The most terrible maniac strangler, Voronenko, came to St. Petersburg: he killed children

MK help:

Criminal record of maniac Dmitro Voronenko:

• 1997 – Art. 158 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (theft). Conditionally for two years.
• 1998 – Art. 114 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (causing grievous or moderate harm to health when exceeding the limits of necessary defense). The term is one year.
• 1999, art. 158 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (theft). The prescribed punishment is 3 years imprisonment. He served a year and was pardoned.
• 2004 – Art. 132 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (rape). He was sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in prison. He served 13 months and was released on parole. In 2005, he left for Kyrgyzstan to the city of Kok-Jangak.
• 2008, sentenced by the St. Petersburg City Court to life imprisonment for the murder of 4 people, with the addition of a sentence from 2004.

The prisoner rattles shackles (the so-called nizhniki, they are connected with handcuffs by a chain) as he walks on the St. Petersburg soil. It looks scary, but in this case, few would think of being outraged by such an “inhumane” approach. The maniac himself seems even happy: after all, he was brought to the City on the Neva from the edge of permafrost – the village of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, where Voronenko spent all his last years.

…Classical music flows from the radio. A strange prisoner in a black prison uniform with white stripes listens to her in fascination. He himself has a repulsive appearance with empty eyes. This is Dmitry Voronenko. And the MK columnist described this scene several years ago, when she was in the Polar Owl colony for life prisoners. By that time, Voronenko had been sitting there for almost 10 years. The serial killer there was often compared to Alexander Pichushkin (who tracked down and killed 49 people in Bitsevsky Park in Moscow). So they said: “We have two terrible prisoners here, two maniacs – Voronenko and Pichushkin. Nobody wants to be in the same cell with them. But keeping them together is dangerous: they will kill each other. It is clear that few people will regret the murder in this case, but for the administration this is an emergency. So they are kept in solitary confinement.”

In general, Voronenko and Pichushkin, although recognized as sane, speak and behave as if they were mentally ill. After just five minutes of communicating with them, it is clear that these are real maniacs who are proud of their terrible crimes. The convicts who encountered Voronenko called him completely inadequate, a beast in human form (it was surprising to hear this from murderers and rapists). They talked about him:

– Laughs at random and until he hoarse, talks about tortured victims.

Voronenko also voiced his dreams of being released (it is not clear what he hoped for). At that time, the parents of the girls he tortured demanded the death penalty for him. They even went all the way to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court upheld the life sentence.

“Voronenko told me about his life,” says the former Polar Owl operative. – About how I was born in Central Asia, grew up in Ukraine and moved to St. Petersburg as an adult. I remember he had some kind of bestial hatred for all living things. Since childhood he tortured animals, and then switched to people. He told me a lot of things, but I didn’t have time to “finalize” him – I went to Chechnya on a business trip. And then another maniac wrote a false statement against me, as if I was forcing a confession. And after that I was fired, and Voronenko, apparently, was not questioned for a long time about crimes to which he did not admit.

In “Polar Owl”, many convicts write confessions, but they are not always verified (often the prisoners invent new episodes in order to be taken out of this place). But recently, apparently, Voronenko got his hands on it. He wrote a confession a year ago. He specifically indicated that this was his very first murder. The investigator who came to him interviewed the killer, documented and… chose a preventive measure for him in the form of a written undertaking not to leave the place. It would seem absurd. How can I leave the PZ colony? But it turned out that this is common practice.

The other day Voronenko was transferred to St. Petersburg. He is being held in pre-trial detention center No. 1 (new “Crosses” in Kolpino) in a separate cell.

“He was taken to the Oktyabrsky District Court to re-elect a preventive measure,” says Daria Lebedeva, head of the joint press service of the city courts. – In order to be legally kept in a pre-trial detention center, this was necessary. And he was taken to the detention center, in turn, for investigative actions. He behaved calmly in court. He only said that his rights were clear and that he did not object to the preventive measure. That’s all.

Voronenko, as it became known, entered into an agreement with the investigation. But this does not cancel holding confrontations, going to the scene of a murder, etc. And then he awaits trial. Exactly 16 years ago, a maniac was detained here in St. Petersburg and two years later sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 4 girls.

