Psychiatrist Artem Gilev explained why criminals dismember their victims

The case of the former clergyman of the Chistopol diocese from Nizhnekamsk, Mikhail Zubarev, is striking in its savagery. According to one version, the suspect committed his atrocity out of jealousy, but people who know the family do not confirm it: the mother never gave her husband any reason, she was quiet and obedient, and none of the relatives heard about quarrels and conflicts. As MK wrote, in his youth he was severely beaten by his peers, injuring his head. At the same time, as the diocese reported after Zubarev’s arrest, “the cleric suspected of murder hid from the clergy the fact that he was registered in a psychiatric dispensary in another region.” Over the past few months, people around him began to notice strange behavior in his behavior.

To decide the fate of the sinner priest, a meeting of the diocesan court headed by the ruling bishop will soon take place. In the footage taken after the priest was brought to court, he is sitting on a bench with his head down, covering his face with his hands.

On November 1, another criminal news came, this time from Orsk (Orenburg region). A man suspected of killing and dismembering his lover was detained there. The couple led an antisocial lifestyle. The woman was killed a week ago, but the suspect decided to get rid of the body parts only on November 1. At the same time, the inadequate person scattered the remains along the fence of the kindergarten. Fragments of the body protruding from the bags were accidentally discovered by a woman who was taking her child to kindergarten…

“In order to evaluate this particular case of the murder of his wife by a clergyman and the dismemberment of her body, it is necessary to analyze the results of a forensic psychiatric examination,” says Executive Director of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia Lyubov Vinogradova. – As the media write, this man suffered from schizophrenia, but hid it from his circle. On the other hand, we sometimes encounter similar crimes committed by seemingly completely healthy people, at least not suffering from any severe chronic mental illness. At the same time, they are deviant pathological personalities, characteropaths by nature or of traumatic, organic and other exogenous origin (characteropathy – disharmony of personality with an exacerbation of individual traits of its character – Auth.).

In the International Classification of Diseases, Lyubov Vinogradova continues, there is a category F 65 – disorders of sexual preference. Among other disorders, necrophilia is mentioned there. You need to know that necrophilia is not only the desire to commit sexual acts with inanimate bodies, but also abuse of them, including dismemberment. Such actions are performed in cases of mental retardation and various psychoses. One of the behavioral signs of this latter in this tragic incident is that the former clergyman did not spare his own children, displaying the mother’s head in the refrigerator (or even, according to one version, began to kill the mother in front of her young daughter).

“And, finally, the most important thing,” says Vinogradova, “there is a widespread opinion that murders with extreme cruelty, abuse of corpses, etc. usually committed by mentally ill people, completely wrong! There are many more rapists and murderers among the healthy. It is not without reason that only 10% of people sent for a forensic psychiatric examination in connection with committing a murder or inflicting serious bodily harm are declared insane, that is, they did not understand the meaning of their actions at the time of the crime. The rest did it quite consciously, sometimes with a premeditated plan. It must be understood that the regular lessons of hatred that people receive on television also contribute to brutality and incite cruelty.

…Of perhaps the most sensational criminal acts involving dismemberment, the one that immediately comes to mind is Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University, historian Oleg Sokolov, who killed his 24-year-old graduate student lover in 2019. Now the 67-year-old criminal is serving a 12.5-year sentence in a colony. Let us remember that in a state of passion, in response to allegedly insulting his girlfriend, Sokolov killed her, and then dismembered her and tried to drown the backpack with the remains in the Moika River. Just at that moment a taxi driver passing by saw him. During interrogation, the criminal said that he did not remember what he did after the murder, including how he dismembered the victim. But a forensic psychiatric examination found him sane. According to research results, Sokolov did this using a regular saw.

And the next year, another monstrous crime from the same series occurs in St. Petersburg: rapper Andy Cartwright was found dead in an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, but not just dead, but torn into fragments by his own wife Marina Kohal. After a series of similar shocking stories that followed each other, St. Petersburg even began to be unofficially called the capital of “dismemberment”; many dark jokes appeared on this score…

Psychiatrist Artem Gilev explained to MK the essence of the actions of the dismemberment killers:

“I can’t say that cases of dismemberment have become more frequent; they have always existed,” says Artem Andreevich. – Then, we should not forget that earlier such cases were written less about, they did not become public as often, and the media were not as nimble as they are now.

– What categories of people can do this in our time?

– Since a person has already committed murder, if he already has the ability to take the life of another person, then dismembering a dead body is, in fact, a piece of cake for him. He needs to cover up the murder to avoid punishment. There is nothing extraordinary here. If a person commits a murder, then he already has certain personality characteristics, most likely these are some kind of accentuations (disharmony in character development, which manifests itself in the excessive expression of individual traits; accentuation is not a mental disorder, but can increase the risk of developing psychological problems, especially in stressful situations, – Auth.) or personality disorders. If he allowed himself to kill, that means he can afford to dismember or eat a person…

About how this relates to mental illness. It happens that a person committed a murder because of some delusional experiences, and he also dismembered him under the influence of “voices in his head.” But these are already cases associated with psychosis. You need to know the medical history, you need to communicate with the person, you need to examine him – without an examination it is impossible to say whether he had a severe mental disorder at that moment.

– Could this be how the priest’s schizophrenia manifested itself?

– It is impossible to say about this in absentia. If, for example, a person had voices and delirium, then the murder could well be connected with this. But a person suffering from schizophrenia could also kill out of hatred or jealousy, or because of some other emotion that prompted him to do so.

Doctor Vadim from Moscow, who is involved in forensic medical examination, also shared his opinion:

“Many murders are committed against an emotional background, but the killers go for dismemberment with a cold calculation to conceal the crime. They put themselves above all else, they want to avoid punishment, and therefore they are ready to take any action for this,” he told MK. – The feeling of self-preservation suppresses all other emotions, and they have only one thought in their heads: to get rid of the body by any means, so as not to sit down.