THE SILENCE: SERIAL KILLINGS KEPT OUT OF THE PRESS

Most serial cases reach the public through the press first. The names, the descriptions, the warnings to the neighbors come from newspapers and broadcasts, and the arguments about whether the police moved fast enough come later, from the same pages. These cases turn that order around. In the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s, in Romania under its Communist state press in 1971, and in China in 2001, the papers printed little or nothing, and the cities waited without being told what they were waiting for. A ninth case, from Pakistan, shows a different kind of silence: a film about a convicted man that was held up by regulators for more than a year.

The record is uneven, and it should be read that way. The Soviet cases are known mostly from Russian news accounts written decades afterward, from retired investigators who have been interviewing since the 1990s, and from a long-running television series. Those sources agree on outlines and disagree on details, and in several places they disagree about the central question of whether the public was warned.

Moscow and Chekhov, 1977 In the autumn of 1977 five infants were taken from prams, or from the arms of the adults minding them, in Moscow and in the town of Chekhov in the Moscow Region. Lenta.ru reported three in Moscow, two girls of three months and a boy of six months, and two girls under a year old in Chekhov. None of the children is named in the published accounts. The man arrested in October of that year was Anatoly Biryukov, born in Chekhov in 1939, a fitter at a Moscow construction enterprise and the son of Nikolai Biryukov, a lieutenant general and Hero of the Soviet Union. Forensic psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute judged him sane, Lenta.ru wrote. He confessed to the five killings, was sentenced to death, and was executed on February 24, 1979, after clemency petitions to every authority up to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were rejected.

Nothing appeared in the Soviet press. News.ru reported that the case was classified and held under the personal control of the interior minister, Nikolai Shchelokov; Life.ru added that the minister reported on it to Leonid Brezhnev. What the public knows now comes from investigators who spoke years later, from an episode of the documentary series Sledstvie veli presented by Leonid Kanevsky, and from news articles published in 2019, 2021 and 2025.

Those articles disagree about what Muscovites were told. Lenta.ru argued in 2019 that the secrecy had a price: because the press said nothing, parents went on leaving prams with sleeping babies outside shops and clinics, which was exactly what the man the police wanted was relying on. This is an argument, drawn by the writer from the pattern of the cases. News.ru, writing in 2025, described the opposite: rumors of a child-killer spread across the city, and the police went around warning residents not to leave prams and small children alone. Both accounts are retrospective, and neither cites a document from 1977.

The number is disputed too. Every account gives five children, and five is what Biryukov confessed to. Boris Shekhtman, who took part in the search, said in later years that no one can say how many children he killed, according to News.ru. No other killing has been attributed to him.

His father refused at first to believe it. Lenta.ru wrote that the general hired one of the best defense lawyers available, and that after several court sessions at which the prosecution laid out its evidence, he publicly disowned his son. He died two years later.

Irkutsk, 1984 to 1986 Irkutsk lived with rumor for the better part of two years. NEWS.ru describes talk of kidnapping gangs, of sects, and of a patient who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. The police, in the manner of the time, looked first at men with records for offenses against children and at people with mental illness; more than ten such men were detained, NEWS.ru says. A composite sketch drawn with the help of a child and of surviving children showed a thin man of about 30 in glasses and a hat, carrying a briefcase. It did not lead to the man eventually arrested; IrCity wrote that it did not look like him, though some later accounts say it did.

Vasiliy Kulik, a physician who had trained at the Irkutsk Medical Institute and worked as a district therapist and then on the city’s emergency ambulance service, was arrested in Irkutsk on January 17, 1986, his 30th birthday. Staff of a nearby canteen who had heard the rumors circulating in the city helped hold him until the militia, the Soviet police, arrived. He confessed the next day. Investigators tied him to the deaths of seven elderly women and six young children in 1984 and 1985, one of the children in Kirovograd in Ukraine. The Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him in 1988 of a series of murders, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. He was executed in Irkutsk in June 1989.

