On October 24, 1996, a crew of plumbers making the rounds of an apartment building on Pionersky Prospekt in Novokuznetsk, checking the pipes before the Siberian heating season, knocked at a three-room apartment and was refused. The man inside told them through the door that he was locked in because of a mental disorder. The plumbers called the district police officer, who broke the door down. In the bathtub officers found the torso of a girl with the arms and legs removed; a head and a rib cage were later taken from a tank. And there was a fifteen-year-old girl, Olga Galtseva, badly hurt but alive. The tenant, twenty-six-year-old Alexander Spesivtsev, got out onto the roof and away. Two days later, on October 27, he was arrested at the entrance to his own building.
Olga Galtseva gave the police a detailed statement against Spesivtsev and his mother. Three days after she was carried out of the apartment she died in the hospital of peritonitis and pulmonary edema. What she described became the core of the case. On September 24 Lyudmila Spesivtseva had brought her and two thirteen-year-old friends, Anastasia Burnaeva and Evgenia Barashkina, up to the apartment on the pretext of needing help opening the door. Spesivtsev killed Anastasia almost at once, after she tried to hit him and get away. He kept the other two chained for about a month, raped and tortured them, and forced them to cut up their friend's body and eat it; the family dog gnawed the bones in front of them. Then he killed Evgenia and made Olga dismember her. His mother and his older sister, Nadezhda, came and went from the apartment throughout and did nothing.
Spesivtsev was born in Novokuznetsk, an industrial city in the Kemerovo region, on March 1, 1970, underweight and often ill, and grew up in that same apartment with his mother, his father, Nikolai, and Nadezhda. His father drank heavily and was openly unfaithful; Lyudmila stayed with him for fifteen years and separated in the mid-1970s without ever formally divorcing. The boy slept in his mother's bed until he was twelve. He was unruly, and she defended him against every complaint. After she was fired from her job as a school caretaker for stealing plumbing fixtures, she found work at the court as a lawyer's assistant, and she liked to bring home criminal case files with photographs of the dead and look through them with her son for hours. The files took the place of books for him. He later told interrogators that looking at the photographs gave him a strange feeling. Nadezhda worked as a secretary at the same court.
In 1988 he was sent for compulsory treatment to Novokuznetsk's Psychiatric Hospital No. 12 after a theft. In 1991 he met a seventeen-year-old named Evgenia Guselnikova. They went walking together and he read her poems; then he beat her, and when she tried to end it he locked her in the apartment and tortured her for a month. She died in June 1991. The official cause was sepsis, and the abscesses that covered her body kept doctors from establishing what had really killed her. In 1992 a Novokuznetsk people's court sent him with a diagnosis of schizophrenia to the specialized psychiatric hospital in Oryol. He was discharged in 1995, judged to be in remission, and no record of the discharge was made. For the next year and a half, as far as the police files showed, he was still a patient in Oryol.
He killed again within months. Elena Trunova, twenty-one, was a woman he had met at a neighbor's table the evening before; the next morning, when the neighbor left for work, Spesivtsev took her back to his apartment. By his own account a failed attempt at sex turned into an argument and he stabbed her in the chest and abdomen with a kitchen knife. He said he asked his mother that evening to get rid of the body and went to sleep, and that when he woke both she and the body were gone. Investigators concluded that one or both of them dismembered Trunova, and that Lyudmila carried the remains out in pieces and buried them on waste ground nearby. That was in February 1996.
Between then and October he killed at least eighteen more people in the apartment. The dead included Elena Kotkina, twenty-two, in April; in May, the siblings Alexander and Olga Nosovets, ten and eleven, the siblings Dmitry and Irina Vorobyov, twelve and fourteen, Nikolai Kroven, eleven, and Konstantin Chernykh and Pavel Ivolgin, both thirteen; in June, Elena Sachkova, thirteen, Olga Nikolaeva, fifteen, and two adults known only by their first names, Nadezhda, forty, and Valentin, thirty-five; Natalya Voynova, nineteen, in July; and in August two twelve-year-olds, Galina Shatalina and Olga Tsvetaeva. Many of the children were homeless or runaways. A neighbor, a retired woman named Lidia Vedenina, called the police in early summer to complain of the smell of decay and of music played at deafening volume behind the Spesivtsevs' door, and asked them to check the apartment. Nobody came.
