The Toksovo Ten

Epilogue

On August 23rd, 1903, The Voice received a letter from New York from a Mrs. Emma Murphy, that created such a stir in their offices that they immediately rushed to publish it in their next paper. The article read as follows:

LETTER FROM TOKSOVO TEN KILLER ARRIVES AT VOICE OFFICES!

Just last night, The Voice received a stunning letter from New York, purporting to be regarding the 'Toksovo Ten' killings of 1870-1871. Readers may recall this case, which has gone down as one of the most shocking serial killings in Russia's history. Ten St. Petersburg residents, all either members of or closely connected with the aristocratic Tolstyakov family, received letters on July 28th, 1870, from a person calling themselves '10,' who threatened that they would pay for their wrongs against them. After that, each of the note recipients was murdered over the course of six months, and each murder had a red number found at the crime scene associated with the order of their death. Police finally arrested the last living note recipient, Darya Petrovna Chebarova, after she was discovered murdering her brother, Nikolai Petrovich Tolstyakov. Chebarova was hanged February 15th, 1871, Russia's only execution for a non-treasonous offense in recent history. With overwhelming evidence against her, it was widely assumed that Chebarova was guilty of the murders. That is, until now. The letter the Voice received reads as follows:

To whom it may concern,

If you are reading this, it means that I have died. I have given my dear wife instructions to send this letter under a false name to the Voice's offices in St. Petersburg upon my death. I trust that she will not read the letter, and will carry out my request faithfully.

My reason for writing this letter is a vain one– I simply cannot rest easy knowing that the world will never know that I was the genius behind the so-called 'Toksovo Ten' murders, one of the most intricate and baffling murder cases in history. For now I must be content to let my former wife take the credit for them– it's safer that way, and my chief concern was that she should know that I was responsible for them– and I made sure of that, just before her death. But I do want St. Petersburg to someday give me the credit I deserve for the murders, especially considering how little I was respected when I lived there.

Those familiar with the Toksovo Ten case will probably have guessed by now that I am Vassily Chebarov, and it was I who committed the nine Toksovo Ten murders (as well as one additional murder that no one realized was connected), and that I faked my own death in order to escape suspicion.

I believe my reason for the killings was justifiable, though I'm sure many moralists will disagree. My primary goal all along was to exact revenge upon my wife for her infidelity.

You see, I truly loved my wife. I of course later realized what a vile, reprehensible creature she was, but for years I was blind to her faults. I had long had suspicions that she was unfaithful, though I firmly pushed them away. That came to a halt however, one night in January 1870. My wife had gone to a ball, and I was lying awake with worry, wondering what she was up to and trying to push away my doubts. She thought I was asleep when she returned, and took little caution to cover up the fact that her dress was torn or her terrible satisfied grin as she prepared for bed.

The next day when I was working at the Darya Chebarova Institute for Girls' Literacy, I couldn't stop myself from asking our maid, Masha Numerova, if she knew my wife to be unfaithful. Masha was a student at the school, which I had taken over for my wife, and we had grown close in the time I was working there. Masha confessed that she and all of our other servants had suspected my wife's infidelity for almost the entirety of our marriage, as she took little caution in hiding it from them. She said that our coachman, Fyodor Ogorodnikov, who was Masha's sweetheart, had even been made to escort my wife and one of her lovers, Prince Dmitri Kamerovsky, from the ball the night before.