So I'm sure some State Duma deputies will not be surprised to learn today that investigators believe two young men suspected of murdering a high school girl, chopping up her body, eating some of her internal organs and tossing her remains in the trash are "members of the informal youth organizations 'Goths' and Emo,'" according a statement released Tuesday by the St. Petersburg branch of the Investigative Committee.
Authorities say the two suspects — a florist with a criminal record named Yury Mozhnov and a butcher at a local market named Maxim Golovatskikh — drowned the 11th-grader in the bathtub in an apartment on Prospekt Kosmonavtov in the northern capital. They then proceeded to dismember her, and, "having consumed parts of her organs as food, placed the remains in bags and threw them in a trash can and a reservoir," the statement said.
Federal Security Service officers have been brought in to assist with the investigation, a local expert on youth subcultures told the Fontanka.ru web site.
Thankfully, the expert, Vladimir Gushchin, injects some reason into the hysteria that has pervaded discussions of Goth and Emo culture in the past year or so. It is absolutely uncharacteristic of members of these subcultures to commit some crimes, Gushchin told Fontanka.ru. (Are there many subcultures for which such crimes are characteristic?)
Gushchin goes on to propose an interesting theory: The suspects, perhaps, killed the girl in the heat of an argument and then decided to make it appear as if cannibalism were involved so that they could plead insanity later on.
Anyway, like with most crimes committed in St. Petersburg, Fontanka.ru carries a detailed account of this murder, which first came to light after someone discovered the girl's severed remains wrapped in two plastic bags in an abandoned lot on the corner of Ulista Ordhonikidze and Ulitsa Lensoveta on the evening of Jan. 31.
The girl's severed head was discovered near Building No. 9 on Ulitsa Altaiskoi, Fontanka.ru said. The girl's parents reported her missing on Jan. 19, saying she left the apartment that day to meet up with some friends and never returned.
As if this horrible tale needed any more lurid an angle, Fontanka.ru speculates that the suspects, both 19, "possibly" tried to recreate the scene in the film version of Hunter S. Thompson's classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in which a drugged-out Dr. Gonzo, taking a bath, asks Duke to kill him by tossing his tape recorder in the tub.
The two had reportedly watched the 1998 film starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro the night before.
This version sounds highly dubious.
Mozhnov and Golovatskikh are in custody. The St. Petersburg branch of the Investigative Committee was to hold a briefing later Tuesday on the progress of the investigation.
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