Vladimir Vinnichevsky

Vladimir Georgievich Vinnichevsky (Влади́мир Гео́ргиевич Винниче́вский; 8 June 1923 – 11 November 1940), known as The Urals Monster (Уральское чудовище), was the youngest known Soviet serial killer.

Vladimir Vinnichevsky was born in July 1923.

His father, Georgy Ivanovich, worked as a crew chief in municipal public utilities of Sverdlovsk, and his mother, Elizaveta Petrovna, was an accountant.

The family lived in a stand-alone private house in the center of Sverdlovsk.

The Vinnichevsky family was considered wealthy by Soviet standards at the time: Vladimir had a suit, a tank helmet, a Swiss knife, and leather shoes.

He had been also given pocket money - at the time of his arrest he was found to have more than 20 rubles, which constituted a two-day salary of an average Soviet worker at the time.

Vinnichevsky studied at the Sverdlovsk School № 16, in the 7 "B" grade.

Due to his low performance in school, he once had to repeat a grade.

At the same time, however, he was good at singing and knew many songs by heart.

Vinnichevsky was on friendly terms with Ernst Neizvestny, who later became a famous sculptor.

Neizvestny and Vinnichevsky were in the same year of schooling (Vinnichevsky was two years older than Neizvestny, but went to school at a one-year older age and repeated a grade).

The adolescents lived near each other.

Together they attended school, cinema and Sverdlovsk's Theater of Musical Comedy.

Vinnichevsky often visited Neizvestny's apartment.

He was convicted of eighteen attacks on children aged between two and four years in 1938–1939 in Sverdlovsk, Nizhny Tagil and Kushva.

Eight of these attacks resulted in murder.

The first murder (or more precisely, the third, as there is no information on the previous murders) was that of 4-year-old Gerta Grebanova, committed in the summer or early autumn of 1938 in Sverdlovsk.

Vinnichevsky entered the courtyard of the private house where the Gribanovs lived, took the girl to the kitchen garden, where he strangled her, and then struck her head 8 times with a kitchen knife, breaking it, and leaving a splinter in the victim's skull.

He later disposed of the broken knife and used a screwdriver and a folding knife in later murders.

Although Vinnichevsky committed most of the attacks in Sverdlovsk, he made trips to other cities in the Sverdlovsk Oblast to confuse the investigation - one attack was committed in Nizhny Tagil, and another in Kushva.

He attacked both boys and girls.

The motive of the attack was a sexual act with the victim.

At first, Vinnichevsky tried to perform a "natural" sexual act with the female victims, but he was convinced that, due to anatomical limitations, this could not be done.

Then he began to perform anal intercourse, and in some cases (usually in the cold season) limited himself to rubbing his genitals.

After the act Vinnichevsky would choke his victim, and sometimes stab them to death.

The murder of Gerta Gribanova gave the investigators evidence, as the girl's skull had a knife piece stuck in it.

The girl's body was beheaded by the investigative authorities: the skull was left as evidence, and the rest given to the child's parents for the burial.

The assumption was that the killer would use the same kitchen knife that ended Gribanova's life, but later, this assumption turned out to be false.

The fifth victim of Vinnichevsky was a boy who, most likely, survived, but could not be found.

Then the killer suggested to 4-year-old Borya Titov to go sledging with him, took him to a wasteland, and attacked him after a snowdrift.

Although Vinnichevsky prudently took the child with him, the child was rescued, and later told the investigators about the murderer.

The seventh victim was 3-year-old Kate Lobanovа in Kushva.

The girl was killed, and her body later thrown into a swamp to hide the smell of degradation.

In Sverdlovsk, Vinnichevsky began to practice the kidnapping of children and killing them in the forest massifs to the outskirts, where the bodies were covered with branches.

During an interrogation on 17 November 1939, Ernst Neizvestny described Vinnichevsky with the following words:

It is not known when Vinnichevsky committed his first murder, since the investigators could not find the relatives of the first victims, about whom Vinnichevsky gave evidence.

To commit his crimes, Vinnichevsky would go around yards, saying that he was under the orders of the Komsomol organization for the sponsored Pioneer squads collecting scrap metal, and therefore went around neighborhoods, figuring out which residents had scrap.

This is how 4-year-old Lida Surina and 3-year-old Valya Kamaeva died in the spring of 1939.

Later, 3-year-old Alya Gubina was kidnapped, whom Vinnichevsky raped, after which he stabbed her several times with a knife, leaving a wound 25 centimeters long.

On 16 January 1940, Vinnichevsky was sentenced to death and executed several months later.