Few of the incidents ever reached the police. Families kept silent, NEWS.ru wrote, because such crimes were rarely spoken about in the Soviet Union in those years, and in the cases where children did tell their parents, IrCity reported, no complaint was filed. Life.ru reported that the first children he approached were often let go with a warning not to tell anyone. Silence in this case was not only official. It was also the silence of ordinary families, and of an investigative system that had no ready category for what had happened.

IrCity noted that Kulik was arrested before the names of Anatoly Slivko, Gennady Mikhasevich and Andrei Chikatilo were known to the Soviet public, and that serial offenders were barely recognized as a type in the country. Life.ru wrote that the discovery that a respected, ordinary professional was responsible shook people far beyond Irkutsk. In 1987 a new team took over under Nikolai Kitaev, an investigator of the Irkutsk regional prosecutor’s office, and Issa Kostoev, who would later work on the Chikatilo case, joined it. A 2025 tribute to Kitaev in the journal of Baikal State University says that he led the investigative group and used unconventional tactics and ways of proving the case, which helped establish Kulik’s guilt in 13 intentional murders of children and elderly women. The case later appeared in many criminalistics textbooks, and a 2008 episode of Sledstvie veli retold it.

Nevinnomyssk, 1964 to 1985 For about twenty years Anatoly Slivko was one of the most admired men in Nevinnomyssk, an industrial town in Stavropol Krai. He worked at the town’s chemical plant and led a children’s tourist club. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that in 1977, despite having no teaching qualifications, he was named an Honored Teacher of the RSFSR for his work with children outside school, that he was elected a deputy of the city council, and that the children’s newspaper Pionerskaya Pravda and national radio covered his work. NEWS.ru says the Soviet press treated his clubs as model institutions. Lenta.ru reports that he received the title with the support of the town’s party secretary.

During those years boys from the club died. In 1986 a Soviet court convicted him of the murder of seven of them between 1964 and 1985 and sentenced him to death. The trial was closed to the public, Novaya Gazeta Europe reports, and he was executed in September 1989. The case came to light because an assistant city prosecutor, Tamara Langueva, took over a file in the summer of 1985 and noticed what earlier investigators had not: that nearly all the boys who had disappeared in Nevinnomyssk over the years had belonged to the same club. He was arrested on December 28, 1985. Langueva did not speak publicly about the case for nearly thirty years; in October 2013 she appeared on the Channel One program Naedine so vsemi in what the broadcaster described as her first interview in three decades.

Novaya Gazeta Europe also makes the strongest claim about official silence, and it is a claim, not a documented rule. It reports that the police in those years avoided alarming the public and that most disappearances of children were kept quiet, and that the boys Slivko chose were usually from troubled or poor homes, boys no one would miss quickly. The paper relies on the view of Afanasyev, a former military prosecutor who wrote a dissertation built largely on the case. He had access to classified material, and the dissertation was defended behind closed doors and stamped for official use only. He argues that the Soviet authorities concealed crimes of this kind and lacked the theory and methods to investigate them, and that this may have contributed to wrongful convictions. He also holds that Slivko admitted only the killings of boys who could be identified from his films, so the full number may never be known, and that investigators did not press further because their superiors wanted quick results.

The town filled the gap with talk. Rumors went through Nevinnomyssk that he had been killing for about 21 years, Novaya Gazeta Europe reports. Lenta.ru describes survivors of his sessions who were afraid to tell adults, and one boy whose family was told that an insect bite explained a mark. Afterward the town’s party secretary, who had backed his Honored Teacher title, took her own life, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe and Lenta.ru, and the paper says the police chief was dismissed for failing to act on the disappearances.

Rostov, 1978 to 1990 No Soviet case better shows what a closed press cost than the hunt for Andrei Chikatilo. A teacher of Russian literature turned factory supply agent, married with two children and a member of the Communist Party, he lived in Shakhty and traveled on business across the Rostov region and well beyond it. He was charged with 53 murders of children, teenagers and young women between 1978 and 1990. The Rostov Regional Court convicted him of 52 on October 15, 1992 and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine murder episodes for lack of proof and upheld the sentence on the rest, leaving 43 murders legally proven. He was executed on February 14, 1994.

