Gennady Mikhasevich

Gennady Modestovich Mikhasevich (; 7 April 1947 – 25 September 1987) was a Soviet serial killer and serial rapist known as the "Vitebsk Strangler" (Віцебскі душыцель), who murdered a minimum of 36 women in Vitebsk, Polotsk and the surrounding regions in the Byelorussian SSR between 1971 and 1985.

Personal life Gennady Mikhasevich was born in the village of Ist (Vitebsk Oblast) in 1947. In outward appearance, Mikhasevich was a good family man, a teetotaller with two children and was a conscientious worker; he was also a member and local functionary of both the Communist Party and of the Voluntary People's Druzhina, and served in the Soviet Army. Mikhasevich later explained that his killing spree started after he had returned from his military service to find out that his girlfriend had left him and married another man.

Murders On the night of 14 May 1971, he was on his way from Vitebsk to Polotsk. It was late so he could not catch a bus to Polotsk where his parents lived. Mikhasevich reported that he was feeling despondent because of the breakup with his girlfriend, and had prepared a loop to hang himself. By chance, however, he encountered a young woman on the road and, in order to vent his anger, decided to kill her. He murdered again in October 1971, and strangled two other women in 1972, near Vitebsk. Mikhasevich graduated from a technical school in Vitebsk in 1973 and returned to Ist, starting work in a sovkhoz. He got married in 1976. In the meantime, the murders continued.

Many of his murders were committed to facilitate rape. He invariably strangled or smothered his victims, either assaulting them in solitary locations or, during later years, after having lured them into his own red Zaporozhets or the cars at his workplace (he later had a job in a repair garage). Mikhasevich did not carry weapons, choosing instead to use a variety of improvised means, including in one case, a cord made of rye. Besides killing, he robbed his victims of money and valuable items, some of which he would later present to his wife as gifts. He would also take mundane household items, like scissors.

The investigation started to advance in the 1980s, as the young investigator Nikolay Ignatovich firmly believed that all the killings of females near motorways in the region were not separate, isolated cases as previous investigators had conveniently believed, but had been committed by one person, a serial killer. The police also suspected that the serial killer was using a red Zaporozhets; as they started checking all the people of the Oblast who possessed such a car, Mikhasevich, as a druzhinnik, participated in these actions; essentially, searching for himself. After initial denial, he confessed and was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in 1987. His case became notorious in the USSR (“The Vitebsk Case”, “Витебское дело”), as it revealed how corrupt investigators had tried to close cases quickly: by the time Mikhasevich was finally arrested, 14 people had already been convicted for the crimes Mikhasevich committed, and a couple of them had been sentenced to death and executed for crimes they did not commit.