Cannibalism and Despair

A horrific crime strikes three innocent children in a down-and-out Siberian steel town.


But the townspeople are too preoccupied with their own struggles to express alarm.


NOVOKUZNETSK, Western Siberia -- They talk rough and walk tough. But under the grime on their faces, Dima, Sasha, Lyosha and Vitya have sweet smiles. The homeless street kids, with their skinny legs, are the picture of vulnerability.


They live in a cellar. They beg and sniff glue. And they keep out of the way of adults who only mean trouble -- the drunken parents, crazed down-and-outs or the police who round them up every few weeks.


In return, most grown-ups ignore the ragged children underfoot in this depressed Siberian steel town, one of the many places that Russia's new capitalism forgot. Poverty is etched on every face and hard times have bred a harsh neglect.


But one person in Novokuznetsk did take a passionate interest in children like these. He believed they were the detritus of Russian democracy, the future drug addicts and prostitutes of the new freedom.


So Sasha Spesivtsev killed them. His last victim said before dying that Spesivtsev and his mother also cooked some of his victims -- one of at least a dozen outbreaks of cannibalism reported in Russia in the last five years.


Now Spesivtsev, a mustachioed 27-year-old with a furtive grin, is in jail awaiting trial on 19 counts for murders he has confessed to committing. The unemployed man says he lured his drifter victims home from the station or the mean streets nearby. Body parts washed up in the Aba River last summer, near the school where his mother, Lyudmila Spesivtseva, worked.


"He came up to me once, but I ran away,'' Lyosha, an 11-year-old urchin, recalls of Spesivtsev. "He was always around. We all knew what he looked like.''


In other places, the brutality of these killings -- and the mere suggestion of cannibalism -- might have created a sensation, as did the 1991 U.S. case involving Jeffrey Dahmer, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, serial killer and cannibal. But there has been no outcry in Russia. Here, such crimes are surprisingly prevalent, always in rundown provincial towns, almost always among the unemployed, the drink-sodden and the uneducated.


Outside Novokuznetsk, few Russians have heard of Spesivtsev. In town, anyone not directly affected by him has ignored the story. "People have taken it quietly. Everyone here's too busy trying to get hold of the next crust of bread to worry about Spesivtsev,'' prison governor Vladimir Romanov said.


Even the families of the victims are taking their loss in seemingly passive fashion. They don't know how to lobby. They don't expect justice. Spesivtsev's victims were all drawn from the underclass: village girls whose parents are semi-literate workers at dying factories, runaways, dropouts. Unlike them, Spesivtsev came from a family that had friends in high places in town.


To his victims, the latest outrage is just one more proof that they are at the mercy of every whim, however cruel, of the neglectful rulers of their social hierarchy: the maniac who preyed on them, the police who are investigating at a snail's pace, the chronically inefficient judicial system, and the bribe-taking bureaucrats who are too busy protecting their own to enforce the law that theoretically protects the poor.


Novokuznetsk, site of five enormous steelworks, has fared badly since the advent of democracy. The smog that used to wreathe city buildings has dissipated, but only because the giant factory chimneys no longer belch out smoke producing steel for grandiose Soviet building projects.


The coal-mining towns all around are bankrupt. It is hard to find anyone on the street who has been paid his salary or pension in the nationwide wages crisis of the past six months. But no one is starving. Somehow, people get by. They take second jobs. There are sales kiosks on every corner. A local mafia flourishes. The most drastic change wrought by the new order is that the poor feel defenseless.


One neighbor, pensioner Lidiya Vedenina, called the police early last summer to complain about the smell of death and the deafening music coming out of Spesivtsev's apartment. She begged investigators to check him out.


No one came, although the police were supposed to be scouring the town to find the person throwing body parts into the river; Spesivtsev had a criminal record that might have made him a prime suspect -- a teen-age girl was found dead in his apartment in 1991.


Police broke down his door only four months later, and even then only because plumbers complained he wouldn't let them in to mend a broken pipe.


Inside, they found Spesivtsev's last victim, Olya Galtseva, 15. She was dying on the couch of stab wounds to the stomach. Nearby were a headless corpse in the bath and a skeletal rib cage in the main room.


Olya and two 13-year-old friends had disappeared a month earlier. Police and doctors had ignored their frantic parents' appeals to find them, insisting that the trio must have run away .


Olya told the police a pitiful story: She had gone out with her friends to buy batteries and bumped into Lyudmila Spesivtseva, weighed down with shopping bags. The three girls had helped Spesivtseva home. Once there, mother, son and a fierce Newfoundland dog trapped them inside.


Because they are from the bottom of the social hierarchy, parents say bitterly, police and investigators shortchanged them when their daughters disappeared and now are not bothering to follow up the killings.


Lyudmila Barashkina, Zhenya's mother who now gets paid in chicken legs rather than cash for her work in a village poultry factory, weeps when she remembers how contemptuous police officers returned her 13-year-old daughter's corpse and skull to bury -- but gave her the wrong skull. At the last minute, she had to cancel the funeral.


"Afterward, they just laughed and said 'It's a good thing we didn't give the body back to you -- you'd only have had to dig it up again.' And now we keep trying to see the prosecutor to find out what they're up to, but his secretary just says, 'You're only coming in over my dead body' and throws us out. And that new investigator ... hasn't bothered with us at all,'' she said.


Alone among the threadbare inhabitants of 53 Pioneer Avenue -- a rough apartment block where lights and elevators work only sporadically and violent graffiti covers the walls -- the Spesivtsev family was relatively well-educated.


Spesivtsev's older sister Nadezhda, 34, worked as a secretary to a town judge, according to a local journalist, Mikhail Zelenchukov: "The mother worked there for a while too. They were always at the prosecutor's office and in court. They helped with investigations. They're legally educated.''


Now Barashkina is worried that Nadezhda Spesivtseva's acquaintance with investigators will slow the case. The facts bear out her fears: Although neighbors saw the Spesivtseva daughter enter the apartment while the three girls were imprisoned there, she has been given psychiatric tests and quietly freed. If she appears at her brother's trial at all, Shelkov says, it will only be as a witness.


Meantime, no one in Novokuznetsk wants to discuss what sent Spesivtsev over the edge. "I can't say a thing. Ask the investigators,'' was the only comment from Gennady Shuryayev, chief doctor at the local psychiatric institute.


But what is certain is that he was not hungry. His mother and sister both had jobs. Police found stacks of building materials -- linoleum, lightbulbs -- in his home, suggesting some sort of traffic in stolen goods.


So why did he break the ultimate taboo? In his jail cell, Spesivtsev passes his days writing poems and reflections on the evils of Russia's new permissive democracy, which he believes has turned the safely regulated Soviet world he once knew into a violent free-for-all of corruption, vice and cheating politicians.


Asked by police how he justified his crimes, Spesivtsev answered with a shrug: "How many people has our democracy destroyed? Aren't people dying on railway stations because of our democracy? If people thought about that, there wouldn't be any of this filth. But what can you do?''


Spesivtsev is undergoing psychiatric testing to see whether he is sane enough to stand trial. His mother, who has withdrawn into herself and will not speak, is imprisoned in a separate cell.


According to prison governor Romanov, psychiatrists have not yet found any reason to declare the now docile Spesivtsev criminally insane. But local journalist Zelenchukov recalls an interview with him in which he showed an unhealthy willingness to consider human flesh as a commodity to be traded.


"As we were leaving, Spesivtsev asked us if we couldn't organize the sale of ... his head,'' Zelenchukov recalled. The inmate wanted the money to buy cigarettes. "He thought some institute might want to study his brain after his execution and might pay, in advance, in cigarettes."