The Moscow Times wrote in October 1992 that because serial killing was officially treated as a problem of capitalist countries, the search had long been kept secret and that Rostov residents did not learn for years that such a man was at large. The investigator Amurkhan Yandiev, who later worked on the case, put a figure on the cost in a September 2026 interview with TASS, reported by Rossiyskaya Gazeta under a headline saying that 50 victims could have been saved. That is the opinion of a participant, offered thirty-odd years afterward.

Secrecy was not the only failure, and the Chikatilo file is where the other failures are best documented. The first killing he confessed to, of a nine-year-old girl in Shakhty in December 1978, produced a wrongful conviction. Aleksandr Kravchenko, 25, who had a previous conviction, was arrested on a theft charge in January 1979, after his wife was pressured to withdraw his alibi. Media accounts later reported that he was put in a cell with a violent inmate who beat him, and Yandiev told TASS in 2026 that this was why Kravchenko took the blame. He was sentenced to death at a retrial and executed on July 5, 1983. His conviction was overturned in 1990, after Chikatilo’s arrest.

Meanwhile investigators who assumed the killer was mentally ill searched psychiatric registers. Issa Kostoev told Lenta.ru that on September 8, 1983, police detained a 19-year-old on a psychiatric register, along with a resident of a boarding home for people with intellectual disabilities. They confessed under pressure, their acquaintances began confessing too, and their accounts contradicted one another. Yandiev told RIA Novosti in 2020 that three or four people with mental illness were held as suspects for three to four months each, and the file became known as the delo durakov, "the case of the fools." Aleksandr Kuyumdzhi, a former prosecutor in the case, told Novaya Gazeta in 2005 that twelve people were held in pretrial detention on false charges during the hunt.

In 1984 police held Chikatilo himself as a murder suspect and released him because a blood test seemed to clear him. For years the discrepancy was explained as a medical curiosity. Kostoev told Lenta.ru that the first expert recorded his blood group as II and that later testing confirmed group IV; Kommersant reported in 2026 that the likelier causes were contaminated material and an expert conclusion stated too categorically. He was arrested on November 20, 1990, in Novocherkassk. Reporters had begun covering the case by then, but the Soviet public had learned of it very late.

Moscow Oblast, 1986 to 1992 Sergei Golovkin killed 11 boys, aged 10 to 16, in the countryside west and north of Moscow between April 1986 and September 1992. He was a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy and a livestock specialist at Moscow Horse Plant No. 1 in the Odintsovo district, where colleagues knew him as withdrawn and awkward and where he had received a silver medal from the national exhibition of economic achievements. The police spent six years hunting a man called "Fisher," a tattooed figure described by a teenager after one of the deaths. The 360 channel reported that the boy had invented him. Moskvich Mag traced the name to the 1972 world chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, and wrote that rumor, a witness description and a parody song spread it among local children. Golovkin later used the name himself.

The investigation was slowed for years by that false lead, and by a failure to see a series. Moskvich Mag’s 2026 account says the crimes were alike but were not linked for a long time, and that officials were reluctant to accept that a serial killer was at work near the government dachas around Nikolina Gora. Investigators also wondered whether Chikatilo, still at large in the Rostov region, could be responsible; Pravo.ru wrote that the two series were at one point thought to be the work of one man. Chikatilo was sentenced to death by the Rostov Regional Court four days before Golovkin was arrested on October 19, 1992.

The trial began on August 22, 1994 and lasted until October 19, 1994. The case file ran to 95 volumes, 360 reported. The first hearings were public; the court then closed them after relatives of the boys tried to reach the defendant in the courtroom, Moskvich Mag reported, while Pravo.ru describes the hearing as closed. Golovkin was sentenced to death. He was executed at Butyrka prison in Moscow in 1996, most reports say on August 2.

Even the end is argued over. Pravo.ru wrote that he was the last man executed at Butyrka but that the last execution in Russia took place on September 2, 1996, and that the name of the man killed that day was never made public. Moskvich Mag’s Alexei Baykov called the claim that Golovkin was the very last probably a legend, without ruling it out. Where the state controlled the record, legends grew around it.

