12-Year-Old Girl's Killer Found Near Tambov After 11 Years
In April 2011, a bulletin was circulated in the Tambov Region: 12-year-old Tanya K. had gone missing. On April 8, the girl left school in the small town of Zherdevka and disappeared. She was found only five days later—dead. Her body had been thoroughly washed, even her nails trimmed. And there were no witnesses who could shed light on what happened to the girl.
The mystery of Tanya«s death would only be fully solved 11 years later. The search for the killer would even involve participants from the show »The Battle of Psychics« (16+). And it turned out that the guilty one had been close to the victim»s family all along. Our colleagues from Voronezh1.ru tell the horrifying story that haunted residents of the small district center for years.
«Nothing Like This Had Ever Happened Here»
Zherdevka is a district center in the Tambov Region, on the border with Voronezh Region. In the early 2010s, a little over 15,000 people lived there. For a small town, the disappearance of a child, and then a murder, was a shock.
The bulletin on Tanya after her disappearance stated: slender, brown eyes, light brown hair, with a small mole above her upper lip. She went to school in black trousers, a white nylon jacket, and a white cap. Relatives said that Tanya was an excellent student, helped her grandmother with household chores, and loved to draw.
When Tanya didn«t return home on that terrible April day, her grandmother sounded the alarm. She immediately called the girl»s mother, Nina, who lived and worked in Moscow. Nina came right away and went to the police. A search began, joined by what seemed like the entire town. Parks, abandoned buildings, dark streets—everything was searched. All of Zherdevka waited for good news to come at any moment… But people waited in vain.
Tanya was found raped and dead 15 kilometers from Zherdevka. A tractor driver plowing a field noticed a bag with legs sticking out of it. On the cleanly washed body, law enforcement found no clues.
The news of the murder horrified the town«s residents. Parents were afraid to let their children go out alone, and teachers at schools didn»t know how to talk to the children about what had happened.
«The case is unprecedented, of course, and horrifying,» one of Tanya«s teachers said. »Nothing like this had ever happened here in my memory.«
«He Knew He Wouldn»t Be Found«
The investigation had almost no leads on who could have done such a thing to the girl. All local men previously involved in similar crimes were questioned. Suspicions also fell on acquaintances of the victim«s family; even Tanya»s father was called in for questioning. But they couldn«t find the guilty one. Rumors even spread that the police themselves were involved in the murder, which is why the investigation was dragging on so long.
By autumn, no suspect had emerged in the case. And Tanya«s desperate mother turned to the show »The Battle of Psychics.« This was in hope of help not only from supernatural forces but also from basic publicity. However, neither helped much.
The psychics didn«t give the murdered girl»s mother a unified version of events. They repeated rumors that the criminal was a policeman. Participant Natalya Banteeva from the show«s ninth season particularly pushed this version.
«She got into the killer»s car herself,« the psychic was sure.
Another clairvoyant, Zuliya Radzhabova, insisted that the girl had been tried to be used in child pornography filming. The psychic also believed that the killers wouldn«t be caught.
But the killer was eventually found. However, it took several more years.
Lie Detector
After the psychics left, investigators continued with the routine of the investigation. Among other things, they checked friends and acquaintances of the girl«s family on a polygraph—a lie detector. And here, suddenly, luck: one of Tanya»s mother«s acquaintances gave ambiguous answers. His name was Igor Skorokhodov.
45-year-old Skorokhodov was the lover of Nina«s best friend, Marina. He took the polygraph in 2013, and was first detained then. But the evidence against him was only circumstantial. On the day of Tanya»s murder, he was home alone and didn«t answer calls—that»s all. Investigators suspected that the girl might have gone to Igor and Marina«s house to congratulate her mother»s friend on her birthday.
Marina immediately began defending her common-law husband.
«Two years passed, and local men kept being called to the police. Igor went too, and on his own, at the first call,» the woman told journalists. «I don»t think the girl remembered my birthday and could have come to us. Moreover, there is evidence that Tanya passed by our house and was seen further down the street. But no one even considers these facts.«
The suspect himself also denied his guilt.
«Before my detention, I was repeatedly called as a witness, without summons. They forced me to take the blame for Tanya»s murder, said everyone was against me, and after I refused, threatened to find a reason to arrest me. <…> When I was detained as a suspect, in the cell they again forced me to sign their script of the murder. Interrogations were conducted day and night. I was beaten, and then accused of slandering the investigative authorities and inflicting the beatings on myself,« Skorokhodov claimed.
In the end, his guilt couldn«t be proven in 2013—the court didn»t consider the circumstantial evidence gathered by investigators sufficient to keep the man in custody. Skorokhodov was released.
The Perfect Crime
For the next few years, the investigation was at a standstill, and then the case was even closed. Perhaps the secret of Tanya«s murder would have remained unsolved forever if not for the persistence of her mother Nina. In 2017, she, still not giving up, decided to appeal to the head of Russia»s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin. He ordered the investigation to be resumed.
New collection of evidence and testimony led to an unexpected result: suddenly, new victims of Skorokhodov were identified. No, he didn«t kill anyone else, but several underage girls reported that he had molested them at different times. Skorokhodov was detained again, and an unusual examination was appointed—olfactory. It involves studying and comparing smells, and at that time it had just begun to be used. An expert studied the suspect»s sweat odor and the odor from the bag in which Tanya«s body was found—everything matched.
«There were no direct clues. He got rid of everything, foresaw everything. A perfect crime. No biological materials of his, nor her clothes on which traces could remain, he threw it all in the city dump. Only the sweat odor from his hands on the bag she lay in, and on her hair elastic,» the girl«s mother said.
When Skorokhodov was asked how his smell could have ended up on one of the clues, he gave up and confessed to everything. He showed where and how he killed the girl. It all indeed happened at his home, where Tanya had come to congratulate her mother«s friend. Marina wasn»t home, but the girl couldn«t escape. At first, Skorokhodov didn»t plan to kill the victim, only to rape her. But, according to the killer, Tanya screamed too loudly—and he strangled her. Then he thoroughly washed her and, naked, in a bag, took her to a field outside Zherdevka.
It took several more years to complete the investigation and trials. The killer«s guilt was finally proven, and he was sentenced only in December 2022. Skorokhodov himself didn»t live to see the verdict—he died in pre-trial detention shortly before the last court session.
