Serial killer who cannibalised children during the 1990s sent to mental hospital

The Kemerovo regional court ruled to send Alexander Spesivtsev, a resident of Novokuznetsk, to compulsory treatment, the regional Office of the Public Prosecutor said.

Photo: Freepik by rawpixel.com, PDM

The defendant, Alexander Spesivtsev, is a serial killer, who killed at least 34 victims and ate them during the 1990s.

Spesivtsev will undergo treatment at a special psychiatric hospital.

The court found that from March to September 1996, the defendant had killed 15 people with particular cruelty. Eleven of the victims were minors. The man was torturing them in his apartment.

One boy whom Spesivtsev lured home from the stairwell managed to escape.

His crimes surfaced in 1997 by accident due to a clog in the sewer system. During the rounds, he refused to let plumbers in. When he refused to open the door to the police, security forces had to break in. An exhausted and tortured girl and body fragments were found in the apartment.

It turned out that Spesivtsev and his mother had been luring children and teenagers into their flat for years. It is believed that the man may have killed 82 people as evidenced by the clothes found during the searches.

In 1997, Alexander Spesivtsev was sentenced to only ten years in prison. A year later, a new trial against Spesivtsev began, but instead of a colony, he was sent to a mental hospital. He committed all of his crimes in his hometown of Novokuznetsk.

In 1991, Spesivtsev met a 17-year-old girl Evgenia Guselnikova. They went out together, Alexander read poetry to her, but one day he beat her up, and she decided to break up with him. He locked the girl in his flat and tortured her for a month. The girl died of septicaemia. Her whole body was covered with purulent accesses, because of which doctors could not establish the true cause of the girl's death.

In 1992, by decision of the Novokuznetsk People's Court, Spesivtsev was sent to a specialised psychiatric in-patient clinic to be treated for schizophrenia. After three years, Spesivtsev was discharged with signs of remission. No record of his discharge was made, which caused law enforcement to believe that he was still in the clinic.

Elena Trunova, a 20-year-old woman, became his first victim after discharge. He first saw her at a party while visiting a neighbour. Spesivtsev took Trunova to his flat and attempted to have sex with her, but failed. According to Spesivtsev, she started swearing and calling him names. He got angry, went to the kitchen, grabbed a kitchen knife, went back into the bedroom and stabbed the woman in the chest and stomach. Elena died from the wounds. According to Spesivtsev, his mother came to the flat in the evening, and the killer asked her to get rid of the corpse. According to investigation, they dismembered the corpse, and the woman took the remains out of the flat in pieces and buried them in the field nearby.

From March to August 1996, Spesivtsev killed 15 people in his flat. A neighbour, pensioner Lidia Vedenina, called the police in early summer complaining of cadaverous smell and deafeningly loud music coming from the Spesivtsevs' flat. The police did not come to inspect the flat.

Spesivtsev's mother lured to her son's last three victims to their flat (13-year-old Nastya Burnaeva, 13-year-old Zhenya Barashkina and 15-year-old Olya Galtseva) on 24 September 1996. She asked the girls to help her open the door. Spesivtsev immediately killed Nastya, who tried to hit him to escape. He kept the two other girls chained with homemade handcuffs for about a month. He would abuse and torture them in every possible way. He raped the girls and forced them to cut up their friend's body and eat her remains. Spesivtsev's mother and sister would often come to the flat and see what was happening there. However, the women did nothing to stop the madman. He then brutally murdered Zhenya and forced his last victim Olya to dismember the body and eat the soup that he had made from the girl's flesh. He fed Nastya's and Zhenya's bones to his dog before her eyes.

After being released from captivity, Olya Galtseva managed to give detailed testimony against him. Unfortunately, the girl died three days later in the hospital from peritonitis and pulmonary edema.

From the testimony of the victim:

"When Andrei (as Spesivtsev introduced himself to the victims) killed Nastya, he told us to cut the corpse into pieces to make it easier to hide them. He gave us a metal hacksaw, and we used it to cut the corpse. We would cut the meat from the bones with a knife. He didn't do it himself, he only commanded us. He would feed some of the meat and bones to his dog. Zhenya and I carried the cut off parts to the bathroom, and we would put them there in the bathtub. Both the old and the younger women saw it all. He would beat me and Zhenya every day. He broke Zhenya's arm and smashed her head, and used a simple needle and thread to stitch it up. He liked Zhenya, and he was always pestering her, saying: "Prove to me that you are not a b…". He would examine her like a gynaecologist and, after how many days — I can't say, he raped her. He would rape her constantly, but as for me he would only beat me. He forced Zhenya to stab herself, but she said she couldn't do it. She asked him to give her some injection so that she wouldn't suffer."