Bucharest, 1970 to 1971 In the spring of 1971 the Romanian Militia mobilized thousands of officers, cadets, patriotic guards and reservists to catch one man. For more than a year women walking home alone at night in Bucharest had been targeted, and four had died. Later Romanian press accounts describe a city that organized itself around rumor: women were warned not to go out alone after dark, and Adevarul reported in 2025 that in 1971 women went out at night only in groups or with men. Evenimentul Zilei wrote in 2016 that many women stopped leaving their houses after 9 p.m. According to later press accounts, some blonde women dyed their hair because word had spread that the killer chose blondes. Adevarul (2025) says the women who died were blonde and those who survived were dark-haired, and the legal scholar Hunor Kadar points out that the pattern did not hold exactly.

The four women named in the verdict were Elena Oprea (1970), Fanica Ilie, 31 (March 1971), Gheorghita Popa, 35 (April 1971) and Mihaela Ursu, 39 (May 1971). Kadar writes that after Ursu’s death the Militia widened the search to a scale it had not attempted before: about 6,000 people took part, more than 100 cars patrolled at night, hundreds of people were followed or questioned, and more than 2,500 people were arrested. Adevarul’s 2025 account gives the arrests as more than 2,500 in its introduction and more than 2,000 in its main text.

The man arrested on May 27, 1971 was Ion Rimaru, a student at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Bucharest, who lived in a student dormitory. A medical certificate linked to the last killing had led investigators to him. The public learned of the arrest only later. A Militia communiqué dated June 4, 1971 announced that the authorities had identified and arrested the criminal, Evenimentul Zilei reported in 2026, quoting the text. The newspaper counted nine days between arrest and announcement and criticized the delay, given how frightened the city had been. The communiqué said he had admitted four murders, six attempted murders and a robbery, all against women.

The trial was public. It took place before the Bucharest Municipal Tribunal on September 1 to 3, 1971, and he admitted all the charges in court, according to the Agerpres report of the verdict that Evenimentul Zilei quotes. Adevarul (2025) says he argued that he had not understood what he was doing and that the judges rejected the argument. The sentence was given on September 3. The charges are listed slightly differently in different reports: the Agerpres wording quoted by Evenimentul Zilei has three especially serious murders, one qualified murder, six attempted especially serious murders and five rapes, together with attempted rape, robbery and theft, while Adevarul’s 2019 account gives four rapes, one attempted rape, three robberies and five qualified thefts. The sentence was upheld on appeal and he was executed at Jilava Penitentiary near Bucharest on October 23, 1971. The newspapers carried only a short notice the next day stating that the sentence had been carried out, Evenimentul Zilei reports. Romanian reports say he was 25.

One strand of the story shows how long an unreported case can outlive its press coverage. A year after the execution, Kadar writes, his father, Florea Rimaru, died after a fall from a train, and a forensic specialist examining the body said his fingerprints matched prints on file from a killing in Bucharest in 1944, one of a series of five unsolved killings of women that year. The father was never charged with anything. How he died is not settled: Kadar writes that he fell or was thrown, and that some believe the Securitate threw him off to punish him; Evenimentul Zilei stated that as fact in 2016 and called it public rumor in 2024. No official finding was reported.

Wuhan, 2001 In the spring and early summer of 2001, a run of night-time assaults and killings of women in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China, set off a rumor that crossed the city. People said a killer was looking for women dressed in red. TIME reported in January 2003 that the Wuhan papers carried little or nothing about the cases, that local reporters' stories were spiked, and that information reached only city officials, in internal reports. Into that silence came the rumor that gave the case its name. Word spread that the man was choosing women in red, residents began calling him the Red Dress Killer, and a tomato seller in a victim’s neighborhood told TIME that everyone was badly frightened and that people "started wearing a lot of blue." In 2016 the People’s Daily overseas site Haiwainet recalled the same rumor in a roundup of serial cases: a killer in Wuchang who slept by day and came out at night, looking for women in red with long hair.

The nickname came from rumor, not from the police. TIME reported the rumor and quoted Yueyang police as telling the family of the accused that most of the victims in Hunan province were wearing red; the 2001 reports from Beijing say nothing about clothing.

