In the winter of 1963 and 1964 a young man went from apartment to apartment in Moscow and in the textile city of Ivanovo, knocking on doors and saying he had come from Mosgaz, the city gas service, to check the stove. In 20 days he killed five people, three of them schoolboys. Moscow police and the newspaper reports written since have known him by the name he used at the door. He was Vladimir Ionesyan, a 26-year-old singer from Tbilisi.
He was caught on January 12, 1964, on a station platform in Kazan, after a television set taken from his last victim led detectives to the room he shared with a young dancer. The Supreme Court of the RSFSR sentenced him to death on January 30, and he was shot at Butyrka prison in Moscow the next night. From arrest to execution took less than three weeks, which is one reason his motives were never fully worked out.
Ionesyan was born on August 27, 1937, in Tbilisi, according to Absatz, and was of Armenian origin, according to 360 and the news agency OSN. He sang well as a child. He finished a music school and was admitted to the Tbilisi State Conservatory without entrance examinations, then left in his second year to work in a theater, 360 and OSN reported. Absatz wrote that he found the work at the conservatory too hard, and that he toured Georgia with the theater's troupe.
His troubles began with the army. When he was called up, he presented a certificate from doctors saying he was unfit to serve because of a nervous illness, and he later told interrogators that someone at the military enlistment office had destroyed it, OSN and 360 reported. He was prosecuted for evading service. The accounts of what followed differ. 360 says he was sentenced to two and a half years in a light-regime labor camp in eastern Georgia and was released early after a year was taken off for good behavior. Absatz says he was 22 when he was sentenced to a year in a light-regime camp in Gori, where he served as the camp's cultural organizer and was sometimes allowed into town; on one of those trips he went home instead, and he was given an extra year of forced labor for it. Diletant, the history magazine, dates the call-up to 1959 and says he was given a year of labor in place of prison. When he was called up a second time, the enlistment office accepted a certificate from a neurological clinic, and his military card recorded him as unfit for service on health grounds, according to 360, Diletant and OSN.
He married a graduate of the Tbilisi Conservatory, and they had a son. Money was short. He took part in a group theft, was caught along with the others, and was given a five-year suspended sentence in view of his age and his family, 360 and OSN reported. Absatz wrote that his wife pleaded with the court not to take away the family's only earner. His wife blamed his friends and arranged work for both of them in Orenburg, where in 1963 he was taken on as a tenor soloist at the Musical Comedy Theater and she as an accompanist, according to 360 and Absatz. Their marriage then went badly, 360 said.
In early November 1963 the Orenburg theater hired Алевтина Дмитриева, a 21-year-old dancer from Kazan, for its chorus line, 360 reported; OSN and Absatz describe her as a ballerina who lived near the Ionesyans. She and Ionesyan began an affair. About a month later the theater let her go: her trial period had gone poorly, and she was told she needed more training.
Ionesyan offered to help. He told her he was a secret agent of the KGB, the state security service, and that he had connections who could get her leading roles, even at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. She believed him, 360 reported. The two left Orenburg without notice, first for Ivanovo, where he claimed to have contacts, and then for Moscow. When nothing came of Ivanovo, the Bolshoi or the Maly Theater, they rented a room from an elderly pensioner, who told her neighbors that a niece and her husband had moved in, Absatz wrote. Diletant reported that they had neither work nor money.
To explain his absences, Ionesyan told her he had been promoted and would often be away on secret assignments, and that undercover work required him to dress plainly, 360 reported. When he came back from his "assignments" he gave Dmitrieva small things he had taken, as souvenirs and rewards for her service, according to 360 and OSN.
Diletant set the case against the state of the Soviet police at the time. From the mid-1950s the internal affairs bodies were reorganized and about 25,000 staff were cut. In 1960 Nikita Khrushchev signed a government resolution abolishing the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR and handing its work to the ministries of the individual republics, which were later renamed ministries for the protection of public order. Coordination from the center broke down, and, by the magazine's account, about a third of the most dangerous crimes, including murders and robberies, went unsolved. Campaigns against drinking and religion took up police time, and apartment burglaries rose as families moved out of communal flats into apartments of their own.
