Hella Nation - Evan Wright [78]
Britt had been out of town in Salt Lake City on business when he received his last call from Simberg. After Simberg screamed and the line went dead, Britt initially wondered whether Simberg was fooling around. Simberg had phoned from a blocked number and Britt was unable to return the call. Growing concerned, Britt had the police department search Phoenix hospitals for any John Does fitting Simberg’s description. Early the next morning—just hours before Simberg’s murder—Britt issued a missing-person report.
When hunters found Simberg’s body on the sixteenth, Britt subpoenaed his own phone records in order to determine the identity of the blocked call from which Simberg had phoned on the fourteenth. Britt discovered that the telephone Simberg used had been purchased by Chris Andrews a couple of weeks earlier. On the purchase order Andrews had written the address of his apartment. Andrews’s phone records also yielded numerous calls Britt traced to Drachev and Tsoukanov. Andrews’s bank records indicated he’d made a $400 withdrawal twenty minutes before Simberg had used his phone to call Britt. Bank security camera footage yielded images of Simberg, Drachev, Andrews and Tsoukanov together at the time of the $400 transaction.
Drachev and Andrews made plans to flee town within hours of the murder. They traded the TEC-9 pistol they’d used on Simberg, the motorcycle Andrews’s mother had bought him a few weeks earlier, and a Sony PlayStation 2 for an old Mercedes they drove to the East Coast, where they separated.
Tsoukanov returned to his parents’ house in Phoenix. Police arrested him for the murder of Simberg a few days before Christmas. Shortly after New Year’s Eve he confessed. In his initial meeting with Britt, Tsoukanov provided detailed descriptions—corroborated by forensic evidence—of how he and his two friends murdered Simberg. He said they had “tricked” Simberg into meeting them by offering to loan him money. Tsoukanov explained that the crime was a “murder for hire.” He promised to tell Britt soon who had hired the murderers.
Britt was absolutely certain Southland was responsible for Simberg’s murder. When Britt reviewed the statements made by Dusty Swindle about the day before the first heist, when the gang of high school kids drove to a cul-de-sac to be inspected by Southland in the guise of the “Big Boss,” Britt discovered that the inspection had taken place in front of Tsoukanov’s home. When I visit the Tsoukanov residence in the spring of 2002, a member of his family tells me that Southland had visited the home on a few occasions prior to the murder of Simberg. Days later the same Tsoukanov family member calls me at home to say her recollection was faulty. Southland was never there.
In subsequent interviews with the police, Tsoukanov retracted his statement that Simberg had been killed as a murder for hire. Tsoukanov denied ever having met Southland. He couldn’t recall why he and his friends had committed the murder. Richard Bolinski, a friend of Tsoukanov’s who has visited him in jail, says, “I think Dennis is scared to death of somebody. He’s afraid for what could happen to his family if he talks.”
When I meet with Tsoukanov in the spring of 2002 at the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix, he tells me that he hopes that after he speaks with me and is written about in Rolling Stone, “girls will write me letters.” It turns out he doesn’t have a lot to say. The food at Maricopa is “retarded.” He shows me drawings he’s made of a hill in Estonia where he used to sled. He wants to know if his sister showed me the amateur modeling photos a local photographer took of him for his bid to become an Abercrombie & Fitch model. I look into Tsoukanov’s unnervingly cross-eyed gaze and tell him I saw the photos and they are good, especially the ones where he is in profile.
12. JUSTICE FALLS
BRITT HAS BEEN UNABLE to link Southland or