In August 2001 Wuhan police arrested Duan Guocheng, a security guard from Yueyang in Hunan, aged 28 according to the Beijing reports and 29 according to TIME. Chinese newspapers reported, relaying the Beijing Youth Daily, that police said he had confessed to killing 13 young women, most of them in his home province, and that he was suspected of dozens of armed robberies. People’s Daily Online put the Wuhan killings at four in May and June 2001, with three more women wounded. The day after the arrest, TIME reported, Wuhan’s main newspaper ran the story on its front page, hailing the capture of the "Psycho Killer" accused of murdering 13 women. Police lifted the news blackout. At a ceremony after the arrest, Chen Xunqiu, Hubei’s top police official, handed reward money to the team and called the case "a typical example" of breaking a case "using high-tech methods and strategies." TIME called that an exercise in public relations, given how the case had actually been solved. That is the magazine’s judgment.

Duan was charged with what TIME called the "Red Dress Murders." His trial began on December 16, 2002, at Wuhan, and was expected to end in February. TIME said it expected a conviction and a quick execution, but no verdict had been reported when the magazine went to press. His family had almost no contact with him: on Christmas Eve his mother brought clothes to the detention center and received only a receipt signed by her son, and the family did not know whether he had a lawyer. The killings linked to him are accusations, backed by what police said was a confession. No court finding had been reported by early 2003.

Beijing, 1998 to 2001 Hua Ruizhuo drove a cement-mixer truck for a Beijing construction company. He told prosecutors that between July 1998 and June 2001 he had killed 14 women he picked up in Chaoyang district, on the east side of the city. Detectives of the Chaoyang branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau arrested him on July 16, 2001. The Second Branch of the Beijing People’s Procuratorate brought the case before the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, where the trial began on the morning of November 20, 2001. TIME reported in January 2003 that he had been executed the year before.

The fullest account appeared in the newspaper Life Times as the trial began, and was reprinted by China News Service on November 22, 2001. Except for Hua and the officials who handled the case, that report gave every person a pseudonym to protect their privacy. The silence around the case shows in the numbers: most of the women had come from other provinces, their families were never located, and twelve of the 14 were still unidentified when he went on trial. The report said that Hua would now face the full force of the law; it did not give the verdict, which came later. The date of the judgment, and what Hua or his defense said in court, have not been reported.

TIME’s reporter Matthew Forney placed the case in a wider picture. Chinese police, who solved most ordinary murders, were less prepared for serial cases. Local forces did not always share information, and news of killings was often kept out of the press, so the public was not warned. In Hua’s case the deaths in Chaoyang district stretched over three years. TIME quoted Wang Dazhong, a criminal investigator who trained police at the Chinese People’s Public Security University in Beijing: "We’ve reached the age of serial killing in China."

Lahore, 1999 to 2023 The last case reverses the pattern. In Pakistan the press did not stay silent; the letter that began the case went to an Urdu daily. Javed Iqbal wrote to the Lahore police and to the newspaper Jang in the last days of November 1999 saying that he had killed 100 boys. Jang published the story on December 3, 1999, with photographs of 57 boys, TRT World reported, and the families of most of the boys he named identified their sons' belongings at the Ravi Road police station in Lahore. Time put the number identified by late December at 72, and noted that the parents of only 25 had ever gone to the police. He gave himself up at the newspaper’s office on December 30, 1999. A Lahore judge convicted him on 100 counts of murder on March 16, 2000. He died in jail on October 9, 2001 with his appeal pending, so the conviction was never final; officials called his death a suicide, and Dawn reported that its circumstances were questioned.

What came under restriction, two decades later, was a feature film. In 2022 the director and writer Abu Aleeha completed a film about the investigation, starring Yasir Hussain as Iqbal and Ayesha Omar as a police officer who questions him. Titled Javed Iqbal: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer, it premiered in Karachi on January 25, 2022 and was due to open across the country on January 28. Dawn Images reported that the Punjab government stopped its release in that province despite censor approval, and that the producers said they would go to the Lahore High Court and would not release the film anywhere until the case was settled. Arab News reported that the Central Board of Film Censors also refused it. The film won best actor and best director awards at the UK Asian Film Festival in May 2022 and was selected for the DC South Asian Film Festival in Washington in November, while it remained, in Arab News’s phrase, unlikely to release at home.

