EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

followed by abject repentance on his part. Sometimes he would bang his head on the ground before the altar until it was bloody and bruised.
    He led his Oprichniki in horrors. Once he ordered a peasant woman to be stripped naked and used as target practice by them and on another occasion, he ordered them to throw hundreds of beggars into a lake to drown. Another trick was to lash a nobleman to a barrel of gunpowder and watch, laughing, as the unfortunate man was blown to pieces.
    One gruesome story tells of the horrific demise of Prince Boris Telupa. He had a stake inserted from the lower part of his body up and out his neck. He remained alive, impaled on the stake for fifteen hours of excruciating pain. Ivan ordered that the prince’s mother be brought to see her son and then gave her to a hundred gunners who raped her until she died. She was then thrown to Ivan’s dogs who tore her limb from limb.
    Nikkita Funikov, Ivan’s treasurer, was boiled to death while an advisor, Ivan Viskovaty, was hung before pieces were sliced off his body.
    In warfare, Ivan was equally brutal. When he captured the city of Novgorod, the inhabitants were raped, impaled, sliced and roasted and Ivan personally played a full part in the horror. The archbishop of Novgorod was sewn into a bearskin before being hunted by a pack of snarling hounds. So many people were thrown into the freezing Volkhov River that it overflowed its banks.
    In 1572, Ivan once again abdicated. This time he named a replacement, Simeon Bekboelatovitch, a Tartar general. For a year, Ivan lived on his country estate, making occasional visits to the city to pay homage to the new Tsar before becoming bored with the charade and returning to the throne.
    He married a series of women and made England’s Henry VIII look like a saint in the way he treated his wives. In 1561 it was Maria Temriukovna, a beautiful woman from Ciscassia. When she died in 1569, he married the daughter of a merchant, Martha Sobakin. She died two weeks after the wedding and he married Anna Koltovskaya. Tiring of her, he sent her to a convent in 1575 and married for a fifth time, to Wassilissa Melentiewna. She made the mistake of committing adultery and her lover had the misfortune to be impaled beneath her window. She was allowed to live, but as a nun. When he discovered that his seventh bride, Maria Dolgurukaya, was not a virgin, he had her drowned the day after their wedding. He married his last wife, Maria Nagaya, in 1581.
    Possibly the worst of the many examples of Ivan the Terrible’s rages occurred in 1581, an incident that resulted in the death of his son and heir, the Tsarevich Ivan. The young Ivan was something of a chip off the old block. Aged fifteen, he had been at his father’s side, witnessing the barbaric cruelty of the massacre at Novgorod first-hand. He took as much pleasure in the depravity of the Oprichniks as Ivan and once saved his father’s life, stabbing to death a Livonian assassin. However, his relationship with the Tsar had started to go downhill towards the end of the Livonian War that lasted from 1558 until 1582. In 1581, Ivan attacked his pregnant daughter-in-law, the Tsarevich’s wife, furious that she was wearing tight clothes. As a result, she lost the child she had been carrying. When the Tsarevich confronted him, Ivan accused him of inciting rebellion. The two argued and Ivan struck his son a blow to the head with his sceptre. The Tsarevich fell to the ground with blood pouring from the wound and died a short while later, despite his contrite father’s constant prayers for his survival.
    Ivan the Terrible displayed all the signs of being a psychopath. He murdered without any emotion apart from enjoyment. He was self-centred, unreliable, manipulative and subject to wild mood swings and unexpected fits of extreme rage. His rages were so extreme, in fact, that he is said to have often foamed at the mouth during them. He was unable to maintain a relationship for very long