killed to eliminate witnesses. Murders Ionesyan never planned his crimes beforehand. Pretending to be a controller from Mosgaz or an employee of ZhEkA No. 13, he went to apartments, took reading from meters and checked gas burners. While choosing the place of the future robbery, he was guided not so much by the rich decoration of the apartment, but by the number of people in it. As a weapon he used a tourist hatchet, bought from GUM. Oustretched outer detail was the ushanka, which Ionesyan, unlike the overwhelming number of Muscovites, tied at the back of the head, and not on the top, which immediately gave investigators a tip to the fact that the killer was a non-resident. Nevertheless, there are cases when Ionesyan put on a kepi instead of an ushanka. The first victim Ionesyan committed the first murder on December 20, 1963 in apartment No. 95 on the fourth floor on Baltiskaya Street in the Sokol District. Under the guise of a Mosgaz employee, he walked through several apartments at a time, where he inspected for a convenient victim under the pretext of a preventative inspection of gas equipment. That convenient victim was 12-year-old Konstantin Sobolev. After making sure that there was no one at home, Ionesyan inflicted a large number of blows with the axe on the boy (according to other sources, the killer used a knife, and this was the only time he supposedly used a knife). After killing the child, Ionesyan took his sweater, 60 rubles, a bottle of cologne "Shipr" and beach glasses. After questioning the tenants of the house, the police went to 9-year-old Vladimir Teplov (to protect the witness in all documents, including at court, his name was listed as Artem Frolov). The three-room communal apartment No. 86, located on the second floor, was the first one Ionesyan entered when he was in the house (there were no residential premises on the first floor). Ionesyan, who was there, asked if there was anyone else at home, to which the boy answered mechanically: "Everybody is at home", although in the apartment, except for him, was only his 70-year-old grandmother and a baby. Probably, because of this, Ionesyan did not attack the boy, but, in hesitation, went into the kitchen and inspected the gas stove, from the handle of which policemen removed the clear fingerprints of his fingers. Teplov's testimony (in particular, that the