On the night of May 18, 1923, Moscow police came to a house on Shabolovka Street saying they were looking for an illegal still. The owner, a cab driver and horse dealer named Vasili Komaroff, kept perfectly calm until the officers moved toward his storeroom. Then he jumped out of a window and ran. In the storeroom they found a man's body, still warm, tied up and bagged in the hay. It was the thirty-third.
For two years the city had been finding men in sacks. The bodies turned up in vacant lots in the poorer districts around Shabolovka, trussed and doubled over, and they turned up on a schedule: the day after the horse market, which met on Wednesdays and Fridays. That pattern was the whole of the investigation. Detectives worked the market and the taverns around it, asking about traders, and the name that kept coming back was an odd one. Komaroff drove a cab but never chased fares; he stood about as if waiting for someone, and he always had money.
He was born Vasili Terentyevich Petrov on January 1, 1871, in Vitebsk Governorate, into a large, poor family in which heavy drinking was ordinary, and he was drinking himself by fifteen. He served four years as a conscript, married at twenty-eight, went to the Far East during the Russo-Japanese War, made a small fortune there and lost it. After the revolution he fought with the Red Army. By the early 1920s he had settled in Moscow under the name Komaroff, with his wife, Sofia, and their children, in a yard with a stable beside the house. Neighbors saw a settled family man. People closer to him described a violent one who had once tried to kill his own eight-year-old son.
The method was simple. He advertised horses below the market price in the hungry years after the civil war, and the men who answered were mostly countrymen who had come into the city to buy livestock cheaply. He brought them to the stable, poured vodka while the price was discussed, and killed them with a hammer blow to the head or by strangling. He tied the bodies, put them in sacks, and got rid of them in vacant lots, in the Moskva River, or under the hay in his own stable. All the victims were adult men. The money was almost nothing: in court he said the proceeds had gone on food and drink.
Sofia found out, by one account in the second year of the killings, and did not go to anyone. She took part instead, helping to dispose of the bodies and sharing what little the killings brought in.
Accounts of his escape differ. One has him caught the same night in a village outside Moscow; others say he was free for several days. Once in custody he did not resist at all. He confessed to thirty-three killings, eleven of which the police had not connected to the case, and took investigators to five bodies still in their sacks. Six men he had put in the river were never recovered. He tried three times to kill himself before trial and asked the court for a quick hearing and a quick execution. "I am fifty-two," he told reporters. "I have had a good time and don't want to live any longer." He called the killing an awfully easy job and said only one man, one who had tried to beat him in a horse trade, had ever fought back.
The trial opened on June 7, 1923, and was moved to the Polytechnic Museum so that the crowds could get in, with armed guards outside. Sofia was tried beside him, the prosecution arguing that nobody could have lived in that house and not known. In the early hours of June 8 the court sentenced both of them to be shot, and the courtroom applauded; there were shouts that it should be done at once rather than within the seventy-two hours allowed. They were shot by firing squad on June 18, 1923. He was convicted of thirty-three murders, the same number he confessed to, and twenty-seven of the bodies had been found.