01x01 - Falling Pieces

[bunniefuu]

Police arrived mid-afternoon on
a 911 call gathering evidence.

I remember, clearly,
on this particular day

I was in my office
and this call came out.

And we hear that there are
three bodies on-site,

so we just responded
out to the house.

When I arrived on scene,

the media has showed up, they're
already snapping pictures.

And what we found
in that house is shocking.

Police say, Vladimir Pokhilko

used a hammer and hunting knife

to k*ll his wife and son
as they slept,

then used the knife
to k*ll himself.

It looks like
this is a m*rder-suicide.

He was a Russian immigrant
who teamed up in business

with the inventor
of the computer game Tetris.

But later, we learned there's
more to discover in this case.

This is way deeper
than we thought.

You understand this doesn't
make any sense, right?

It didn't smell right in 1998.

And I know now I was right.

Can I have a minute? Okay, okay.

My name is Sandra Brown,

I was a law enforcement officer of 25
years with the city of Palo Alto.

During that time period, I worked all
of the homicide cases that we had.

I get questioned quite often, "What is the
one case that stands out in your mind?"

And this case
constantly comes up.

It still bothers me to this day.

It was in September of 1998,
late in the afternoon.

And so, I remember
getting together with our team

and we were just
getting our orders.

I was a crime
scene investigator.

We had Sergeant Chan, who was in
charge of crime scene investigation.

Sergeant Wong was in charge
of detective's division.

So at that point, everything
is secured and locked down.

And I assigned
Detective Mike Denson

and Jean Bready as the primary
and the backup.

When we first went into
the house it looks normal.

Nothing seemed
to be out of order,

it wasn't disheveled,
it wasn't tore up,

there wasn't any signs
of struggle.

Usually you hear things
like clocks, maybe, or,

you know, air conditioning
going on or something like that.

But it was just like quiet.

Dark.

And I just had
this weird feeling.

We went to the first bedroom...

...in this first bedroom
there was an adult female.

She had head trauma,
lots of head trauma.

And she had physical injuries
to her back.

There was blood staining on the
bed, on the walls, on the floor.

It was a pretty messy scene.

The child was in the master bedroom
on the bed over in the corner.

There's wounds
in the back of his skull,

and then he had also sustained
trauma to his back.

And there was blood around him,
it was quite startling.

And then, when you look away from
the child there's an adult male,

about maybe six to 10 feet away

flat on the ground with
a knife in his right hand.

What I remember specifically
about the male subject was

the severity of his throat
and how it was sliced.

The cut was so deep
and so severe

that I would see
the back of his larnax

and his actual spinal cord
as well.

It was almost like
filleting a fish.

Again, there was blood on the floors,
the walls, the windows, the bedding.

The scene was extremely violent.

The gentleman who found the three
deceased victims was Gennady Norichkin.

He was a family friend
he was still outside,

so I got to interview him right at the
scene and he told us who they were.

The deceased male in the
bedroom was Vladimir Pokhilko.

The deceased female
Yelena was his wife.

And the deceased juvenile male
Peter was his son.

He was 12 years old.

Gennady told us that the
Pokhilko family were from Russia.

We also learned that Vladimir
was a co-developer of Tetris.

Tetris was a very popular, if
not the most popular, video game.

I grew up on Tetris.

It was a lot of fun.

Trying to get those blocks
clear across.

If you look at this game versus
a game like Mario I or something

you'll notice it's just do
dynamic, nothing's ever the same.

It's like the shifting sands
of the Sahara or something.

It's gonna constantly
give you new information

and you have to constantly make
decisions based on that information.

And it's a beautiful thing to just
try to solve it as good as you can.

Even if you
can't solve it perfectly.

Whereas a lot of other games
they're solvable.

When I'm playing a lot, like,
I see it in my sleep.

Which is a really sad
thing to say.

It's pretty addictive.

In Vladimir's research center everybody
who had a computer had a copy of Tetris.

