This day occupies pages 44 through 94 of Volume II of the
transcript.
Kirichenko is still testifying. Today he destroys Malitskaya’s
credibility. Kirichenko
reveals that she did know who visited Cheberyak, something she denied on the
witness stand, as well as changing her story about the noises she heard.
If the government discredits Malitskaya, because her testimony points to Vera, the government theory of a morning murder loses one of its two props. The evidence that people were popping in and out of the house all morning comes from two sources and nobody as cagy as Vera is going to allow a murder under those circumstances. Unfortunately, none of the prosecutors raises the possibility that Malitskaya heard Vera getting help moving the carpet.
Today Zamyslovsky asks Singaevsky, if you thought that the
robbery was an alibi for the murder, you believed it was because you would have
to hide the body as well as commit the murder, and hiding the body would have
pushed back the timing of the robbery.
Singaevsky says yes, sir. Why is
he cooperating with the government?
It’s a payback.
Somebody in the government convinced Singaevsky to confess to the
robbery as an alibi, and he went to the investigator and did so in December,
1912. In April 1912 Rudzinsky used the
same alibi; the case was dismissed relative to him in May, 1912. The confession Latyshev signed in March 1913
was the same one, and when he saw Mandzelevsky, he thought he would be betrayed
to save Mandzelevsky. Within a
month of Latyshev’s death, the courts dismissed the Adamovich robbery case
relative to Singaevsky, without even completing the investigation. The whole stunt pretends that Vera’s gang
were not the murderers and allows the government to focus on Beilis as their
victim.
But what Zamyslovsky has forgotten, is that if the murder
was committed close enough before the robbery that hiding the body would have
interfered with the robbery, it would have happened while Vasily Cheberyak was
home from his job, and that Zhenya was also around. Vasily is still around; the judge has not
released him yet. Nobody calls Vasily
back to the stand to testify about this, now that the prosecution has brought
it up.
Vipper makes a very good point fairly late in the day: that the police suspected a number of people in the
crime at first, so the police had no reason to concentrate on Cheberyak and her
three men. Unfortunately Kirichenko is a
simple, honest soul and he does not go through all the evidence pointing at
them, or even all the dead ends reached in investigating other people. Vipper’s point is that if there was more than
one suspect, there have to be very good grounds for focusing attention away
from some of them.
Vipper’s problem is that by this point in the trial, all the
attention has been focused away from Beilis, and that happened because of the
obvious lies told by the people who accused him – the Cheberyaks – and forging
the Shakhovskys’ depositions, and so on.
Polishchuk is back.
If I was going to describe his appearance today, I would call it Kabuki
in the sense of being an elaborate, stylized performance that means something
only to initiates. Shmakov seems to think Polishchuk is an initiate of all the ideas that obsess Shmakov. Eventually Polishchuk gets tired of pretending to play along and says “I don’t know” or “Ask
Col. Ivanov.”
Toward the end of the day Vipper does another of those
standup routines that pretends that the government never takes anybody to jail
except with reasonable suspicion or probable cause. However, Vera’s gang of four was run in on no
other cause than to check their papers.
The constant pretense at this trial is that the Tsarist legal system
operated like the British one, if not the American one, but examples are rife
throughout that it did not, Beilis’ trial itself being the most glaring
example.
Judge: Fyodor Boldyrev
Prosecution:
Criminal
Prosecutor, Oscar Vipper
Civil Prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky
Civil Prosecutor Georgy Zamyslovsky
Private
Civil Prosecutor Aleksey Shmakov
Defense:
Oscar
Gruzenberg
Nikolay Karabchevsky
Dmitry Grigorevich-Barsky
Alexandr Zarudny
Vasily Maklakov
Page
|
||||
Witness
|
Notes
|
Transcript
|
Translation
|
Statement
|
Evgeny Kirichenko
|
Krasovsky’s and Ivanov’s subordinate
|
44
90
|
1644
1746
|
1
2412
|
Adam Polishchuk
|
Requestioned
|
56
|
1667
|
495
|
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krasovsky
|
Requestioned
|
64
|
1686
|
861
|
Pyotr Singaevsky
|
Murderer, brother of Vera Cheberyak
|
66
80
|
1689
1722
|
902
1828
|
Makhalin
|
Confrontation with Singaevsky
|
73
|
1706
|
1336
|
Boris Andronikovich Rudzinsky
|
Murderer, fiance of Vera’s sister
|
75
|
1708
|
1422
|
Nikolay Mandzelevsky
|
Part of Vera’s gang
|
80
|
1723
|
1867
|
Lenka Shvachko
|
Knew Karaev, heard Rudzinsky’s confession
|
82
|
1729
|
2011
|
Mrs. Zarutskaya
|
Mother of Nazar
Says Vera id’d the body
|
90
|
1747
|
2443
|
Mrs. Pimonenko
|
Knows the story of the quarrel between Zhenya and Andrey
|
91
|
1748
|
2460
|
Pilaev
|
Boy who knows about the quarrel
|
92
|
1751
|
2545
|
Fyodor Sinkevich
|
Priest; re-questioned
|
93
|
1754
|
2601
|
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights
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