Shortly after the end of the Great Patriotic War, children and teenagers began to go missing on the streets of Omsk. Authorities thought a serial killer was operating in the city, while a rumor that a vampire was hiding in the Gigant movie theater began circulating among Omsk residents.
According to a local newspaper report, the first child went missing in the fall of 1946. Over the course of six months, 20 more children vanished.
Most victims disappeared after going to the Gigant movie theater. The place quickly became notorious and many parents refused to send their children to watch movies alone.
When the public found out what happened, they decided to take care of the problem themselves. A large crowd of Omsk residents went to Gigant and simply burned it to the ground to make no child would be killed in the movie theater ever again.
Being atheist, the Soviet government, of course, didn’t want to hear anything about the vampire and instead carried out its own criminal investigation, eventually finding out what had actually happened.
It turned out there was no Siberian Dracula, who was killing the children, but a band of murderers led by Pelageya Belyaeva and her son Anatoly Vorobyov. The mother and the son hammered together the band of ruthless murderers seeking to rob children of their clothes.
After the war, children’s clothes were in scarcity across Omsk, like in many other parts of the country. There were simply not enough factories to manufacture clothes, let alone clothes for children. That created a high deficit in children’s clothes that could only be found for a high price from street venders in the city.
The murderous gang thought they could make a living by killing children and selling their clothes. And so the killings began.
The city’s biggest movie theater, Gigant, became the gang’s favorite place to find victims. Gigant had regular movie sessions for children and since many of them came to watch movies by themselves they had become perfect targets for Vorobyov and his partners in crime.
Gang members lured children to the attic of the movie theater, promising to show them a free movie or offering them a chocolate bar. When the child went upstairs, he or she was never seen again.
All the gang members were eventually arrested and prosecuted. After that the killings stopped. In the end it turned out that Gigant, which was one of the best movie theaters in Siberia, was burned for no real reason.
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