Prophetic evidence

Non-traditional interrogation methods proved effective: Russian investigators hired hypnotists

The referent of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor's Office (SKP) Dmitry Marininov was shot dead in January last year near the house where he lived with his family. A year later, investigators announced that the investigation had been completed. According to Newsweek, hypnotists helped investigators find the killer. And this is not the first time that investigators have used non-traditional, but quite legal, interrogation methods. Hypnotists, psychologists and polygraph examiners are now officially on the staff of the Main Directorate of Criminalistics of the UPC. Created in January, the GUK is a full-fledged center of expertise, which conducts all types of research, including hypno-reproductive (soft hypnosis) and psycho-physiological ones using lie detectors. All these know-hows really work. According to Newsweek, last year alone, the SKP conducted 79 sessions of mild hypnosis in different regions of Russia, and many of them turned out to be useful for the investigation. Hypnotists are listed in the GUK as referents, and they are called specialists in memory activation there.

REMEMBER ALL

Memory activation specialists helped compile an identikit of the killer Dmitry Marininov. The assistant, who worked in the Main Directorate of Internal Security of the Investigative Committee, was shot near the house in Krasnoe Selo near St. Petersburg. The killer pierced the rear wheel of Marininov's Mercedes, and when he began to change it, he approached him from behind and shot him in the head. After that, the killer went through the yards to the next street, from where he was taken by an accomplice in a car.

The murder of the counterintelligence officer caused a commotion among the St. Petersburg security forces, and the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, even interrupted his visit to Finland. Despite all the efforts of the investigation, the case stalled due to the lack of eyewitnesses. Only at the beginning of last March did the operatives have a weak lead. They found a witness who had seen a man spinning around Marininov's car shortly before the murder. However, the witness could not remember his appearance.

The investigators offered him the help of a gentle hypnosis specialist, and he agreed. “A person, like a computer, has a “working” memory and a “permanent” - unconscious, where everything that he has ever seen or heard is deposited, ”says the criminologist of the SKP. The task of the activator is to extract the necessary information from the deep memory of a person using special techniques.

The session took place in one of the free rooms of the investigative headquarters, from which the telephone, computer and all objects that could divert the attention of the witness were previously removed, says one of the employees of the Investigative Committee. With the help of mild hypnosis, a memory activation specialist returned the witness to January 15, 2009, and he was able to remember the moment of the murder of Marininov. Under the recording of a video camera, the hypnotist asked the witness questions, and he answered with gestures. “During hypnosis, the reactions of the left hemisphere are suppressed in a person, so he can only respond with gestures, signals, and sometimes he can write or draw something,” explains Moscow hypnologist Pavel Ponomarev. So the investigators got a sketch of the suspect.

Marininov was the main witness for the prosecution at the trial in the case of one of the St. Petersburg groups of drug dealers, which included policemen, so the investigators began to look for the organizers and perpetrators of the murder in this circle. Sergei Strelnikov, Sergei Ivanov, and the gypsy baron Sergei Kirilchuk were soon arrested. The identikit approached Strelnikov, who was charged with the murder of Marininov. According to one version, Marininov got involved in a conflict between drug dealers in the Krasnoselsky district of the city and was killed by a killer hired by one of the gangs.

30 000 AND BONUSES

The Marininov case is one of the most high-profile, but far from the first, when specialists in mild hypnosis helped the investigators. So, thanks to hypnologists, the capital's operatives got an identikit of the killer who blew up the North Ossetian vodka magnate Oleg Gioev in April 2007 in the center of Moscow. In 2008, with the help of hypnologists, an employee of the fire department in Solikamsk, Alexander Gerashchenko, was detained. Over the course of nine years, he killed seven people. The victims were military, policemen and security guards. The criminal killed them for service weapons. Gerashchenko was seen by four witnesses, but each of them described him differently. Investigators called an expert psychologist from Moscow, Professor Alexei Skrypnikov, who helped the witnesses remember the exact signs of the killer. And the other day in Omsk, a murder two years ago was solved. The witness was able to recall the license plate numbers of the car in which the criminals fled. All of them were detained.

However, not every hypnosis is suitable for investigation. With deep hypnosis, which produces more effective results, investigators prefer not to get involved. “All cases with evidence obtained in this way fell apart, because the court believed that hypnotists interfere with the minds of witnesses,” says one of the Moscow investigators.

Lawyers oppose any interference in the human mind. “The Code of Criminal Procedure clearly spells out how the investigation should be conducted, and it doesn’t say about any assistants to memories,” explains Vladimir Zherebenkov, lawyer at the Human and Law Collegium. “All these exotic techniques have not been studied, not certified, and it is not clear how they generally affect people’s consciousness.”

