Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
A pedophile serial rapist and murderer of girls was the Russian Valery Georgievich Asratyan, better known as the Director. He was born in 1958 in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. He grew up in a loving and well-off family, but already stood out in kindergarten because he liked to play doctor with the girls. Valery slipped into the role of the doctor who examined the girls naked. Valery was an intelligent boy and a good student, but also very precocious, having sex with a 15-year-old girl at the age of 13. After graduating from school, he began studying at the Pedagogical University, which he successfully completed in 1980. At that time, he had discovered the novel Lolita by 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 character of the protagonist Humbert and developed a weakness for underage girls. After graduating, 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. After his release from prison, Valery was by no means reformed. He raped another girl and was sentenced to two years in prison 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. But Valery soon had a new wife by his side, 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 duo became Valery’s accomplices in his perfidious crimes against underage girls. From 1988 onwards, he lured them into his apartment with the following trick, which earned him his nickname “The Director.” He approached underage girls on the street and pretended to be a famous film director looking for new faces for television. He invited them to his apartment for a casting. There, he gave them coffee mixed with psychotropic substances. When the girls were completely sedated, almost completely out of it, he beat and raped them until he lost interest in his new “sex toys.” At first, he did not kill the girls. But later, he took their lives for fear of being caught by the police. 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 and, miraculously, had no major memory gaps from the drugs administered, as was the case with the other victims. This witness testimony finally led the police to Valery, who was arrested in 1990. He immediately confessed to two murders and 17 rapes, which meant the death penalty. Valery wanted this because he feared punishment by the prisoners in a penal colony. Child molesters’ lives were made hell there. Valery was sentenced to death. In 1996, Valery was executed by firing squad in Butyrka Prison. With that, the director was finally history.