Then, we repeat, it was officially considered that his first victim was a fifth-grader, whose body was found in the basement of a house on Bolshaya Raznochinnaya Street. Before killing her, the maniac tortured her for several hours.

Now it is known that it was not she who became the first, but Lyudmila, a 6th grade student at one of the schools in the Kirov region. She, like two other victims, was only 11 years old at the time of her death. Her skeletal remains were found between the Krasnenkaya River and the elevator site on May 2, 2007. But then the investigation did not have direct evidence that Voronenko took the girl’s life. But the maniac was silent. Today the investigation knows the whole picture of the crime, and the killer has been completely exposed. Luda passed away on September 26, 2006. Then the fanatic waylaid her on the road, attacked her from behind and dragged her into the bushes. There he strangled and violated me.

Even in those terrible days and weeks, operatives suspected that there could be many more victims than four. There were too many similarities in “handwriting” in Lyuda’s case. She, like other victims, was first strangled with items of clothing and then raped.

But there was not enough evidence. Unfortunately, as investigators later told reporters, during the investigation they came across the wild indifference of people. Even those who saw something did not want to remember anything or communicate with the investigation. But there were also clues that led to the capture of the killer. The first thing that matched was the crime scene. During the investigation, it turned out that the maniac has his own “favorite” areas in St. Petersburg. Voronenko killed young girls and children in the Kirov, Petrograd and Primorsky regions. (Note that at the time of the capture of the maniac, the Kirovsky district was ahead of other districts of St. Petersburg in terms of sad statistics. From 2005 to 2006, 9 people suffered from rape and sexual assault here, including three little girls). The second is the manner of killing. The maniac lay in wait for the victims mainly in the evening and always attacked from behind, suppressed resistance and strangled them. All the victims were fragile and short, since Voronenko himself is short.

At that time, a murderer-guest worker from Ukraine was suspected of several dozen murders in St. Petersburg. The department for combating especially serious crimes of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region believed that he was involved in many atrocities.

The main witness was the surviving victim of the maniac. On that terrible evening when he attacked her, the girl was going to visit her grandparents’ dacha in the Kirovets gardening garden. Voronenko suddenly emerged from the bushes and dragged him into a ditch, where he raped me for an hour. This girl was lucky, the maniac didn’t kill her. Subsequently, she gave valuable testimony and accurately described his appearance, which helped to catch Voronenko.

When Voronenko was caught, they first identified the area and located the house. They sat in ambush for several days. When he was detained, Voronenko tried to escape. He couldn’t believe that he was caught after all, and even fainted. As experts later said, he was very sensitive to himself. He told the operatives that he was poor and unhappy, that he did not understand how he committed murders and rapes, that the world around him and the women who refused him intimacy were to blame for everything. He behaved cowardly and shielded himself in every possible way. “He was only brave in dark basements,” the operatives said then, “one on one with a frightened child.”

In a series of conversations with psychiatrists and psychologists, it became clear that Voronenko had no interests in his life. His eyes lit up only when he told how he tried to meet girls and they refused him. With his work colleagues – when he managed to find a hack job – he talked only about this. Psychiatrists found he had a mixed personality disorder and a tendency towards sadism. However, all of the above did not reach the point where a person cannot realize the socially dangerous nature of his actions. The killer was completely sane. His drug was lust. He did not sympathize with his victims, did not feel remorse. “A rare creature,” those who had to work with him during the investigation say about him. At court hearings, he mocked the sobbing mothers, had fun and mockingly grinned at the experts in the face. As investigators say, “until the very end I hoped that I would get out.” Realization came to him when the court imposed capital punishment on him, which by law was replaced by life imprisonment. In those years, the mothers of murdered children began a whole campaign for the return of the death penalty.

The new process, we hope, will restore faith in justice to the relatives of his very first victim. But for the maniac himself, the stage and content in “Crosses” is just entertainment, a long-awaited change of scenery after the harsh conditions in “Polar Owl”. Most likely, that’s the only reason he confessed, in order to arrange a “vacation” for himself from a colony for life-sentenced prisoners. By the way, his former cellmate, nationalist Alexey Voevodin, also sentenced to life, did exactly the same thing. He is also now in St. Petersburg, waiting for a new trial in an old criminal case. But what awaits Voronenko? Most likely another life sentence. This doesn’t seem to change much for him, but at least he definitely won’t be able to count on parole and retraining.