Aleksey Sukletin

Early life and early crimes Aleksey Vasilevich Sukletin was born in 1943, in Kazan, RSFSR, Soviet Union. His mother worked as a nurse in a military field hospital (it is known that she was alive in 1985 when Sukletin was arrested on suspicion of a series of murders). In 1964, Sukletin committed a new crime, acting together with accomplices with whom he drank alcohol. Once they had no more money left, Sukletin informed them of an elderly woman who lived nearby. They entered her apartment together, posing as gas service employees. The men then hit the woman on the head with a heavy object and took 80 rubles, but the victim survived and reported the crime to the police. The same year, Aleksey Sukletin met 23-year-old Madina Nurgazizovnaya Shakirova, a native of Vasilyevo, He told her that he allegedly was serving a sentence at a Kazakh camp, but fled. Before meeting Sukletin, Shakirova had gone to Uzbekistan for work, then moved to Kazan, where she worked as a turner at a plant, then as a breeder on a farm. She also had a child which she abandoned and gave to her parents, while she herself moved in with Sukletin. Soon the couple began to engage in criminal activities, starting with extortion. By order of Sukletin, Shakirova went from Vasilyevo to Kazan, taking a taxi back late in the evening. She complained to the taxi driver that her husband was cheating on her, and when they came to Sukletin's home, she offered the taxi driver to spend the night together. The man agreed, and then Sukletin and his accomplice Rinat Volkov, who played the role of a jealous husband and Shakirova's brother, burst into the bedroom. They beat the taxi driver and demanded money from him, also photographing him in indecent postures, asking for 200 rubles or else they would distribute the pictures to the public. The next day, the taxi driver gave them 200 rubles. ==Murders==

Shortly after meeting Shakirova, Sukletin informed her of his desire to kill women for cannibalism. He told her about his first idol, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, emperor of the Central African Empire, the other being 19th century British serial killer Jack the Ripper. Farid Zagidullin, Sukletin's adult victims were sex-workers, vagrants, or alcoholics. Subsequently, Madina Shakirova recalled that Sukletin looked at women only as possible sources of meat. Allegedly, Sukletin had tried to kill her three times. She also said: In January 1980 (according to other sources, January 1982), Sukletin committed his second murder. Together with Shakirova, he met two girls and invited them to celebrate the New Year. At night, he killed and ate one of the girls, 22-year-old Tatiana Illarionova. He did not harm the second girl, as she seemed too thin for his liking. When the surviving girl woke up, Sukletin told her that Ilarionova got up early in the morning and went to Kazan. The third victim of the killer was 15 to 16-year-old Rezeda Galimova. Sukletin lured the girl to his dacha, saying that he would settle her problems with studies. He raped her, and then killed her with two hammer blows to the head. The victim begged Shakirova to help her, but she refused. Subsequently, Shakirova took the murdered girl's sweater. After killing Galimova, Sukletin lured 22-year-old Nadezhda Sityavina to his house. He killed her after announcing to Shakirova that he would cohabit with Sityavina and presenting Nadezhda to his mother in Zelenodolsk. The fifth victim was 19-year-old Natalia Shkolnikova, a colleague of Sityavina. The sixth and youngest victim of Sukletin was 11-year-old (or 12) Valentina Elikova. Having met the girl in Kazan, the killer introduced himself as a distant uncle and took her to his home. There he hit Elikova's head against the wall, raped, killed and then ate her. Shakirova tried to save the child, but Sukletin severely beat her. After the murder, he ordered Shakirova to kidnap a baby for him, but she refused. She eventually left Sukletin and returned to her parents but did not tell anybody about the crimes. After Shakirova fled, Sukletin raped the juvenile daughter of his friend Boris. He achieved this by telling her about a non-existent nephew living in Italy, for whom he promised to find a girl to marry. Soon after, 23-year-old excessive drinker Lydiya Fyodorova became Sukletin's new cohabitant. She was accompanied by her relative Anatoly Nikitin. The three of them had parties and drank alcohol. However, the new concubine refused to help Sukletin kill and eat women, threatening to expose him to the police. On 12 March 1985, Sukletin and Nikitin raped and beat Fyodorova, who became the seventh and last victim. Sukletin burned her clothes and, after mocking the corpse, dismembered it, and ate the soft tissues. On 18 March, Shakirova returned to Sukletin. In order to conceal the murder, she cleaned her roommate's room and washed the bloodied clothes. According to neighbours, Aleksey Sukletin did not arouse any suspicion in them. They knew him as a good man and drinking companion, who could fix the roof, dig potatoes, recite poems, and was a hospitable host. He liked women and enjoyed their company. He liked to call passing children "meatballs", but no one could have imagined that the guard committed murders and engaged in cannibalism. The Vasilyevo police eventually visited Sukletin, but failed to gather any evidence. In mid-80s Soviet society, it was not customary to talk about serial killers, which were considered a characteristic feature of capitalist countries, as a result of which law enforcement agencies kept the disappearances of women and girls in Vasilyevo a secret. ==Arrest==

Fyodorova's long absence became of interest to law enforcement. Representatives visited Sukletin and asked him questions about her whereabouts, but he replied that he had no clue on the subject. On 4 June 1985, Aleksey Sukletin was arrested. Subsequently, Shakirova, Nikitin, and Volkov were also arrested. ==Investigation, trial and execution==

During the first interrogations, Sukletin stated that investigators would not be able to prove his guilt in the murders. However, investigator Farid Zagidullin (afterwards, the deputy prosecutor of Tatarstan) was able to obtain a confession from Shakirova, threatening that she would be executed if she stayed silent. For Madina Shakirova, the prosecution also requested the death penalty. However, the court took into account mitigating circumstances: the defendant's repentance of the crimes committed, as well as the fact that she participated in criminal activity under the threat of murder by Sukletin. She was eventually sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Anatoly Nikitin was also sentenced to 15 years for the murder of Lidiya Fyodorova, and Rinat Volkov was sentenced to 7 years for extortion. While Shakirova was serving her sentence, inmates shunned her, dubbing her "Dina-Meat Grinder". Initially, she was kept in a colony in Kozlovka, Chuvash Republic, where other prisoners attacked her, after which she was transferred to a colony in the Plesetsky District, Arkhangelsk Oblast. In 2001, both Shakirova and Nikitin were released from prison. The media erroneously reported that she had died in 2005, but those reports were refuted in 2008, when she gave an interview to the TV programme "City". The fate of Nikitin and Volkov after release is unknown. ==In the media==

The Sukletin case was repeatedly reflected in mass culture in post-Soviet Russia. In particular, books and chapters from books were devoted to him: • The End of the Bloody Devil by A. K. Bataev, an employee of the Prosecutor's Office in Tatarstan (1993) • Serial Killers. Maniacs and their victims by Nikolai Modestov (chapter: "Shashlik from the Beloved", 1999) • Kazan Bandits 2 by Maxim Belyaev (deputy chairman of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Tatarstan) and Andrey Sheptytsky (senior assistant to the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia in the Republic of Tatarstan) [chapter: "Volga Alligator", 2013] Aleksey Sukletin became the prototype of the hero of the third series of the Russian TV series The Method, released in 2015. == Literature ==

• Hans Askenasy. Cannibalism: From Sacrifice to Survival — Prometheus Books, 1994. — P. 208. — 292 p. — . ==See also==