The police already had some of the dead. In June 1996 officers found a burial site on waste ground between the teachers' college and a dance pavilion, with about seventy fragments of children's bodies that experts attributed to fifteen children aged three to fourteen. Detectives went through the records of every psychiatric clinic in the region, but Spesivtsev never came into view: on paper he was in Oryol. Identifying the remains required expensive genetic testing, and although a forensic laboratory was brought to Novokuznetsk in a passenger railroad car, there was not enough money to test everything. In the apartment investigators found about forty pieces of jewelry, eighty-two sets of bloodstained clothing, and torn photographs of unidentified naked children. Relatives were able to identify only some of the belongings.
Spesivtsev was charged with nineteen murders, confessed to them, and then withdrew the confession. Investigators could prove four. The law took his case in stages. In 1997 he was convicted of killing Evgenia Guselnikova in 1991, found to have been responsible for his actions at the time, and sentenced to ten years. In 1998 the case of four of the 1996 murders came to court, and a new examination at the Serbsky Center in Moscow found him legally insane. In 1999 he was committed for compulsory treatment to the special-type psychiatric hospital with intensive supervision in the village of Dvoryanskoye, in the Kamyshin district of the Volgograd region. Alexander Kolomiets, first deputy head of the Novokuznetsk police, said that if Spesivtsev ever recovered he would face a long prison term for the crimes committed while he was sane. Anatoly Derkach, an Interior Ministry officer on the case, read the killings as a hunger for domination: Spesivtsev held a knife on the girls, forced them to have sex and made them beg for mercy, and it was the begging that made him feel powerful.
Lyudmila Spesivtseva, sixty at the time of her trial, admitted that she had brought victims to her son and buried their remains. She did not accept that she was guilty, and her lawyer asked for an acquittal; the prosecution asked for fifteen years. In 1999 the court convicted her as an accomplice in three murders and sentenced her to thirteen years in a general-regime penal colony. She was released in 2008, according to most accounts, though some give 2009, and went to live with Nadezhda in a village outside Osinniki, in the same region. No court ever found Nadezhda guilty of complicity or concealment, and she was never punished. The regional governor, Aman Tuleyev, sent official inquiries about Spesivtsev's condition to the hospital twice a year to reassure the public.
The case was reopened decades later. In 2022 officers of the prison service in Buryatia found and questioned a man who, as a boy of twelve, had been held captive in the apartment in 1996 and had escaped. Spesivtsev had seen him on the stairwell, lured him inside, beat him and kept him without food or water. His account, passed to investigators in Kemerovo, prompted a new review of the material, and forensic work finally identified the dead from 1996. In May 2024 the Kemerovo regional court found Spesivtsev responsible for fifteen further murders, the ones he had originally been charged with, committed with particular cruelty, and for one attempted murder, and ordered his compulsory treatment continued. The surviving boy's name has not been released.
On January 16, 2025, the Zavodskoy district court in Novokuznetsk awarded the daughter of Natalya Voynova one million rubles in compensation for moral harm; she had asked for ten million. As of 2024 the apartment on Pionersky Prospekt was still registered to Spesivtsev, with court bailiffs pursuing about a hundred thousand rubles in unpaid utility bills, and people still come to look at the building, to the annoyance of those who live there. The officially established total is twenty murders. The figure of eighty-two victims that runs through the Russian press comes from the eighty-two sets of clothing found in the apartment, and it has never been tested in court. In 2024 Spesivtsev was still under compulsory treatment in the Volgograd region.