Tetris exploded because
it became the video game

For people who did not play
video games.

It was so abstract compared to games
with spaceships and things with zombies.

That you could say, "I'm
really playing a puzzle game.

I'm not playing a video game."

And that makes it more socially
acceptable, it really made it a crossover.

This game is addictive because

when you get a score in Tetris
you just wanna beat that score.

It's like the gambler's
addiction almost.

But not in so bad a way.

It some ways
it's a very healthy way

'cause it's a great way
to train your brain to think

in different geometric patterns.

It works on a very
visuospatial level.

It really affects the way
that you think about

the shapes coming in, what they're
doing, and how you put things into place.

We call it
the Tetris effect now,

but people have talked about that
effect for hundreds of years.

It's our natural desire
for order.

And our natural desire
to understand how shapes work.

At the end of the 1980s

when I was playing Tetris
late at night, for hours on end,

I could've never imagined
that the game that I was playing

would have anything
to do with a m*rder

that I investigated
many years later.

This was one of the first big
m*rder cases that I covered.

When you cover a crime

if you don't know all the
circumstances around the actual crime

you begin trying to figure out as much
as you can about who the people are.

Neighbors say the boy's
father is computer engineer.

Vladimir Pokhilko was involved
in a company called AnimaTek.

The company
was a computer graphics,

computer design type company
based in San Francisco.

Before he got interested
in working with computers

Vladimir had studied
psychology in Moscow.

I met Yelena at a big yoga
conference at Moscow University.

She was beloved
and she was good at her work.

And she made me feel at home.

She was the highly
respected founder of Stanfys,

the Stanford Yoga Studio.

The shops internet website
attracted many people

who say the family
seemed very happy.

Peter, the son,

who went to the junior high
in Palo Alto

was this star student
he was a dancer, an artist,

and a math, and science wiz.

Phil Done
says he was the boy's teacher.

Definitely gifted. And I do not
say that lightly. Brilliant child.

The people in the neighborhood

said that they were friendly,
hardworking people.

But neighbors told us that the
Pokhilkos were a pretty private people.

And the more we learned
about Vladimir and his family

the deeper this,
sort of, mystery got.

When we found out that this guy might
have been the creator of Tetris,

I can't make my eyebrow lift, but
I'm telling you I'm thinking, "okay."

I had a funny feeling about this
one, this is not a normal case.

Life in the '80s in America was morning
in America to quote President Reagan.

We said we would once again be respected
throughout the world and we are.

We lived under the shadow
of competition with Russia.

We watched the documentaries about
what nuclear w*r would be like

and I remember
being terrified as a kid.

But there was also this
feeling that we were winning.

That the US
was going to triumph.

And as the US was reveling in its
consumerism and consumption...

...the Soviet Union was on its
last legs and it was crumbling.

And yet from that comes

this big, colorful, poppy game
that we're still playing today.

In the Soviet Union of the '80s

Vladimir Pokhilko worked
at the Moscow Medical Center

where we was a psychologist.

Vladimir knew a guy named Alexey
Pajitnov, they were friends.

Alexey Pajitnov was a Russian
computer scientist and programmer

at the Soviet Academy
of Sciences here in Moscow.

When Alexey was younger he had
been obsessed with pentominoes.

These five segmented shapes.

It's like a Tetris shape with
five pieces instead of four.

And you'd get, like, a square
or rectangle to put them in

and you had to piece all the pieces
in there and get them to fit.

So Alexey said, "What if I try
to recreate this effect,

but on this computer
I'm working on?"

And the first thing
he figured out

was that doing
the five segments,

the pentominoes,
that was too much.

So he cut it down to four
and at four you get tetra.

When he eventually
put the entire thing together

he said,
"I'm gonna call it Tetris."

Vladimir was one of the first
people who got to see Tetris

and also understood that
there was something more to it

than just a little hobby project
Alexey was doing on the side at night.

