Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

autumn, a young woman named Ada was hitchhiking through East Siberia to the Far East. She stopped at a highway diner in a small settlement somewhere between Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude and then went missing.

In early May of the following year, the snow in the Transbaikal forest began to melt. Snowdrops came into bloom, and wild rosemary was about to blossom. In the wood thicket, nearly 100 meters from the Trans-Siberian Railway, remains of a human skull and jaw were found along with shoes and some clothes.

Forensic experts examined the unidentified skeletal remains but could not establish the cause of death. The skull belonged to a Caucasian woman between the age of 18 and 25 years.

The experts found holes on the clothes that were possible indications of stab and slash knife wounds.

The woman’s shoes from the scene led the investigators to local residents Dengina and Bazarenko, who had Ada’s outerwear.

It was revealed at trial that these young women were drinking beer near the mentioned diner. They noticed a well-dressed young woman and invited her to join. Bazarenko took a liking to her belongings. They contrived a reason to bring her to the forest and attacked her, knocking her down. While Bazarenko was holding the woman’s nose and mouth, Dengina inflicted multiple (dozens) of stab wounds in the victim’s chest and stomach with a knife. After committing the murder, they took the victim’s possessions and covered the body with fallen leaves.

Bazarenko, mother of two, pleaded not guilty. Dengina pleaded guilty on the count of murder but not of robbery with violence.

The court found Dengina and Bazarenko guilty on the count of robbery murder and sentenced both to long-term imprisonment in a general penal colony.

Both convicts appealed against the verdict. However, their cassation appeals were dismissed by the higher court instance, and their sentences were left unchanged.

In fact, Dengina and Bazarenko involved a minor in their robbery murder – they were drinking beer with K., a sixteen-year-old guy. After stabbing the victim on the scene, Dengina, leader of the criminal group, passed the knife to K. to get him to take part in the murder. He stabbed the victim several times, while Bazarenko was holding her on the ground, and returned the knife to Dengina, who finished the woman off with multiple stabs in the heart and chest. The teenager received a near-maximum term for a minor in an institution for young offenders.

Bazarenko, who was the 16-year-old K.’s partner, and Dengina expected that the young man would “take all the blame” and would not “get much time” because of being a minor. However, their expectations remained unfulfilled – K. pleaded not guilty.

In another case, the perpetrator was a 36-year-old mother of two named Svintsova. The court found that when her husband came home drunk, she knocked him down with the help of her minor daughter and niece in the hallway of their apartment. The three culprits hogtied the man with a synthetic cord. Then Svintsova decided to carry her act through in the kitchen. She cut down a synthetic clothesline they had in the bathroom. Taking advantage of her gagged husband’s helplessness, she wrapped the clothesline around his neck several times and strangled him to death – the fading victim could only watch his murderous wife. Svintsova and her accomplices rolled the body in a carpet and took it to a dumpster enclosure. The people’s court, unlike Svintsova, let the defendant say the final statement. The husband killer was sentenced to a prison term according to the norms of criminal law.

The 40-year-old Bortsova, a chronic alcoholic and psychopath, met with her ex-partner. They started drinking together and eventually resumed their intimate relationship in his house. However, Bortsova lived with another man at the time and did not want to get back together with her ex-lover, although he asked her to. She was about to leave when she found that the front door was locked. She demanded a key and, outraged at her lover’s refusal, axed him to death. She inflicted dozens of hacks and stabs on the man’s head, face, neck, and body, using an axe and a knife. Then she lit a fire on the corpse, trying to burn it. When the fire started burning high, Bortsova extinguished it, afraid of a fire accident. She started dismembering the body with the axe but could not complete the process, so she dumped the corpse into the basement. After that, she left the house and locked the front door. The people’s court sentenced Bortsova to long-term imprisonment in a general penal colony and ordered her to undergo compulsory treatment for alcoholism.

A killer brings the moment of most terrible, crushing powerlessness upon themselves – the moment when one is spiritually powerless in the face of physical irreparability called into being by one’s own deed. It is not being dead that frightens us but dying; not death but finality; frightening is the realization of the “nevermore.” It is with this fait accompli that the killer presents both themselves and the victim in the most dreadful moment – when both are uprooted from the living real unity embracing all humanity.[192]

The unquestionable evil of the world – murder, violence, oppression, wickedness, and more – are the consequences of the primordial evil that lured the human in with a guise of good.[193]

3.4. An Investigator Is No Pen-Pusher

The essence of the investigator and judge’s work is freedom in its philosophical and legal sense. Freedom is also the fundamental ontological reason why both are endowed with the right and duty to protect the rights and lawful interests of aggrieved persons and entities as well as protect the individual from illegal and baseless prosecution, conviction, and limitation of rights and freedoms. In the context of criminal proceedings, freedom manifests in the investigator’s personal responsibility for the investigation and the judge’s for the hearing, because all human