In July 1996 a man ran into a settlement outside Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, a small industrial town in the Rostov region, and asked the first woman he met to lend him a shovel. He did not bring it back. She remembered him, and when the body of a twelve-year-old girl named Natasha was found soon afterward, the woman whose shovel had been taken helped the criminal investigators find the man who had borrowed it. He was Roman Burtsev, twenty-five, a welder at a local plant. He was arrested on July 17, 1996, and for three years before that the town had been losing children without a single witness, suspect or usable trace.
The first were a brother and sister. On September 15, 1993, Zhenya, twelve, and Olesya, seven, went to play at a garbage dump; their parents both worked long hours and the children were often left to themselves. According to the prosecutor's account of his later statements, Burtsev struck the boy several times on the head with a metal rod because he was in the way, then raped and strangled the girl, threw both bodies into a pit and covered them with refuse. In 1994 he met Marina, twelve, who was looking for her kitten, offered to help her find it, drove her out of town and killed her the same way. On May 23, 1995, Anya, nine, refused to go for a walk with him, and he took her by force; she was killed on the bank of the Seversky Donets. On July 1, 1996, he killed Ira, nine, who was simply walking along on her own errands, and left behind her medallion bearing an image of the Mother of God, which became one of the threads that led to him. Fifteen days later he killed Natasha.
Each time he hid the body with great care and then, until the last year, waited about a year before killing again. V.I. Maslakov, in a history of the Rostov regional prosecutor's office, called the case unusual for exactly that reason: offenders like Chikatilo seldom tried to disguise what they had done, while this one did, and it was only when the last victim's body was found that the killer was found as well. His foreman told investigators he was a dark horse, withdrawn, without friends in the workshop.
Burtsev was born in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky on April 13, 1971, to a family of drinkers, and grew up quiet and shut in. At thirteen he dragged a girl into a basement and made her undress; a woman working as a janitor heard the child's screams and pulled her away from him, and he was registered with the juvenile police. After that there was nothing on the record. He finished school, served in the army, went through a vocational school and went to work as an electric welder. Russian accounts say he was fixated on marrying a virgin, and that he later explained his attacks as a desire to know virginity.
Even after the arrest investigators had no direct evidence, and he did not confess. The psychiatrist Alexander Bukhanovsky, who had worked on the Chikatilo case, got him talking, and over time Burtsev admitted each killing and showed investigators where he had committed them. At trial he tried at different moments to pass as insane and as mentally deficient. The examination led by Bukhanovsky found no mental illness and no pathology at the time of the crimes. Bukhanovsky later described him as one of the most striking offenders of the kind he had studied, a man who imagined himself as a movie villain while he killed and who, unlike most serial murderers, was terrified that anyone would learn what he had done. In a later interview with Kamensk television Burtsev said, "If I had let the girls go, they would have come for me the next day."
On February 19, 1997, the Rostov regional court sentenced him to death by shooting. Most accounts say he was convicted of six murders; one gives the number as five. Russia had stopped carrying out executions, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, by most accounts in 1999. He served it at the special-regime colony known as the White Swan in Solikamsk, in the Perm region, and was reported to complain regularly about the conditions and his health. He died in prison in December 2023, at fifty-two, of cancer.