19-year-old Roman Butenko had graduated from a college of culture and wanted to become a guitar teacher. He was training to take part in the Ukrainian bodybuilding championship. But in September 1994 he was arrested by law enforcement officers of Dzerzhinsky police department in Kharkov. Government investigator from Kharkov city prosecutor’s office Valeriya Meshkova charged him with rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, Tanya Rekhina.

The policemen tried to force him to confess to the crime. Butenko refused to shoulder somebody else’s sin. He pleaded investigator Meshkova to stop the beatings. But she asked her husband, criminal investigator Major Ivan Litvinov, to help her build up the case. “You don’t live in America. You’d better forget about human rights. We’ll beat you till you’re dead,” the major said to Roman.

Butcher Litvinov hardened the methods of interrogation. He got wardens of the Kharkov pre-trial holding facility to take part in torturing the arrested. They placed Butenko into a separate cell. They beat him with an iron rod and a baton, breaking his elbow joint and inflicting a craniocerebral trauma. Six months the young man spent in the prison hospital. The doctors didn’t provide him with any kind of medical assistance. Roman had to bandage his arm himself. The bones knit in a wrong way and the arm became crooked.

Investigator Meshkova paid no attention to bruises and livid spots that Butenko had after questionings. In tightly closed vaults and offices the policemen continued to cripple the lad. The young rooster was very much afraid of groans and yells of the helpless Roman. The rooster flapped the wings and screamed frightfully. A policeman would seize the cock by the legs and, bringing the frightened bird up to the face of the arrested, would say, “We’re going to kill you, and no one will be able to find out where your corpse would be buried. Your only witness is this cock here. But we’ll make a broth out of it”.

Butenko didn’t endure the torture. He was so exhausted and crushed, he couldn’t think. He could only cry and wince of pain. So he wrote a confession. He confessed he had raped and murdered 16-year-old Tanya Rekhina, although he had never seen her.

The bill of indictment contained several fantastic episodes that had been made up by investigators Viktoria Meshkova, Anatoly Demchenko and Vyatcheslav Kobzev. For example, they maintained that Roman raped Tanya in a doorway and strangled her with her silk trousers. Then he allegedly stuffed cloth scraps into her mouth, seared her breasts with a cigarette, and took Tanya, whose weight was 70 kg, into his arms to carry her to a sewer manhole that was 900 meters away from the doorway. The murderer carried his victim along a crowded street, but none of the passers-by paid any attention to it.

The investigation lasted 3 years. Judge Nikolai Kushnarenko of the Kharkov regional court sentenced Butenko to 15-year’s imprisonment. Lawyer Anatoly Suprun and his client didn’t succumb to the heavy and cruel sentence. In 1999, taking into account their arguments and proofs, chairman of the panel of judges of the Kharkov regional court Sergei Kamyshev acquitted Roman. By that time Roman had already spent almost 5 years in the remand prison and in labour settlements. The judge awarded Roman $14,000 for moral damages. But Roman has received no money so far, as officials are still arguing with each other which establishment should pay the damages.

For three years now Butenko has been unsuccessfully trying to bring to justice criminal investigator Ivan Litvinov, investigators Viktoria Meshkova, Anatoly Demchenko and Vyatcheslav Kobzev, law enforcement officers of the Dzerzhinsky police department and the Kharkov pre-trial holding facility. An investigator from the prosecutor general’s office came to Kharkov to settle the matter. He told Roman that there are 60 policemen in the Dzerzhinsky police department, and it’s hard to find among them those who beat him. And as doctors of the prison hospital burned Butenko’s medical file, it is impossible to verify whether he had a broken arm and a craniocerebral trauma or not. Prosecutors and investigators who built up the case have been promoted and now work in the regional prosecutor’s office.

The only witness who didn’t receive promotion is the rooster, who screamed heat-rending during the torture. But it turned out that in 1996 policemen chopped off his head and cooked a broth out of him during their drinking-bout.