Neighbor Confesses to Killing and Burning Schoolgirl 19 Years Later
In the Ural village of Otradny, near Nizhny Tagil, people still remember how schoolgirl Lyuba disappeared, even though 19 years have passed since that day. The curly-haired girl was always walking alone and in plain sight of the neighbors. She vanished suddenly in May 2007.
«In the evening her mother lost her, she didn«t come home. She and Vira lived together. She has older sons, but they didn»t live with them,» a family neighbor said. «Lyubka was such a little one, she was always hanging around with my nephew, they were the same age.»
Various rumors about the schoolgirl«s fate circulated around the village. But for some reason, the neighbors never doubted that the girl was alive.
«They said that gypsies took her, or that her mother sold her somewhere. Vira beat her all the time, she was a girl nobody needed, living on her own, you could say. She was always running alone in the streets. A dysfunctional family. It seemed she was younger than her age in behavior. As if she stopped her development at around 8 and just stayed that way,» a family neighbor said.
Lyuba has never been found, alive or dead. But now investigators know she was killed. Her murderer was found after many years. It turned out to be a resident of a neighboring village, Sergey Berezovich, who in 2007 was accused of lewd acts against the same schoolgirl, but before her disappearance. The girl«s mother contacted law enforcement agencies, and a case was opened against the man, who was 44 at the time.
Berezovich was convicted for the lewd acts, but the fact that he had killed Lyuba became known much later. In 2014 Sergey sold his house in the village and moved to another region with his wife and children. A few years ago he was sent to a penal colony for molesting another child. And unexpectedly, he confessed to the crime from the past.
He said the girl threatened to report him to the police again. During their argument, he strangled Lyuba in his car, and then burned the body in the forest, dousing it with gasoline.
«The unburned remains of the corpse the accused brought home and continued to burn in the bathhouse stove for another 4–5 hours, breaking the bones with a poker,» the prosecutor«s office of Sverdlovsk Region said. «The next morning he collected the ashes of the murdered girl in a bucket and took them away, scattering them near the Chusovaya River.»
For the murder of Lyuba, Berezovich faces up to 23 years in a penal colony—that«s the term the state prosecutor asked to be assigned to him. This is in addition to the time Sergey is already serving for another crime.
The schoolgirl«s mother did not live to see Berezovich»s trial. Neighbors say that after her daughter«s disappearance, the woman drank heavily; first her legs gave out, and then she died. Lyuba herself has no grave, because nothing remains of the girl. Only traces of DNA, which have been preserved since 2007 on the seat covers of the very car where the neighbor strangled her. Sergey did not sell his Volga, which helped investigators gather evidence of his guilt.
«The solving of the crime was facilitated by the improvement of forensic techniques, which allowed examinations, including molecular-genetic analysis, to be conducted after a long period of time,» said Dmitry Trofimov, assistant prosecutor of the Suburban District of Sverdlovsk Region.
Earlier we wrote that Berezovich asked the court not to prosecute him for the murder of the schoolgirl, stating that the statute of limitations for this crime had expired.
