Son accidentally turns in serial rapist and killer father

In June 2008, 45-year-old Anatoly Sedykh was detained in Lipetsk. An overweight man, father of two, a sensitive and caring husband, a driver for a local auto enterprise who moonlighted as a private cab driver. He got around with a cane — he had been suffering from heart problems for several years. Why could such a man be arrested?

The list of Anatoly Sedykh«s crimes turned out to be long and horrified even seasoned investigators. It turned out that this »model family man« had raped and strangled at least 12 girls over six years. And these were only the proven cases — there could have been more victims. VORONEZH1.RU tells how the maniac was caught and why he was nicknamed the »strangler« and the »Lipetsk Chikatilo«.

The investigation hits a dead end

1998. The «wild 1990s», the August default, the devaluation of the ruble. In Lipetsk — protests by workers at the local tractor factory over unpaid wages and mass layoffs at the largest metallurgical plant. As if that wasn«t enough, in the summer one of the strongest hurricanes in recorded history hit the city.

Against this backdrop, a piece of news in the autumn passed without too much fanfare: a group of friends looking for a picnic spot outside the city stumbled upon the body of a young girl in the forest. There were signs of strangulation on the body, and no documents or clothing were found nearby. The murdered girl was soon identified: she was 19-year-old Elena Ya., who had gone missing a few days earlier and whose parents had been looking for her.

Two months later, another girl went missing — 17-year-old Olga M. Her body was soon found — also in a wooded belt. Olga had been brutally beaten, then perversely raped and strangled with her own underwear. After the second murder, the police became clear: a serial maniac was operating in the city. Law enforcement determined that both corpses were the work of the same killer, based on the specifics of the rape and the murder method.

Before any leads on the maniac«s identity could be found, he managed to kill several more times. On the bank of the Voronezh River, the raped and strangled body of 18-year-old Irina V. was discovered. And then, in the same brutal manner, 28-year-old Tatyana S. was tortured. Her body was found by mushroom pickers in the forest. According to eyewitnesses, it became known that shortly before her death, Tatyana had hailed a taxi — a »shestyorka«, a light-colored VAZ-2106 »Zhiguli«. After that, no one saw her again.

The same light-colored «shestyorka» soon surfaced again. One of the unknown maniac«s victims in the spring of 1999 managed to survive and gave testimony.

«Around one in the morning, she hailed a passing car — a light-colored »Zhiguli« — and asked the driver to take her to the city center. He said he had run out of gas and suggested stopping at a gas station. On the way, they started talking, at some point the girl turned to the window and felt a strong blow from something heavy to the back of her head,» recounted former head of the criminal investigation department of the Lipetsk Region Police Department, Andrey Akelyev. «She came to in the morning in a roadside ravine, covered with leaves. Her neck was being squeezed by a tightly tightened T-shirt.»

Despite now knowing the make of the maniac«s car, and even having compiled a facial composite from the surviving girl»s description, the investigation was again at a dead end. And the murders meanwhile did not stop.

The local Chikatilo

Bodies continued to be found one after another until 2004. No economic shocks could now outweigh the fear of Lipetsk residents for their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Not long before, the case of one of the most famous maniacs of the USSR — Andrei Chikatilo — had been making headlines across the country. He also dumped his victims« bodies in forests and parks, and even the operation to search for him was called the same as the operation to search for the Lipetsk maniac — »Forest Belt«. Lipetsk residents feared, and not without reason, that their own Chikatilo had appeared.

Fuel was added to the fire of anxiety by a series of murders in Moscow in the early 2000s — the Bitsevsky maniac was operating there. Lipetsk residents even thought that the criminal who had killed dozens of people in the capital had moved to them. Meanwhile, capital journalists suggested the situation might be the reverse: the Lipetsk maniac had moved to Moscow. Both were wrong.

The investigation, meanwhile, was not progressing. The maniac the authorities were hunting was cunning: he left no evidence at the scene, taking all the victims« personal belongings. The police checked all light-colored »shestyorkas«. As it later turned out, the maniac»s car was also stopped for a check, but for a different reason. At the end of November 2000, near Lipetsk, fish inspection officers saw a «Zhiguli» driving from a place where fishing was prohibited. The men decided there was a poacher in the car.

«I asked to open the trunk to inspect it. There were no poaching tools. The first snow had just fallen, and I decided to drive around the area. I saw tire tracks, followed them, and there was a woman»s body,« recounted Alexander Panov, an inspector with the Lipetsk Region Fish Protection Inspectorate.

Later, the inspectors also recalled that there were women«s clothes in the car. But this did not raise suspicions at first: the driver stated that the clothes belonged to his wife. The inspectors did not remember the car»s license plate number, and the maniac managed to slip away.

And in 2004, the murders stopped. The body of the last victim was found in a stream in a forestry about 10 kilometers from Lipetsk. The murdered woman did not have her phone — it was precisely this phone that would lead to the maniac«s capture several years later.

Father accidentally given away by son

The next four years of searching yielded no results, but there were also no new murders. As it later turned out, the maniac«s health began to fail. And a chance event helped catch him.

In June 2008, Sergei Sedykh was rummaging in the garage of his father Anatoly and accidentally found an old Sony Ericsson mobile phone there. The young man, suspecting nothing, turned the device on. The operator was immediately notified of this and passed the information to investigators — they were still trying to track signals from the maniac«s victims» phones. They located the signal source, obtained a search warrant. And soon, in the garage, besides the phone, they discovered belongings of the murdered girls.

Anatoly Sedykh was detained. The collection of evidence of his involvement in the murders of 1998–2004 began. Meanwhile, the maniac«s relatives claimed that their husband and father was not guilty of anything. His wife Elena, for example, in unison with her husband, asserted: he had bought that very phone for 150 rubles (about $2 at current rates) from some drug addict.

«Tolya is a very devout person, when they read the charges to him, he even fainted. He told me: »Don«t believe anything they say about me. I am not guilty of anything. Everything that happened is a provocation,»« the woman stated.

The son even said that the murdered girls« belongings had been brought to the garage by their grandmother, who worked as a bathhouse attendant.

Sedykh himself, speaking with journalists even before the verdict was handed down, firmly stood his ground: he had not killed anyone.

«I consider myself guilty only of buying that damn phone. My mother said: don»t buy anything. <…> I am not guilty of anything else, not involved in anything,« the maniac said directly to the camera. »I have never killed anyone and never will. I have never been in fights, I am incapable.«

But the investigation found evidence: he was capable.

Twice dead

DNA testing reliably established Anatoly Sedykh«s involvement in the murders. Its findings were unequivocal: it was he who raped the unfortunate girls. After this, the maniac stopped denying and confessed to five murders. Later he would retract his testimony.

Investigators gathered evidence of Sedykh«s guilt in three »clean« murders and nine murders with rape. The man was declared sane, and on 19 April 2010, the Lipetsk Regional Court sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was sent to serve his sentence in the Sverdlovsk region, in the »Black Eagle« colony. Later he was transferred to a special regime colony in Mordovia.

In September 2013, information appeared in the media that the maniac had committed suicide. The quickly spreading rumor, however, was soon refuted. Ten years later, when a criminal case was initiated on two previously unknown murder episodes, Anatoly Sedykh did indeed commit suicide. And the story of his crimes, even before his death, became the basis for an episode of the series «The Method» (18+).

Exactly how many girls the Lipetsk strangler killed is still not known for certain. Whether there were 12, 14, or, as some suggested, several dozen, will probably never be established now.