As a clinical researcher

he recognized
the addictive nature of it.

He said, "This is something
I can actually study

and I can see the effect
it has on people."

That it operated on, kind of,
a deeper layer of the brain.

Similar to a narcotic.

And he saw a way
to play the game head-to-head.

He and Alexey
worked on a version of it

where you could have
two people playing at once

and it was competitive.

When you
make something like Tetris

how do you share it with people?

How do you get other people
to see it?

Today, I'd AirDrop it to you,
I'd email it to you,

I'd give you a link
to download it.

But they didn't
have any of that back then.

They had to make
physical copies of it on disks

and take the copy
and give it to someone else,

who could then make a copy
and give it to someone else.

So other offices outside
of that initial computing center

started to get copies of Tetris.

But the way Tetris
would get out west

is not actually directly
form the Soviet Union,

like a lot of other things behind the
Iron Curtain it had to find a weak spot.

That weak spot
was actually Hungary.

In Hungary they had a little
more access to western equipment.

They started making a version that
would work on more popular computers.

And once you have a version of Tetris that
works on Apple and IBM compatible machines

well, then it's just gonna
spread all over the place.

Back in the '80s no one in the Soviet
Union had any real property rights

or intellectual property rights.

And if something existed
that could be exploited

the government owned it,
just by default.

And that happened all the time.

Government officials using organized
crime groups, or the police, or the KGB

to strongarm the owner
to giving up his rights.

We'll threaten you,
we'll scare you,

we'll k*ll somebody
close to you,

so it'd be best for you to
turn your property over to us.

The government took things that
they thought were really cool,

that Russians made, and try
to sell them around the world.

Tetris was potentially pretty
good and they realized that.

So they took Tetris
and attempted to license it

to other countries,
other regions.

The big players in the space
were Nintendo and Atari.

And the big fight becomes, who's
gonna have the rights to sell Tetris?

Henk Rogers was a software guy
he was from the Netherlands.

And he had had some good success

in introducing role playing
games into the Japanese market.

He was looking for other ideas

and when he saw Tetris he said,

"This is something that could
really be a worldwide phenomenon."

Nintendo was working
on a top secret project

that would become the Game Boy.

Henk Rogers went to the
Nintendo people and he said,

"Listen, I know you guys are working
on this handheld game console

and I know you wanna put a game
in the box that when you buy it."

Well, he said, "You know what?
I think it should be Tetris.

And I'm gonna get you the handheld rights
to Tetris to make all this happen."

Henk, in true
secret agent style,

gets to Moscow,
makes some contacts,

he actually gets a meeting with
the Soviet Licensing Organization

that controls
the rights to Tetris.

And the Russian go,
this is a guy we can work with.

And that really took Tetris from
what it was to the next level.

So Tetris was basically
spreading all over the world

although Alexey and Vladimir they didn't
really know any of this was going on.

They said
it wasn't humanly possible.

But now, you can have all the
power and excitement of Nintendo

right in the palm of your hand!

Introducing Game Boy.

It's portable, it's in stereo,
and its games are interchangeable.

Plus, Game Boy comes with
the outrageous new game Tetris.

That really broke Tetris
into the mainstream.

It was big in video game circles

then it was big in every circle.

Hillary Clinton was flying
around in Air Force One

playing, you know,
Tetris on a Game Boy.

It just became part
of the cultural conversation

In a way that almost no other
game has before or since.

But Alexey and Vladimir were
trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

They would have gotten

nothing from inventing one of the
world's most successful computer games.

If they had done it here
in the United States

they would have, literally,
been billionaires.

I met Vladimir and Yelena
in 1989 in the Soviet Union.

My husband, Ron, and I
were invited to their home.

It was an apartment
in the very center of Moscow.

Vladimir and Yelena
were good hosts.

They had pickled
a lot of vegetables.

