Arkady Neyland is the only teenager sentenced to capital punishment in the USSR (4 photos + text)

The only teenager sentenced to capital punishment in the USSR was 15-year-old Arkady Neyland, who grew up in a dysfunctional family in Leningrad. Arkady was born in 1949 into a working-class family, his mother was a nurse in a hospital, his father worked as a mechanic. Since childhood, the boy did not eat enough to eat and suffered beatings from his mother and stepfather. At the age of 7, he ran away from home for the first time, finding himself registered in the children's room of the police. At the age of 12, he ended up in a boarding school, soon ran away from there, after which he took the path of crime.

In 1963 he worked at the Lenpishmash enterprise. He was repeatedly taken to the police for theft and hooliganism. Having escaped from custody, he decided to take revenge on the police by committing a terrible crime, and at the same time get money to go to Sukhumi and start a new life there. On January 27, 1964, armed with an ax, Neiland went in search of a “rich apartment.” In house No. 3 on Sestroretskaya Street, he chose apartment 9, the front door of which was upholstered in leather. Posing as a postal worker, he ended up in the apartment of 37-year-old Larisa Kupreeva, who was here with her 3-year-old son. Neiland closed the front door and began beating the woman with an ax, turning on the radio at full volume to drown out the victim’s screams. Having dealt with his mother, the teenager killed her son in cold blood.

Then he ate food found in the apartment, stole money and a camera, with which he took several photos of the murdered woman. To hide traces of the crime, he set fire to the wooden floor and turned on the gas in the kitchen. However, firefighters who arrived on time quickly extinguished everything. The police arrived and found the murder weapon and Neyland's prints.

Witnesses said they saw the teenager. On January 30, Arkady Neyland was detained in Sukhumi. He immediately confessed to everything he had done and told how he killed the victims. He only pitied the child he had killed and thought that he would get away with everything because he was still a minor.

On March 23, 1964, by a court decision, Neyland was sentenced to death, which was contrary to the law of the RSFSR, according to which capital punishment was applied only to persons aged 18 to 60 years. Many approved of this decision, but the intelligentsia condemned the violation of the law. Despite various requests to commute the sentence, the sentence was carried out on August 11, 1964.