On December 20, 1963, Ionesyan went from door to door in an apartment building in Moscow, saying he was from Mosgaz. He spoke quietly, according to Absatz, to hide his southern accent. That day he killed Костя Соболев, a 12-year-old schoolboy, in Moscow. He took a child's sweater, 60 rubles, which 360 says was then about an average month's wage, a bottle of cologne and a pair of sunglasses; Diletant's list adds a pair of satin trousers and a purse.
The investigation turned on a younger boy who lived in the same building. He was nine and was at home with his grandmother and a baby when the man from "Mosgaz" rang. Asked who else was in, he answered that everyone was. The visitor went into the kitchen, tried the knobs on the gas stove and left, Diletant and 360 reported. He came back once, saying he had forgotten his matches; the third time he knocked, the boy spoke to him only through the door chain. Surprised, the man had taken off his gloves, and he left clear fingerprints on the stove, 360 wrote.
Police canvassing the building found the boy, and the criminalist Софья Файнштейн, a veteran of the Moscow criminal investigation department (MUR), worked with him to build a portrait of the visitor. There were no computers. She and the boy went through photographs by hand, choosing a pair of eyes, a mouth and other features, with help from the poster artist Наум Карповский and the anthropologist and sculptor Михаил Герасимов, known for rebuilding faces from skulls, 360 reported. A detective who happened to resemble the man served as a model, according to 360 and Absatz.
The boy also remembered that the visitor wore a fur hat with its ear flaps tied at the back of his head, not on top as Muscovites tied them. To the investigators that marked him as someone from out of town, 360, Diletant and OSN reported. The resulting profile was of a man under 30, from elsewhere, with a slightly hooked nose and features that suggested the Caucasus. Copies of the portrait went to police officers and volunteer patrols across Moscow, Diletant and REN TV reported, and MUR detectives Владимир Арапов and Владимир Корнеев led the search.
Файнштейн had gone to the front as a volunteer in 1941 and served as a senior sergeant in a signals battalion on the Volkhov Front, taking part in the defense of Leningrad, the liberation of Warsaw and the capture of Berlin, according to 360. After the war she trained in criminalistics, taught it at a police school in the Khabarovsk region, and then worked for 20 years at MUR, retiring as a colonel of the militia. Diletant called her a legend of Petrovka, the Moscow police headquarters.
REN TV, in a 2023 history of the composite portrait, said the method used in the case had been adopted from one proposed in 1952 by a French police criminalist and refined in the Soviet Union, where it was built into a box-like device with a viewing window, spools of film carrying fragments of faces, and levers to move them. The channel said the technique helped catch the man the papers would call Mosgaz.
By then Ionesyan and Dmitrieva were in Ivanovo. On December 25, within about three hours, Diletant reported, he went into three apartments, again presenting himself as a gas worker. He killed Миша Кулешов, a 12-year-old boy, and took a jacket, a sweater, two pens and some bonds. In a building nearby he killed a woman of 74; her name was not reported. He took a pocket flashlight and found 70 kopecks. In a third apartment he attacked a teenager, who survived. He took clothing and 90 rubles from that apartment, 360 reported.
The survivor described the attacker to the police, and the description matched the portrait built from the nine-year-old's account in Moscow, which told investigators they were looking for one man, 360 reported. Absatz added that the survivor remembered his well-kept hands, the hands of someone who did no heavy work, and that a page torn from a notebook, listing the numbers of apartments he had visited, was found and studied by Файнштейн, who prepared a table analyzing the handwriting.
The case was classed as especially important, and senior officials of the police ministry and the Communist Party followed it personally. Khrushchev took an interest and ordered that the killer be caught within two weeks, 360 reported. OSN described the order as an unconfirmed version. Detectives began calling the man they were looking for "Mosgaz", "the killer from Mosgaz" or "the gas man", according to 360 and the legal news portal Zakonia.
That evening, Absatz wrote, Ionesyan told Dmitrieva that his work for the KGB had put them in mortal danger and that they had to get back to Moscow carefully. They walked about 10 kilometers before taking a bus.
A few days after Ivanovo he was back at work in Moscow. He killed Саша Лисовец, an 11-year-old boy who was waiting at home for his parents. He took nothing: the room where the family kept its valuables was locked, and he could not get into it, 360, Diletant and Absatz reported. Diletant dates the killing to December 28; 360 places it two days after Ivanovo.
He saw in the New Year with Dmitrieva and then, as Absatz put it, took a holiday. By then the city had grown afraid. People stopped opening their doors to anyone who said he was from the gas service, so officials had to bring building caretakers and maintenance staff with them to check stoves, Absatz and OSN reported. Diletant wrote that real gas inspectors stopped making their rounds and that some were reportedly attacked.