And Vladimir made some kind
of wine or liqueur

and he offered it to us,
they were very generous.

Peter was lively and he was
the center of my attention.

I remember Vladimir holding
this squiggly, young boy a lot.

He was a hands-on dad.

It was just a nice, comfortable,

family atmosphere.

Tetris never came up.

But Vladimir had an idea
about combining

psychology and technology

And wanted to, um, know
if that would fly in America.

They were not happy
with the Soviet system

and had a lot
of entrepreneurial energy,

and wanted
to put it to good use here.

After that, I didn't
hear much from Yelena.

I just assumed that that
family went on and was

Living the life that they really
wanted to here in America.

It's just devastating what
happened to all three of them.

Investigators scour the home

on 400 block of Ferne Street
looking for clues.

We had stab wounds
on both Yelena and Peter.

And then, the neck wound on
Vladimir and the knife in his hand.

So, initially we actually thought,
"this is a m*rder-suicide."

You're thinking, "Okay, that's what
happened, that's what it looks like."

But when you start to look a little
closer, you look at the evidence,

it just doesn't seem to add up.

Police say, Vladimir Pokhilko

used a hammer and hunting knife

to k*ll his wife and son
as they slept,

then used the knife
to k*ll himself.

m*rder-suicides
happen all the time,

all sorts
of different theories why.

In this case, from talking with
Vladimir Pokhilko's coworkers

we found that he was under
a lot of stress.

Throughout the last few months

Vladimir had begun to have financial
troubles with his company AnimaTek.

And Vladimir and Yelena had been
having arguments about the yoga studio.

Yelena had become a very
well-known yoga instructor

in Russia before
the family had left.

And when she came
to the States with her husband

she has been forced
to start all over again.

Vladimir
had financed her yoga studio

and the yoga studio
was not doing great yet.

And Vladimir began to tell Yelena,
"You need to up your business."

There was a lot of love
between Vladimir and Peter,

but there was hostility, there was
resentment, between Vladimir and Yelena.

Their bodies
were in different bedrooms.

And their friend,
Gennady, explained

that Yelena had usually
slept in her own bedroom.

I also learned that Vladimir often
participated in sleep deprivation.

In Russia, one of the things Vladimir was
involved in researching over the years

was sleep deprivation studies.

He was also the subject
of some of these studies

and it was not
affecting him well.

He had gotten himself down to being
able to sleep about two hours per night.

And he was really
going off the deep end.

One night, he had begun
seeing rats all over the room.

Some of his friends thought
that he was doing

some sleep deprivation here
prior to the homicide.

They thought he wasn't
sleeping hardly at all.

If Vladimir had
this sleep deprivation

and all the stressors
that were going on,

he maybe snapped and m*rder*d his wife
and child and then committed suicide.

And then, we discovered the backstory
and how Yelena and Vladimir came to America.

Then we found all kinds
of interesting information.

In the 1980s the Soviet
Union was collapsing,

the infrastructure
was collapsing,

the institutions
were collapsing,

people were left to their own
devices to figure out how to survive.

When the Berlin Wall
fell in 1989

all of a sudden it seemed
like the Cold w*r was over.

And we got these glimpses of how

the world might be better.

In part by seeing
Russian scientists

and Eastern European
entrepreneurs coming to the west.

Henk Rogers
the video game developer

is still friends
with Alexey Pajitnov

and Alexey is still friends
with Vladimir.

And Henk Rogers says, "Listen, I'm
out there selling Tetris games.

I know you're not making
a lot of money from this.

But why don't I help you
move to the US.

You should just come here,
land of opportunity.

Maybe we'll do some stuff
together, it's gonna be great."

Alexey moves
to the US first in '91,

Vladimir comes later and they make
a go of it with Henk as a partner,

trying to do something with this software
technology company called AnimaTek.

They were gonna join the gold rush
that was going on in Silicon Valley.

