Russia Unheard

Her name was Olga. She was fifteen. She survived three days inside apartment 357, and gave investigators, from a hospital bed in the days before her death, the testimony that became the basis for the entire case. Reconstructed from the published case file, with the most graphic content abstracted. Content advisory: this episode contains accounts of serious violence against a minor. Listener discre...

A release that returned him home without ever facing the original charges. A dog, a mother, and a year - and how he used it. Inside the neighbourhood gatherings, the disappearances no one connected, and the apartment that sat undisturbed on the ninth floor of a building full of people. 

To understand the man behind the door, you have to start before he was a man. A boy at a kitchen table in 1982. A mother who worked among criminal case files and brought them home. The household that formed Alexander Spesivtsev - recorded, carefully, by investigators who came later. 

Before the apartment, there was the river. The Aba runs cold through the industrial edge of Novokuznetsk - not a river anyone visits. In the autumn of 1996, it became part of the investigation, not for what it contained, but for what it returned. How a city searched in every direction except the right one. 

A plumber climbs nine floors on a routine drainage call. The door doesn't open. He smells something he can't unsmell, goes downstairs, and calls the police. By the end of that October afternoon in 1996, the door to apartment 357 has been forced - and what's behind it will take the rest of the season to account for. 

October 24th, 1996. Novokuznetsk, Siberia. A plumber knocks on a ninth-floor door, three times, hard. The man inside refuses to open it. By that evening, the police have broken in - and what they find begins a case Russian courts are still trying to fully account for. Russia Unheard - Apartment 357. Six episodes. Full season launches June 18th.