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On 17 October, they had been drinking again. They took an underage girl out of town, and raped and throttled her. They stripped her corpse and hid it under some wood chippings.
On 30 October, the gang were recovering debts from one of Korovnikov's acquaintances. He was taken out of town, where they beat him with a baseball bat and stuck a screwdriver into his skull. The stole a silver cross on a chain worth 50 roubles from the body, which they concealed under some branches.
On 1 November, Korovnikov and one of the gang, Kabanets, invited two girls to their place. The girls were plied with vodka and raped with particular brutality. The first was throttled with the cord from a domestic iron (and robbed of a chain worth 120 roubles and a cross worth 50), the second with the cord from an electric heater (from her they took a 100-rouble ring). The bodies were buried under leaves in a forest.
On 7 February the following year, they pulled off their richest job to date. Organisationally, this was their most complex undertaking. And quite an intellectual achievement for these neanderthals. They abducted a Tambov businessman and his wife and took them out of town.
In his usual way, Korovnikov started throttling the businessman. But the cord snapped. So he grabbed a brick and crushed the man's skull. To make sure, he also stabbed the body with a sharp implement. The man's wife was taken somewhere else, where she was forced to help them lure her mother-in-law out of home.
Having killed the parents and made sure the mother-in-law was out, the gang entered their victims' flat. At home were the couple's son and a friend, who was round visiting. The gang set about them with sharp implements, but then one of them found the couple's money in the flat - 30,000 roubles and 6,000 dollars. In their joy the killers did not bother to finish off the unconscious children, clearly believing them dead already.
Luckily, the kids survived their ordeal and before long they were testifying. The gang were caught, and forensic work and crime reconstructions were enough to establish their guilt. The case against them included DNA from sperm found in the mutilated girls' rectums, samples of hair found in the gang's car, and testimony from the child survivors. Realising the evidence against them was overwhelming but still refusing to admit their guilt, the killers decided to confess to a minor episode in their bloodstained career.
In summer 1998 they were hired by an unidentified person to travel to Moscow and intimidate Olga Kostina. During their testimony it was recorded that Kostina owed that person money. Detective and forensic inquiries confirmed that the intent was to intimidate. And this is borne out in the details: the small amount of explosive (equivalent to about 200 g of TNT) set off at 2 in the morning outside a stairwell door.
This was obviously a vain attempt to save themselves. The gang owned up to a minor offence while denying everything else in the hope that the prosecution, unable to find any solid evidence, would settle for what little it could. In the same way that coachmen used to hurl the entrails of a freshly-slaughtered boar onto the ground to buy off a pursuing pack of wolves.
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