In 1985 the militia in the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus were checking the owners of every red Zaporozhets car in the oblast, because the man strangling women on the region's roads was believed to drive one. Among the civilian volunteers helping them was Gennady Mikhasevich. He was a member of the voluntary people's druzhina, the auxiliary that supported the Soviet police, and in that role he took part in the search for himself, which also told him in advance what the investigators were doing. He killed twelve women that year alone.
He was born Gennady Modestovich Mikhasevich on April 7, 1947, in the village of Ist, in the Vitebsk oblast. He served in the army, and by his own account came home to find that his girlfriend had married someone else. On the night of May 14, 1971, despondent, he had prepared a noose to hang himself when he met a young woman on the road and killed her instead. He killed again that October and twice more near Vitebsk in 1972. He graduated from a technical school in 1973, went to work at a state farm in machine repair, married, had two children, did not drink, and became secretary of the local Communist Party committee.
For years the killings were treated as separate crimes, and the investigators, under heavy pressure for results, found men to convict. At least fourteen innocent men were convicted of murders Mikhasevich had committed; several served long sentences, and accounts say one was executed. It was a young investigator, Nikolai Ignatovich, who argued that the women found dead beside the region's roads had all been killed by one man.
As the search closed in, Mikhasevich tried to throw it off. He sent an anonymous letter to a local newspaper in the name of an imaginary underground group, the Patriots of Vitebsk, and then left a note in the same hand beside one of his victims. The investigators set out to check the handwriting of the men of the oblast. After some 556,000 samples, graphologists found a match. He was arrested on December 9, 1985, fourteen and a half years after his first murder. "This is a mistake," he told his wife as he was led away. "I'll be right back."
He denied it at first and then confessed, and led investigators to where he had hidden some of his victims' belongings. Others he had given to his wife as gifts; two wedding rings taken from murdered women had been melted down for her dental crowns. He confessed to forty-three killings and was convicted of thirty-six. On September 25, 1987, he was shot in Minsk. The review of the case that followed exonerated the men wrongly convicted, and one of the lead investigators faced charges of abusing his power.