Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
The Russian Valery Georgievich Asratyan, better known as ‘the Director’, was a paedophile, serial rapist and murderer of young girls. He was born in 1958 in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. He grew up in a loving and well-off family, but even at nursery school he stood out because he enjoyed playing ‘doctor’ with the girls. Valery would take on the role of the doctor, examining the girls whilst they were naked. Valery was an intelligent boy and a good pupil, but he was also very precocious, having sex with a 15-year-old girl at the age of just 13. After finishing school, he began a degree at the Pedagogical University, which he successfully completed in 1980. Around this time, he had discovered the novel Lolita by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov, in which the literary scholar Humbert falls madly in love with the young girl Lolita and enters into a sexual relationship with her. Valery identified with the protagonist Humbert and developed a penchant for underage girls. After completing his studies, he married a woman from Moscow in 1981. From then on, the couple lived in Russia’s capital, where Valery raped an underage girl for the first time in 1982, for which he received a two-year prison sentence. Upon his release from prison, Valery was by no means reformed. He raped another girl and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for this in 1985. After serving his sentence in 1987, he lived in Valuyki for a short time before returning to Moscow, where his wife left him. However, Valery soon had a new partner, who had a teenage daughter. He began an intimate relationship with the 14-year-old girl, whom he had made compliant through threats. The mother-daughter pair became Valery’s accomplices in his perfidious crimes against underage girls. From 1988 onwards, he lured them into his flat using the following trick, which earned him the nickname ‘The Director’. On the street, he would approach underage girls and pose as a famous film director looking for new faces for television. He invited them to his flat for a casting. There, he served them coffee laced with psychotropic substances. Once the girls were completely sedated, almost in a trance-like state, he beat and raped them until he had lost interest in his new ‘sex toy’. Initially, he did not kill the girls. But later he took their lives, out of fear of being caught by the police. In doing so, he always chose a different method of murder to suggest to the police that there were different perpetrators. This worked well until 1990, when one victim managed to escape; miraculously, she had no major memory lapses caused by the drugs she had been given, unlike the other victims. Thanks to this witness statement, the police finally caught on to Valery, who was arrested in 1990. He immediately confessed to two murders and 17 rapes, which meant the death penalty. Valery wanted this, as he feared the punishment meted out by the inmates in a penal colony. For child abusers, life there was made a living hell. Valery was sentenced to death. In 1996, Valery was executed by firing squad at Butyrka Prison. With that, the director was finally consigned to history.