Criminologists treat criticism philosophically. “The new is always perceived ambiguously,” says Yury Lekanov, head of the GUK, to Newsweek. “There were times when even fingerprinting was not considered evidence, and in the USSR protocols typed on a typewriter and photography were banned.”

All of the memory activation specialists in the SPC come from professional medicine backgrounds. Most state expert centers lack narrow-profile specialists, so investigators have to look for them in commercial structures. Some were lured away by higher salaries and service bonuses. “They pay thirty thousand a month, and there are additional supplements, so everyone is happy,” a high-ranking investigator assures.

INVESTIGATION LEADS "DIANA"

Since this year, investigators have had wide access to yet another know-how. It is not as exotic as hypnotists, but more popular and well-known. Since January, polygraphs have been supplied to the regional departments of the Investigative Committee, and now, as investigators say, they are already in all 84 territorial divisions. Hundreds of high-profile crimes have been solved with the help of polygraphs in recent years.

For example, the murder of a crime boss in Sterlitamak in April last year. The blame was taken by one of the henchmen of the murdered, and his involvement in the crime was confirmed by the only witness. Investigators doubted their testimony and suggested that both take a lie detector test. The device clearly showed that the alleged killer does not know the important details of the murder. But they were well known to the witness. So the investigators found out that it was he who dealt with authority.

The use of polygraphs also has its own characteristics. The accuracy of the readings of the device depends on the condition of the person. For example, whether he has a hangover or not. “The subject must be healthy, with normal pressure and temperature,” says Moscow polygraph examiner Vladimir Lukashin. According to him, recently people have been trying to deceive lie detectors by using psychotropic drugs before the session. Only devices of the latest generations can recognize this.

Lawyers are ambivalent about the polygraph. “I will never allow my client to be tested on a lie detector, because there is no guarantee that the expert is independent of the investigation,” says Moscow lawyer Yevgeny Chernousov. “The investigator must collect evidence in legal and traditional ways.” The data obtained with the help of detectors is the so-called auxiliary evidence. “If I come to court only with the conclusion of a polygraph examiner, then they will simply send me away,” says one of the investigators.

“We are purchasing the domestic Diana system, which suits us optimally in terms of price-quality ratio,” says the source in the UPC. Each such complex costs about 200,000 rubles. However, this line of devices is considered not the best on the market. “This device occupies only 20% of the polygraph market, because it does not have, for example, an important function of recognizing resistance to research (when a person takes special drugs. - Newsweek ),” says Lukashin. The functional modesty of the devices is compensated by the experience of their operators, they explain in the UPC.

However, one of the investigators of the Metropolitan Department of the UPC told Newsweek that there is not a single sensible polygraph specialist in the country and "it is too early to use them - the price of a mistake for a particular person is too high." He explains that in Russia there is still no single methodology for polygraph examinations, and polygraph examiners cannot compile questionnaires in a quality manner.

As an example, he cites a case from his practice. In one of the colonies, a prisoner was killed. All suspicions fell on his neighbor - a drug addict with many years of experience. The lie detector unequivocally pointed to him as the killer, but after traditional examinations, the investigators excluded him from the number of suspects. As it turned out, the body of a drug addict, even a few years after the “tie”, gave out an inadequate reaction.

GOOD OLD

Simple psychologists also help to investigate crimes. If memory activation specialists make sketches based on the memories of witnesses, then psychologists work on psychological portraits of suspects. An expert can calculate the sex, age and character traits of a person. “Such methods proved to be useful for investigating the cases of well-known nationalist groups and the murder in November 2009 of priest Daniil Sysoev,” says one of the investigators of the Investigative Committee for Moscow.

In the latter case, the psychologist suggested that the priest was killed not by a mentally ill person and not by pagan nationalists, but by radical Islamists. A few days after that, the Islamists really took responsibility for the murder of Sysoev. Psychologists helped to uncover the disappearance of two boys in the winter of 2009 in Orekhovo-Zuev near Moscow. Initially, it was assumed that the boys decided to go camping, but the psychologist denied this version. After that, the search area was greatly reduced. It turned out that the boys drowned in a local pond.

Some investigators claim that now they themselves are able to make psychological portraits of people. “Ten years ago, we noticed the character traits of each of our wards and soon realized that they could solve crimes with their help,” says a member of the investigation team in the case of the Orekhovo-Medvedkovskaya organized criminal group. According to him, some bandits were cowards and stupid executors of orders, others were ambitious and lived for glory, and still others treated their lifestyle as ordinary work - they did everything only for money.

“Knowing this, we with a high degree of probability figured out who ordered whom, what motivated them and who could carry out the murder,” the investigator says. In early March, the Spanish police extradited to Russia the last of the leaders of the group - Sergei Butorin, nicknamed Osya. He was just from the second category - ambitious seekers of glory.