On January 8, 1964, Ionesyan went door to door again in Moscow. Knowing that "Mosgaz" no longer opened doors, he said he was from the housing office. He killed Мария Ермакова, 46, in Moscow and took five skeins of yarn, three pairs of socks, a wallet with 30 rubles, a table clock and a Start-3 television set, 360, Diletant and Absatz reported.
The television was his undoing. Residents saw a man who matched the description carrying a television wrapped in a sheet and stopping a vehicle for a ride, 360 reported. The local district police officer saw him climb into a dump truck and noted part of its plate number, the digits 96, according to Diletant; Absatz wrote that he paid the driver 80 kopecks. Investigators found the empty stand where the set had been and used its product papers to get its serial number, Absatz wrote.
Detectives traced the truck and its driver, who said he had dropped the man and his television at a street corner some distance from the scene. Officers then went from building to building nearby. A woman remembered that a neighbor's niece and the niece's husband had just sold a television to someone in the next building. A check confirmed it was the Start-3 from the Ермакова apartment, 360 reported. According to Absatz, the buyer pointed them to the room the couple rented, where they found items from the victims' homes and a list of cities marked to show which had airports or railway stations.
Ionesyan was not there. He had gone ahead to Kazan to wait for Dmitrieva. Police waiting at the room detained her instead. She told them that her partner, Vladimir Ionesyan, was a KGB major on a secret mission, and a simple check established that no one of that name served, or ever had served, in the security organs, Diletant reported. Absatz wrote that she was carried out of the building wrapped in a carpet so the neighbors would not see her.
Held in a solitary cell, she told investigators that he was waiting for her in Kazan, Diletant reported. A telegram was sent in her name to be collected at the post office, and a woman employee of the Moscow criminal investigation department, made up by specialists to look like her, boarded the train in her place, according to 360 and Absatz. Absatz credited the plan to Арапов, whom colleagues called the "Black Colonel". The minister for the protection of public order of the Tatar ASSR, Салих Япеев, took part in the operation in person, Diletant reported.
On the morning of January 12, 1964, Ionesyan was arrested on a platform at the Kazan station, 360 reported. He walked toward the carriage to meet the woman he took for Dmitrieva and was seized; from three meters away he had not seen the difference, 360 wrote. He was back in Moscow by January 13, according to Diletant.
He confessed. Absatz wrote that his early statements were confused and remorseful, and that he later tried to justify himself, saying at one point that he was now a very terrible person but had been a very good one in the past. In interrogation he said he had killed for money, but only the first time, Diletant reported; asked why he went on, he answered that it had not been needed. OSN reported that he described the first killing as happening in a state of nervous stress brought on by lack of money and could not explain the later ones. The official motive recorded was theft, according to OSN. He had made no attempt to run or to change his clothes, Diletant noted.
The authorities moved quickly. After the arrest, Вадим Тикунов, the minister for the protection of public order of the RSFSR, sent a memorandum proposing that the prosecutor's office of the RSFSR finish the investigation in the shortest possible time and that he be sentenced to be shot, Diletant reported. The trial was nonetheless planned as a closed hearing. Letters arrived demanding that he be hanged, quartered or executed in public on Red Square, according to Diletant and Absatz. The central press carried only a short report, 360 wrote.
The case was heard by the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, which on January 30, 1964, sentenced him to death, 360, Absatz and Zakonia reported. The verdict was declared final and not subject to appeal, Zakonia reported, quoting its wording. He could still ask for clemency. The petition was considered within a few hours and refused, Diletant and Zakonia reported. The investigation and trial together had taken about two weeks, OSN wrote, and Diletant noted that there had been no time for a psychiatric examination.
He was shot at Butyrka prison in Moscow on January 31, 1964, at 11 p.m., according to 360 and Zakonia. He was 26. Before his death, Absatz and Zakonia reported, he said that he understood he had lost his humanity, recognized his own baseness and deserved to die for the killings. Zakonia mentioned, as an unconfirmed rumor, that he spent his last day singing his favorite arias in his cell.
Алевтина Дмитриева was convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 15 years in prison, although Ionesyan maintained that she had known nothing about the killings, Absatz and 360 reported. She was released early, at the start of the 1970s, according to 360. The pensioner who had rented them the room was sent out of Moscow, Absatz wrote.
