Irkutsk hammers killed six people and caught on their own video

On the evening of December 1, 2010, Danil Semyonov left the house with snow. He was going to ride with the other kids, but got dressed earlier and ran to the slide alone. When the boys got there, the boy was already lying in the snow. They called his father.

Evgeny and Svetlana Semenov managed to catch their son alive. The doctors who arrived declared death. Later, the mother told reporters – the incident was explained by the fact that the child dispersed on a snowball and crashed into a tree. A criminal case of murder was not opened.

The family pointed out details that did not fit into this version. There were no signs of a violent collision on the snowball and tree. The rope was wrapped around the wrist: this is how Dania used to pull the snowball up. During the descent, he fixed it differently.

By the time the student died, the attackers had already tried to kill the man twice.

The first identified attack occurred on November 14, 2010. Anufriev was 18 years old, Lytkin was 17. In the forest belt of Akademgorodok, they attacked the girl, armed with a hammer and a bat. She survived. A second attack followed on November 25, injuring a woman who had her bag taken away.

Anufriev and Lytkin lived in the same Akademgorodok where the victims were chosen. Both went to the same school.

On December 16, 15 days after Semyonov’s death, Olga Pirog was killed in Akademgorodok. She was 69 years old. She worked as a leading researcher at the Institute of Solar-Earth Physics SB RAS and returned home.

Pirog graduated from the physics faculty of Irkutsk State University, worked in Norilsk, defended her PhD thesis. She has worked at the Irkutsk Institute since 1978. Her body was found by passers-by in the forest.

In a report dated December 18, the press service of the local police department said that no signs of robbery were found. His colleagues did not know about the enemies of the deceased. The investigation checked whether the offender could have personal accounts with the woman, and considered other versions.

Later in court, the state prosecutor presented a transcript of an audio recording made by Anufriev and Lytkin during the murder. The recording became one of the proofs of their guilt.

On December 29, there were two attacks in which three people became victims. At first, the criminals attacked the woman and took her bag. They later attacked another woman with a small relative. Both escaped; the attackers were spooked by a passing car.

One of the women was pregnant. Subsequently, the prosecution included this circumstance in the qualification of the assassination attempt. The court ruled out the corresponding sign: evidence that Anufriev and Lytkin knew about the victim’s pregnancy was insufficient.

By the end of December, two victims had died and five more survived the attacks. But the student's death was still considered an accident. In public reports, the beginning of the series of murders was associated with the death of the Pie.

On the night of January 1, 2011, Anufriev and Lytkin attacked a man near garbage cans on Lermontov Street. He died of his injuries. The investigation could not establish his identity.

In January and the first half of February, there were further assassination attempts on a woman, a student and another woman. The court chronicle described the intervention of witnesses, the light of car headlights and attempts of victims to escape. These circumstances thwarted the attacks, but the perpetrators were not detained. The exact dates of individual attempts in public publications differ.

On February 21, another man died. In a message published before the arrest of the killers, he was called Alexander Maximov.

On February 27, Lytkin left alone. His victim was retired Nina Kuzmina. Later, she said that she was returning from an acquaintance and sat down on a bench near the house to call. The blow came from behind. After the second blow, the woman started screaming.

It was heard by a resident of a neighboring house Alexander Chervyakov. He looked outside, spooked the attacker and helped call an ambulance. At the trial, Kuzmin said that he owed his life.

On the night of March 10 to March 11, Anufriev and Lytkin committed another murder near the State University stop. This was the fifth murder in the case.

By this time, residents had organized squads and went out to patrol the area. In the publication of March 21 it was reported that the points of public order switched to the evening mode of work — from nine in the evening to two in the morning. Information about the situation was transmitted daily to the mayor of Irkutsk Viktor Kondrashov.

Residents suspected one person or group was behind the attacks. Law enforcement officials have not publicly confirmed this. The cases were with one investigator, but the general series of official communications has not yet been recognized as established.

On April 2, the local media published an interview with the head of the press service of the city Internal Affairs Inga Shaidurova. She explained that in different episodes different weapons, time and places of attacks. According to her, this is why the cases were not combined into one production.

In the same article, the assumption that the boy with the snowball was killed was cited as an example of the spread of rumors. Three days remained before the arrest of Anufriev and Lytkin.

The last murder took place on April 3. A woman without a specific place of residence was killed. Anufriev and Lytkin filmed the abuse of her body.

The recording was found by Lytkin's uncle and handed over to law enforcement. On April 5, both were arrested. The next day, local media reported the arrest.

During the searches, clothes, shoes, items that could be used in the attacks, and electronic media were seized. The representative of the regional Investigative Committee Oleg Dubovets then reported these findings to journalists of the regional TV channel. Later they were checked by experts.

The first reports after the arrest did not yet reflect the full number of crimes. Investigators had to match confessions with unsolved assaults, medical records and previous decisions. So the death of Danil Semyonov was included in the case.

Parents were told that their son was killed by two young men from the same neighborhood.

The investigation was conducted, in particular, by the investigator for particularly important cases Yevgeny Karchevsky. According to him, the investigation team conducted more than 50 examinations and questioned more than a hundred witnesses. Investigative actions took place outside the Irkutsk region: people lived in other regions to whom the accused reported crimes via the Internet. The material was 49 volumes.

An investigation into the January murder led to another criminal case. In the case of the death of the same man near the garbage cans already accused Vladimir Bazilevsky.

