On September 22, 1998, the police were called to the home of Vladimir Pokhilko in Palo Alto, California. They found a grisly sight: the co-creator of Tetris was dead, his throat slit; he was still holding the knife. His wife Elena and their 12-year-old son Peter were beaten to death with a hammer and then stabbed.
In Pokhilko’s handwriting was the following inscription:
They ate me alive. Vladimir. Don’t forget that I exist. Daville
And yet Sandra Brown, a now-retired Palo Alto PD crime scene investigator who was at the scene, couldn’t help but feel that the Russian immigrant was just as much a victim as his wife and son.
“Something was wrong,” he told The Post, noting that the blood on the bottom of Pokhilko’s sliding glass patio door did not match the location of her body. “The blood and the knife didn’t make sense. “This man did not kill himself,” I thought. ”
However, the medical examiner quickly found Pokhilko, whose company AnimaTek was in dire financial straits, to be responsible for the heinous acts. Case closed: Murder-double murder-suicide.
But Brown and other colleagues on the case had their doubts—it didn’t help that the FBI showed up immediately at the crime scene, a day after the bloodshed.
“Why are they here? We could have domestic violence, a triple homicide in a small bedroom,” Brown said.
Twenty years later, Brown learned that intuition can be accurate.
The Tetris Murders, a new three-part documentary “ID” premiered on Monday night, which revisits the gruesome murders based on recently discovered documents that suggest the possible involvement of the Russian mafia.
“At first, some representatives of Russian society came to us and said that this man did not kill his family. They thought it was a mob hit,” Brown said, pointing to the murder weapons — a hammer and a knife — possibly representing a Soviet hammer and sickle.
Tetris, the best-selling video game of all time, was born behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1980s. At that time, Pokhilko was working as a psychologist in Moscow and was very interested in computers. His friend Alexey Pajitnov developed a version of Tetris. Pokhilko saw its peculiar addictive effect on the brain; The two worked together to develop Tetris as a video game.
Given the Soviet government’s penchant for confiscating intellectual property, distributing the game was no easy task. Dutch businessman Henk Rogers, who befriended Pajitnov, managed to sell the rights to Nintendo to the Russians just as the company launched the Game Boy, which made Tetris a global sensation.
But the co-developers did not receive financial benefits. Instead, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rogers helped them come to the United States, where the trio founded AnimaTek, which created the lesser-known El-Fish game.
Then, in 1996, Rogers and Pajnitov teamed up with an unnamed Russian oligarch to form Tetris, leaving Pokhilko in charge of AnimaTek.
“They basically globalized the entire Tetris company under one roof,” said Dan Ackerman, author of The Tetris Effect.
While the pair were raising money, AnimaTek was in a financial spiral, which weighed heavily on Pokhilko. Soon he will be dead.
But documents obtained by the show’s producers corroborated that narrative, showing that a subpoena from FBI organized crime and racketeering investigators seeking Pohilko’s accounts was issued two days after the murder.
“How did they have a warrant after we got the job? “That tells me that they already saw this as a mob case before we saw it as a murder,” Brown said.[That] kicked me out.”
Brown said that more than two decades later, talking to people who feared for their lives convinced him that more sinister forces were at play — and that they were still on the loose.
“That subpoena proved to me that they were barking up the right tree,” he said, adding that he hoped the series would cast doubt on Pohilko’s guilt, lead to truth and bring peace to the victims’ souls.
“It’s like Tetris – you don’t know what’s on the first layer.”
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