Like every other Silicon
Valley startup at the time

Alexey and Vladimir wanna make a
great piece of software technology

that's gonna sell
a million copies.

If you're ready to push
your creativity

and imagination to the limit,

El-Fish from Maxis Software
is for you, it's...

The one project they actually managed
to get published was called El-Fish.

It actually took properties from different
kinds of fish and mixed them together,

it was some kind of genetic modeling
built into almost a fancy screensaver.

Once you start playing El-Fish
chances are you won't want to stop.

Like few software offerings today,
El-Fish delivers all it promises.

El-Fish
had some good cult success.

But it set the follow-up on the
success of Tetris, how do you top that?

By the time the mid-90s roll around
Soviet Union, pretty much gone.

But the Tetris licensing rights

and who actually owns the IP
behind it, still kinda confusing.

People who were insiders
in the Soviet Union

were double dealing and selling
themselves part of the government

to become oligarchs.

And, of course, the Tetris
rights get lost in that as well.

There's no paperwork
for any of this.

Everyone said,"
I'm the boss here.

Okay. I'm signing a paper
declaring myself the owner."

But, eventually, Henk Rogers
comes in and helps Alexey Pajitnov

assert his rights
to the Tetris IP.

And says, "I'm gonna
start a company,

me and Alexey, and we're gonna
partner with the oligarch,"

forming what would eventually
become the Tetris Company.

They basically globalized the entire
Tetris industry under one roof.

And Vladimir
wasn't part of that,

he didn't have any real claim
to anything.

Now, that may
sound controversial

but no matter what anyone else
did after the fact,

Alexey sat down and did that original
version completely on his own.

He deserves to be
the sole inventor.

Once Henk and Alexey started
working on Tetris really full-time

AnimaTek really became
Vladimir's company

and he was the one who was
intimately involved day-to-day.

We interviewed Alexey Pajitnov

and Henk Rogers throughout the
course of this investigation.

Alexey told me that he and Vladimir
had talked a week before the crime.

So they were calling
each other quite frequently.

And Vladimir was not keeping

secrets from them about what
was going on with AnimaTek,

that the company
was going to go bankrupt.

His company was having
difficulty with financing.

And there were employees that were
in Russia that were being laid off.

There are employees
that were in the United States

that would potentially
be laid off.

I've worked some cases
where you're like,

"That's the only way
that could have happened."

But this one left me with pause,
like, "Really?"

The first evidence that
came forward was the bodies.

We've had to deal with, um, getting
a medical examiner down there.

They took the bodies
to the coroner's office

and then our crime scene unit
began processing that scene.

There was actually two hammers,

one in each different bedroom.

I was thinking to myself
at the time,

"What's the reasoning behind
the two different hammers?"

Why would Vladimir
use two different hammers?

If he is k*lling these two
who are in his own household.

That right there
threw me for a loop.

Two hammers doesn't make sense to
me something was funny about it.

We also found the butcher knife

which was in Vladimir's hand
and had cut his throat.

My confusion about that is,
first of all,

I thought if you're gonna
cut your throat at some point

you're gonna shock yourself, "this really
hurts," you're gonna drop the knife.

Why was the knife
still in Vladimir's hand?

The blood splatter
that I noticed

was on the sliding glass door
behind him.

So he's on his stomach,
knife in his hand.

When like, "How does one cut their own
throat lying on their stomach?"

Right? Because the blood
on the wall was so low.

In the bathroom,
inside the sink,

the water was run down,

you could see that the blood
was draining towards the drain.

But it wasn't all over
the sink area.

It just looked like
it had been washed down.

There were no fingerprints, where
we would normally find fingerprints,

on the facet handles.

We find fingerprints everywhere.

I find fingerprints
on my glasses.

I don't ever recall
putting my thumbprints

on my glasses,
but they're there.

Why aren't we finding
fingerprints in a bathroom

of a home where a child lives,
and a mom, and a dad?

It was like my Spidey-Sense
just jumped up.

