On June 8, 2006, Aleksandr Rubel walked out of Tartu Prison at twenty-five, a free man. Eight years earlier he had killed seven people in Tallinn, among them a disabled neighbor, a man he decapitated in the street and a fifteen-year-old girl. He had been sixteen and seventeen at the time, and under Estonian law the most a court could give a minor was eight years. The Estonian press followed his release with headlines asking whether his lust for killing had cooled.
He was born on December 25, 1980, in the Ukrainian SSR and grew up in Kopli, the old industrial peninsula at the northern end of Tallinn, living with his parents in the tenement at Kopli 100B. He huffed gasoline vapor, and he did so before the killings.
The first was on September 19, 1997. Tõnu Põld, born in 1952, was a disabled neighbor. Rubel later testified that he had simply wanted to kill somebody and had chosen Põld because he knew Põld could not put up much of a fight. The second, on November 7, 1997, began with his father. Aleksei Pavlov had been a guest of the Rubels, and Andrei Rubel, who believed Pavlov had been courting his wife, stabbed him four times. His son then helped the wounded man into an empty room, strangled him and threw him out of a third-floor window. Andrei Rubel was convicted as an accessory and sentenced to seven years.
Between January 22 and 24, 1998, Rubel stabbed Jevgeni Shelest, born in 1947, to death at Stroomi Beach. On February 2 he stopped Vladimir Ivanov, born in 1954, a passerby he did not know, and asked him for a cigarette and five kroons "for gasoline"; then he killed him with an axe and cut off his head. A week later, on February 9, he killed Olga Voronkova, born in 1944, who lived in the same tenement at Kopli 100B. Between February 28 and March 1 he killed Vladimir Kinzerski, also born in 1944, in his own house.
The last was Alice Siivas. She had been born on February 22, 1983, and was fifteen when he cut her throat at Paljassaare, the headland west of Kopli, on June 4, 1998.
He was tried in Tallinn in February 1999. The newspaper Postimees reported on February 16, 1999, that he had been found guilty of killing seven people; later summaries of the case count six convictions, and the difference has never been settled in the published accounts. Either way, his age fixed the outcome. He received eight years, the maximum available for a minor. His father's seven years for the Pavlov killing came within a year of his own.
Where he went after his release is not established. It has been said that he returned to Ukraine; other reports have placed him back in Estonia under a changed name.