In March 2023, Arab News reported, the film was renamed Kukri after the censors said the original title could seem to glorify its subject, and a closing message explaining the film’s purpose was added. After censor clearance in April 2023, the film reached Pakistani cinemas in June 2023, Daily Pakistan reported. What the Punjab government objected to, beyond the release itself, has not been reported.

What the cases show The silences in these cases are of different kinds and should not be run together. In the Soviet files the state classified cases and kept the press out, and the retired investigators who later described it disagree with one another about whether residents were told anything. In Romania the press was thin, and the delay between an arrest and its announcement was nine days. In Wuhan and Beijing the evidence is a magazine’s report that stories were spiked and police forces did not share information. In Lahore the press published and the state tried to restrict an artwork. In each case the reporting is mostly retrospective, and most of the claims about cost, such as prams left outside shops or women who dyed their hair, are attributed to later writers rather than to records of the time.

What survives from the periods of silence is what filled it: the sketch of a man in a hat, a dagger tattoo that a teenager invented, a story about a killer who hunted women in red. They were not harmless. In Rostov the closed press ran beside a hunt that produced confessions from people with intellectual disabilities and an executed man whose conviction was later overturned. Whether a warning would have saved lives in any one of these cities cannot be established from the record that exists. What the record does show is that in each of them the people most at risk were the last to be told.

Timeline

• 1939: Anatoly Biryukov born in Chekhov, Moscow Region.

• 1964 to 1985: Killings of boys in Nevinnomyssk for which Anatoly Slivko was later convicted.

• 1970 to 1971: Four women killed in Bucharest.

• May 27, 1971: Ion Rimaru arrested in Bucharest.

• June 4, 1971: Militia communiqué announces the arrest.

• September 1 to 3, 1971: Rimaru tried and sentenced to death.

• October 23, 1971: Rimaru executed at Jilava.

• September to October 1977: Five infants killed in Moscow and Chekhov; Biryukov arrested in October 1977.

• December 1978: Killing in Shakhty that Chikatilo later confessed to; Aleksandr Kravchenko arrested in January 1979.

• February 24, 1979: Biryukov executed.

• July 5, 1983: Kravchenko executed.

• 1984 to 1985: Killings in Irkutsk attributed in court to Vasiliy Kulik.

• December 28, 1985: Slivko arrested in Nevinnomyssk.

• January 17, 1986: Kulik arrested in Irkutsk.

• 1986: Slivko convicted of seven murders at a closed trial and sentenced to death.

• April 1986 to September 1992: Eleven boys killed in the Odintsovo district, Moscow Oblast.

• 1988: Kulik convicted by the Irkutsk Regional Court.

• June 1989: Kulik executed.

• September 1989: Slivko executed.

• November 20, 1990: Chikatilo arrested in Novocherkassk.

• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo convicted of 52 murders by the Rostov Regional Court.

• October 19, 1992: Sergei Golovkin arrested in the Odintsovo district.

• 1993: Supreme Court of Russia upholds the sentence on 43 murders.

• February 14, 1994: Chikatilo executed.

• August 22 to October 19, 1994: Golovkin tried and sentenced to death.

• 1996: Golovkin executed at Butyrka (most reports: August 2).

• November 1999: Javed Iqbal’s letter reaches the Lahore police and the newspaper Jang.

• March 16, 2000: Iqbal convicted at trial on 100 counts of murder.

• May to August 2001: Night-time assaults and killings in Wuhan; Duan Guocheng arrested in August 2001.

• July 16, 2001: Hua Ruizhuo arrested in Beijing.

• October 9, 2001: Iqbal dies in custody.

• November 20, 2001: Hua’s trial begins.

• 2002: Hua executed, as TIME reported in January 2003.

• December 16, 2002: Duan’s trial begins in Wuhan.

• January 25, 2022: Film about the Iqbal case premieres in Karachi; release in Punjab halted.

• June 2023: The film, renamed Kukri, reaches Pakistani cinemas.