Bazilevsky was arrested on January 15, 2011. An orphanage who did not have a permanent home. Blood was found on his clothes. The investigation received a confession and linked him to the death of an unknown man on New Year's Eve.

Bazilevsky later claimed that confessions were knocked out of him. He talked about beatings and electric shocks. During the investigative actions, he said, he was told in advance where the body was and how to describe the incident.

In the case there was a conclusion of biological examination: the origin of blood on the clothes from the deceased was not excluded. However, this did not prove that the blood belonged to him. A genetic study was also appointed, but, as follows from investigations by some media, the materials were transferred to the court without waiting for its result.

On April 26, 2011, Bazilevsky was sentenced to four years in prison. Legally, he was convicted for intentional infliction of grievous harm to health, resulting in negligence death, according to part 4 of Article 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

Three weeks have passed since the arrest of Anufriev and Lytkin.

When investigators checked their testimony about the New Year's Eve attack, the description led to a crime for which Bazilevsky had already been convicted. Karchevsky raised the materials of another case. Genetic examination did not confirm that the blood on Bazilevsky’s clothes belonged to the deceased; according to media reports, it was the blood of the detainee himself.

The identity of the victim was not confirmed. The man Bazilevsky allegedly killed was alive. The victim himself remained unidentified.

The revision took about a year. The sentence was canceled, Bazilevsky was released and rehabilitated. According to human rights defenders representing his interests, he was released in May 2012. The total length of imprisonment, including pre-trial detention, was about one and a half years.

On November 19, 2013, the court awarded him 300 thousand rubles in compensation for illegal criminal prosecution. The appeal left the amount unchanged.

Former investigator Yuri Fedorov was prosecuted for falsifying evidence. In October 2014, he received three years of probation. The verdict passed several revisions; in June 2015, Fedorov was granted an amnesty.

Bazilevsky’s allegations of torture were investigated separately.

The trial of Anufriev and Lytkin began on September 5, 2012. The court questioned survivors, relatives of the victims, witnesses and experts. According to the courtroom, 16 victims and more than 50 witnesses testified.

Anufriev backtracked on a significant part of the confessions. He claimed that the testimony was obtained under pressure, and Lytkin stipulates it. The defence pointed in particular to the absence of eyewitnesses to individual attacks and to the fact that not all the instruments of crime had been found.

Lytkin also changed his testimony. Towards the end of the trial, he identified two other perpetrators. The court resumed its examination of the evidence. According to the state prosecutor, the information was not confirmed, and Lytkin refused them.

The court examined the confessions along with other materials. The case included audio and video recordings, forensic results, seized items, and witness statements. The information of telecom operators was used to check the contacts of the accused and the location of Anufriev’s phone.

Some of the materials were not accepted by the court. As reported by the correspondent with the announcement of the verdict, the correspondence received from the servers of the social network, was not accepted as evidence: the court admitted that it could be changed without the knowledge of the accused. Witnesses who could directly confirm the content of communication with Anufriev were interrogated separately.

Both defendants were found to be sane. Lytkin’s defense challenged the completeness of the psychological and psychiatric examination and asked for a repeat. The Supreme Court later found no reason for this: according to experts, Lytkin could understand the nature and public danger of his actions and direct them.

A separate part of the process took motive. The court document testifies about the defendants' interest in serial killers, viewing recordings of violence and intending to gain notoriety for the crimes. The court found that they had created an extremist community and acted out of ideological hatred.

The Supreme Court found this qualification justified. The defense challenged the very existence of the extremist community, but the judicial panel found the preliminary agreement and the common purpose of the crimes proved.

On April 2, 2013, the Irkutsk Regional Court announced the verdict. Anufriev was sentenced to life imprisonment in a special regime colony. Lytkin - 24 years: the first five years in prison, the remaining term in a strict regime colony.

Both were found guilty of killing six people. Responsibility for the assassinations differed: Anufriev was convicted for the attempted murder of eight people, Lytkin – nine. The latter carried out one of the attacks on his own.

The court also found proved the creation of an extremist community, theft, robbery and abuse of the body of the deceased. Crimes against life were classified according to the organized group and the motive of ideological hatred.

Relatives of the victims considered Lytkin’s term insufficient. Svetlana Semyonova announced her intention to appeal the verdict: her son died, and the convict retained the opportunity to once be released. The appeal also received a demand to appoint Lytkin a life sentence.

On October 3, 2013, Russia’s Supreme Court upheld Anufriev’s life sentence without change. The court rejected the allegations of unproven guilt and illegal methods of obtaining confessions. The term of Lytkin was reduced to 20 years in a strict regime colony.

The first five years in prison were excluded from the sentence: the lower court did not substantiate the need for such a procedure for serving the sentence. In addition, Lytkin was released from punishment for creating an extremist community - the statute of limitations, calculated taking into account his minor age, expired. After that, the final deadline for a set of crimes was recalculated. Conclusions of guilt in murders and assassinations remained.

Most of the crimes Lytkin committed before coming of age, the last murder – after. The Supreme Court took this distinction into account and rejected the demand to increase his sentence.

Lytkin did not live to be released. According to the regional department of the Federal Penitentiary Service, on November 28, 2021, he attempted suicide in IK-7 Angarsk. He was hospitalized; on November 30, he died in a city hospital.

Years after the trial, Svetlana Semyonova continued to keep Dani's last school costume. In a 2019 interview, she said the family had to learn to live without their eldest son. On the hill where he was found, children were riding again.

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