Oleg Muraenko was sentenced to death in North Kazakhstan for killing six women, and the case against him turned on a partial fingerprint. The Kazakh news site Liter.kz, which interviewed regional police and a forensic psychiatrist in September 2020, reported that he was executed in 2002, shortly before Kazakhstan stopped carrying out death sentences. In English his name is usually spelled Murayenko.
Much of his case is thinly documented in public. The press accounts of 2020 do not name the women, give the dates of the killings, say how they died, or name the court that sentenced him. What they do describe in detail is how he was identified: by hand, with a magnifying glass, in a laboratory that had no computer database of fingerprints.
Petropavlovsk is the main city of the North Kazakhstan region, near the border with Russia. In September 2020, Liter.kz reported that people in the city were uneasy because men convicted of a run of attacks on women in the late 1990s were reaching the end of long prison terms. The article said that the series in the region, committed in Petropavlovsk around 1997 to 2000, had left more than 20 victims, and that police had caught all three of the men at the start of what it called their "careers".
Two of the three, Aleksandr Lyutov and Valery Krichinevsky, had been convicted of attacks on women in 1997 and 1998 and were serving prison terms that were coming to an end; Krichinevsky had been sentenced to 25 years. The third was Muraenko. He, the article said, would not be coming home, because he was no longer alive.
Liter.kz credited Muraenko with the deaths of six women. A Petropavlovsk news agency, pkzsk.info, writing two months later, described them as six young women. Neither report names any of them, gives their ages or occupations, or says when or where each of them died.
Investigators told Liter.kz that Muraenko had no single pattern in how he came into contact with the women, and that none of them survived to describe him. There were no living witnesses, the article said, and the case was solved by the homicide unit on the strength of forensic work that the paper described as grueling.
The decisive piece of evidence was a woman's handbag recovered by investigators in one of the cases. It was a small clutch-style bag closed by a clasp of the kind found on a suitcase. On the clasp, forensic examiners found a tiny trace of sweat and skin oil that held part of a fingerprint.
Igor Semenov, who by 2020 headed the operational and forensic department of the North Kazakhstan police and in the late 1990s was a senior forensic examiner, described the comparison to Liter.kz. Once a suspect had been identified, he said, the examiners had to go through all ten of the man's fingerprints on his fingerprint card, one finger at a time, using a magnifying glass, to find the small area of ridges that matched the fragment on the clasp. They studied the card for five or six days. By the end, Semenov said, his eye was swimming, and he believed the work had damaged the sight in his right eye, which he said still saw poorly.
Liter.kz did not say how Muraenko came to be a suspect in the first place, when he was detained, or what else was found against him. It reported only that the fingerprint identification was the work that closed the case.
Semenov's account gives a picture of the conditions in which the North Kazakhstan police worked at the time. In the 1990s, he said, the regional laboratory photographed crime scenes on a Soviet-made Zenit camera loaded with black-and-white film. Each image had to be developed, fixed, washed, dried and enlarged in a darkroom before it could be used. By 2020, he said, a computer could produce a set of scene photographs in about half an hour.
The laboratory had no comparison microscopes and no automated fingerprint system. Measurements were taken with calipers and a ruler. The regional police later acquired the Papillon fingerprint database, which by 2020 held about 350,000 prints for the North Kazakhstan police, according to the same article. In Muraenko's case none of that existed; Liter.kz said the shortage of equipment was made up for by experience and hard work.
Ekaterina Propashcheva, a Petropavlovsk psychiatrist of the highest qualification category, told Liter.kz that she had taken part in the forensic psychiatric examinations of the three men at the time. All three, including Muraenko, were found legally sane, she said. In her assessment they showed signs of psychopathy of an unstable type, which she described as a recognized disorder under the international classification of diseases, and she said people with such a disorder were dangerous.
Muraenko was sentenced to death. Liter.kz used the formal Kazakh and Russian legal term for the penalty, the "exceptional measure of punishment." The article did not give the date of the verdict, the name of the court, or the charges, and none of the 2020 reports cites a court record.
At the time, the death penalty in Kazakhstan was carried out by shooting, and the country did not publish full figures. Amnesty International reported in 2002 that no official comprehensive statistics on the use of the death penalty had been published since 1998. It cited a Kazakh television report from 2000 that estimated between 40 and 60 executions a year, and said that at least 30 people were reportedly executed in 2001. In a follow-up in November 2003, Amnesty wrote that prisoners under sentence of death in Kazakhstan did not know when they would be shot, and that executions of men on death row had been carried out in secret.
Kazakh law also set a waiting period. According to Zakon.kz, a death sentence could be carried out only once at least a year had passed after it came into force.
Liter.kz reported in 2020 that Muraenko was executed in 2002, shortly before the moratorium on the death penalty, and described him as perhaps the last person in the North Kazakhstan region, or even in the whole of Kazakhstan, to be sentenced to death and shot. The paper gave no source for the date. The Petropavlovsk news agency pkzsk.info, writing in November 2020, said that it was widely believed that the last person executed in Kazakhstan was Muraenko, and that the last death sentences in the country had been carried out in 2001.
Neither report cites an official record of the execution. Both treat his death as settled; the year is the point on which they differ.
In December 2003, President Nursultan Nazarbayev declared an indefinite moratorium on carrying out death sentences in Kazakhstan, Tengrinews reported. Life imprisonment replaced the death penalty in practice from January 1, 2004, according to Zakon.kz. Both outlets reported in 2016 that 536 death sentences had been carried out in Kazakhstan before the moratorium.
Courts could still pass death sentences after 2003, but they were not carried out. Radio Svoboda reported that the last such sentence was handed down in 2016. On December 23, 2021, the Senate passed a law removing the death penalty from the Criminal Code, with all remaining death sentences to be replaced by life imprisonment, Radio Svoboda reported.
The year of execution. Liter.kz gives 2002. The pkzsk.info agency says the last executions in Kazakhstan took place in 2001 and that Muraenko is believed to have been the last man shot. Tengrinews and Zakon.kz, writing in 2016 about the country as a whole, put the last executions in 2003, before the moratorium decree, and Zakon.kz said 12 people were executed that year. If those national figures are correct, Muraenko was not the last person executed in Kazakhstan, though he may still have been the last in North Kazakhstan, as Liter.kz suggested.
Personal details and dates. The 2020 reports give neither his patronymic nor his date or place of birth, and they do not date the six killings, his arrest or his trial.
1997 to 2000: Period in which, according to Liter.kz (2020), three series of attacks on women in Petropavlovsk took place, including the killings for which Muraenko was later sentenced.
Late 1990s to about 2000: Police identify Muraenko through a partial fingerprint on a handbag clasp, after five or six days of manual comparison.
Date not reported: Found legally sane after a forensic psychiatric examination; sentenced to death for killing six women.
2001: At least 30 people reportedly executed in Kazakhstan (Amnesty International).
2002: Muraenko reported executed (Liter.kz, 2020); pkzsk.info instead dates the last executions in Kazakhstan to 2001.
December 2003: President Nazarbayev declares an indefinite moratorium on executions.
January 1, 2004: Life imprisonment replaces the death penalty in practice.
2016: Last death sentence passed in Kazakhstan (Radio Svoboda).
September 10, 2020: Liter.kz publishes police and psychiatric accounts of the North Kazakhstan series, including the fingerprint work in Muraenko's case.
November 30, 2020: pkzsk.info describes Muraenko as widely believed to be the last man executed in Kazakhstan.
December 23, 2021: The Senate passes the law removing the death penalty from Kazakhstan's Criminal Code.