No court ever settled his motive. Diletant wrote that the speed of the case meant the motives were not established, that he did not fit the usual profile of a sadistic killer, and that specialists still disagree about him. OSN reported that investigators concluded he had a histrionic personality and killed to assert himself: a man who believed he deserved more than the small parts he was given, and who found no use for his singing in Ivanovo or Moscow. Absatz wrote that in Ivanovo he decided to go on killing for its own sake rather than for money. Zakonia, by contrast, reported that psychiatrists found no clear abnormality.
In 2022 the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education published a commentary on the case by Professor Николай Дворянчиков of its department of clinical and forensic psychology. He said the cruelty of the crimes might point to sadistic tendencies and to what he called psychopathic self-actualization, a drive to assert oneself through violence against someone helpless. He saw the choice of victims and places as the sign of an organized offender, and noted that such men often show a mask of normality to the world. The university's account said the court never established the motive, that the money he gained was trivial, and that Soviet judges did not yet work with the idea of a serial killer.
What the courts decided: the Supreme Court of the RSFSR sentenced Ionesyan to death on January 30, 1964, for the killings of five people in Moscow and Ivanovo; the sentence was carried out the next day. Dmitrieva was convicted as an accomplice. The exact articles of the criminal code under which he was convicted were not reported.
Points on which the published accounts differ:
The length of his draft-evasion sentence and how he left the camp: two and a half years with a year taken off for good behavior (360); a year in a camp in Gori, an unauthorized trip home, and an extra year of labor (Absatz); a year of labor in place of prison (Diletant).
The date of the killing of Саша Лисовец: December 28 (Diletant) or two days after Ivanovo (360).
The count of victims. The university's account speaks of six victims in 18 days, four of them children, counting the survivor in Ivanovo. Zakonia gives five dead, "including a child", which understates the number of children. Diletant wrote that he was not the first Soviet killer of this kind, and that the number of his victims did not exceed ten.
His mental state: no psychiatric examination for lack of time (Diletant) against psychiatrists finding no clear abnormality (Zakonia).
Dmitrieva's knowledge: she was convicted as an accomplice, but he insisted she knew nothing (Absatz, 360).
Khrushchev's two-week order: stated by 360, called an unconfirmed version by OSN, which quotes him as saying the man should be gone within two weeks.
360 called Ionesyan one of the first officially recognized serial killers in the USSR, and OSN one of the first Soviet serial killers. His case was the subject of an episode of the NTV documentary series «Следствие вели…», presented by Леонид Каневский, under the title "Open up, Mosgaz!", and of a 2012 television miniseries, Mosgaz, directed by Андрей Малюков, which 360 said took liberties with the facts.
About 50 years later, 360 reported, Moscow police arrested a 20-year-old man from Tajikistan who had posed as a city gas worker to get into apartments, and attributed at least seven killings to him. He died in custody before he could be tried.
August 27, 1937: Vladimir Ionesyan is born in Tbilisi.
Late 1950s: prosecuted for evading military service; later given a five-year suspended sentence for a group theft.
1963: moves with his wife and son to Orenburg and joins the Musical Comedy Theater as a tenor.
Early November 1963: Алевтина Дмитриева, 21, joins the theater; about a month later she is let go, and the two leave for Ivanovo and then Moscow.
December 20, 1963: Костя Соболев, 12, is killed in Moscow; a nine-year-old boy in the building helps build a composite portrait.
December 25, 1963: Миша Кулешов, 12, and a woman of 74 are killed in Ivanovo; a third person attacked survives and describes him.
Late December 1963 (December 28 by one account): Саша Лисовец, 11, is killed in Moscow.
January 8, 1964: Мария Ермакова, 46, is killed in Moscow; a television taken from her apartment is traced through a truck driver.
January 1964: police detain Dmitrieva in Moscow; a woman officer travels to Kazan in her place.
January 12, 1964: Ionesyan is arrested on a platform at the Kazan railway station.
January 30, 1964: the Supreme Court of the RSFSR sentences him to death; clemency is refused within hours.
January 31, 1964: he is shot at Butyrka prison, Moscow.
1964: Dmitrieva is sentenced to 15 years as an accomplice; she is released early in the early 1970s.
2012: the television miniseries Mosgaz is broadcast.