I'm suspicious now.

After a deeper search of the crime scene
it starts to look even more strange.

We go into his office,

we see a handwritten suicide
note sitting on the desk.

I remember going in there and reading
it for the first time myself.

"I've been eaten alive."
And then signed "Vladimir."

And then, underneath it,

another section that said,
"Just remember that I am exist."

And it was signed,
"The Davil." Spelt D-A-V-I-L.

I mean, it shocked me.

That was very eerie.

I remember
Scotty reading the note.

Now, Scotty and I have
different thought processes.

Scotty felt like Vladimir wrote
it because the devil was in him.

Right? He felt like,
Vladimir was, like,

so distraught over his decisions

that the devil "made him do it."

I don't feel that way.

It's almost like someone wanted

the people who found them to think
that the devil was talking through him.

There was evidence that somebody
had gone into the backyard

and burned some items
in a barbecue,

Which was very strange.

There's a letter to a guy named
Alexey, that's a Russian person.

Um, it's talking about stocks
and fluctuation of prices.

Then, there's some airline tickets,
some information about travel.

Why would you burn
that information?

And what is it important
to destroy that?

What's the purpose of it?

It was weird.

The blood spatter is weird.

The knife is weird.

We have the two hammers.

We have the note.

Everything was so perfectly
perfect that it was weird.

This investigation
was like playing Tetris.

Anybody that's played Tetris
knows that you're on a time limit,

and you're stressed trying
to get all the pieces to fit.

And when the next level comes
down, it's gonna be a piece

that you have to quickly think about
where it's gonna go and how it fits in.

Different things were coming
along that didn't quite fit.

I had never come across
a scene like that before,

so it brought
a lot of questions.

We're still
investigating this case

while we're waiting
for the autopsy.

And then, we finally
get the autopsy report back

from the medical examiner.

And that just leads us into another part
of this puzzle that doesn't make sense.

When we got the autopsy reports

it was determined
that both the son and wife

were k*lled by two significant
blows to the head with a hammer.

And then, each of them
were stabbed 11 times.

They both sustained
for a total of 13 injuries.

The bludgeoning and the stabbing
of the wife and the child

seems so specific.

Why the same number?

It is purposeful, it has to be.

The death of the child and the
mother was, to me, overkill.

I just felt like, "Why would
you bludgeon them and stab them?"

And the fact that there were
two different hammers involved

definitely raised a red flag
in my mind.

Does it suggest that there was
somebody else in the house?

Possibly one or two different
people that each had a hammer

and committed the crimes that occurred
against his wife and his young son.

I wanted answers for that.

So that, and what
was written on the note,

added to the uneasy feeling
that everyone had.

The medical examiner determined that
Vladimir Pokhilko was a suicide.

And when I finally got
this report and looked at it,

the wounds, we're like,
"There's no way."

There's no way
you can cut yourself that way.

Could he sustain
that amount of pain

to self-inflict a wound to that
nature? That was my question.

But it was official ruled
a homicide-suicide.

So, you know,
this is what cops do,

we work a major case and then
afterwards we sometimes go get a drink.

You know, the shifts over,
we're sitting around.

I'm like, "You guys, you think
this guy k*lled himself?

He k*lled his family,
he k*lled himself?"

I really start thinking,
"Am I conspiracy theorist

that I created this
whole thing in my mind?"

I knew that myself, and other
members of the department,

felt that it might
have been a homicide.

My theory was that, there was
other people involved

and this was made to look
like a m*rder-suicide.

We're all walking around,
people in the community,

believing that this man

took his son
and his wife's life,

in such a violent manner,
and then k*lled himself.

For what? Because we don't
have enough money?

I don't think
this father k*lled his son,

whom I believe
he loved very deeply.

I don't think
this man k*lled his wife.

I've seen cases where that's
happened, but this is over the top.

I think there's more
to the story.

And I know now

there's more to the story.