ET 29 years ago today

I had my latest Executed Today entry run today: Gennady Modestovich Mikhasevich, an astonishingly prolific serial killer from the Belarusian SSR who murdered somewhere between 36 and 55+ people in fourteen years.

There were two huge problems that prevented the cops from capturing him sooner. The first problem is that, as with the Andrei Chikatilo case, the investigators believed serial murder was the product of decadent capitalism and could not possibly exist in a socialist paradise like the Soviet Union. The second problem is that Gennady Mikhasevich was a member of the Soviet equivalent of the Neighborhood Watch and was therefore much better informed about the movements and activities of the police than the average person.

This is a really interesting story. HBO made an awesome movie about Chikatilo, called Citizen X, which you can stream for free if you have Amazon Prime. I think the Mikhasevich story would also be movie-worthy. As far as I can tell there are no English-language books at all about this man, although there is probably something in Russian.

Regarding that podcast

I had mentioned that a guy who does podcasts about missing people was going to interview me this past Friday. Well, we did talk for an hour and he seemed absolutely fascinated by me and asked all sorts of questions and I wound up telling him all sorts of stuff about the inner workings on the Charley Project. And then I sent him some emails with more stuff, some links to some of the cases I’d mentioned him, info about the social media, etc.

The talk I had with him was actually a “pre-interview”, though. I’ve done those before. Basically it’s a rehearsal for the actual interview: the interviewer and interviewee talk and together they basically figure out a general plan for how the interview will go and what questions will be asked and so on.

Pre-interviews can be very important, especially if the actual interview is live. I was once interviewed on Skype by a TV station in Colombia. The interviewer spoke English, but her accent was so pronounced that several times I had to say “I didn’t understand that, can you repeat it? And maybe say it more slowly?” This was in the pre-interview, thank goodness, because in a live interview that would have been a big mess. But I learned what she was saying and during the actual interview there were no misunderstandings of that kind.

So my actual Charley Project interview on this person’s podcast won’t be done for another few weeks — I sent him a lot of material to look over and he wants to do it right, and this isn’t going to be like a two-minute sound bite type thing. But here’s his podcast on iTunes. They’re all free. He just put out four new episodes. He did mention that all the shows together total 6 1/2 hours in length, so listen at your own risk.