young investigator Nikolay Ignatovich firmly believed that all the killings of females near motorways in the region were not separate, isolated cases as previous investigators had conveniently believed, but had in fact been committed by one person, a serial killer. The police also suspected that the serial killer was using a red Zaporozhets; as they started checking all the people of the Oblast who possessed such a car, Mikhasevich, as a druzhinnik, participated in these actions - essentially, searching for himself. This also gave him insight into the investigation itself, enabling him to learn of the steps investigators were taking beforehand, and allowing Mikhasevich to plan his own steps to avoid them. The year 1984 was especially 'prolific' for the murderer: he killed 12 women in this year alone.

Gennady Mikhasevich was born in the village of Ist (Vitebsk Oblast) in 1947, and served in the army. He committed his first murder in May 1971. He himself later explained that the killing spree started after he had returned from the army only to find out that his girlfriend had left him and gotten married in the meantime. On the night of 14 May 1971, he was on his way from Vitebsk to Polotsk. It was late so he could not catch a bus to Polotsk where his parents lived. Mikhasevich reported that he was feeling despondent because of the breakup with his girlfriend, and had prepared a loop to hang himself. By chance, however, he encountered a young woman on the road and, in order to vent his anger, decided to kill her. He murdered again in October 1971, and strangled two other women in 1972, near Vitebsk. Mikhasevich graduated from a technical school in Vitebsk in 1973 and returned to Ist, starting work in a sovkhoz. He got married in 1976. In the meantime, the murders went on.

Gennady Modestovich Mikhasevich (Belarusian: Генадзь Мадэставіч Міхасевіч; 7 April 1947 – 25 September 1987) was a prolific Soviet serial killer. He murdered 36 women during the period from 1971 to 1985 in Vitebsk, Polotsk and the rural areas in the nearby regions of the Byelorussian SSR.