Georgy Tarimanovich Martirosyan (; born 1969), known as Gosha the Magician (), is a Georgian-born Russian serial killer. A magician and self-proclaimed "spiritual healer", he would lure young aspiring models to his Korolyov apartment, where he would drug and cause them to overdose, killing three women, possibly a fourth, between 2011 and 2012. He was convicted of the three murders, and sentenced to 23 years imprisonment.
Early life
Born in Tbilisi to an Armenian family in 1970, Martirosyan's family moved to the European part of the Union when he was two years old. Following the USSR's collapse, he ventured out to search and explore the various countries of the post-Soviet era. In Belarus, he was convicted of theft and served a short prison sentence before moving to Russia. In the late 1990s, he joined a gang of robbers who broke into apartments, but they were eventually captured and imprisoned. Fortunately for Martirosyan, he was released under amnesty in 2000 in honor of the 55th anniversary of Victory Day. For the following seven years, he worked in a variety of jobs, including a cook, chauffeur, salesman and logger. In 2007, when he made a profile on the popular Russian dating site Mamba.ru, Martirosyan presented himself as a magician and spiritual healer, allegedly capable of curing ailments and healing bad karma, referring to himself as "Gosha the Magician".
Initially, business was relatively slow, but the strange rituals earned him regular clients: using a combination of Wicca and Rasputin-influenced mysticism, he would take girls to an isolated monastery, where he would light candles and sacrifice rams in order to cast spells of good fortune. In 2009, a high-class escort named Rimma became his client, and she enjoyed Gosha's services so much that she told her friends about him. His fame spread through word of mouth, and not long after, he amassed enough wealth to afford a two-storey house in an affluent neighborhood in Korolyov, where he lived with his common-law wife and young daughter, and frequently went on vacations to various countries around the world. According to Martirosyan, among his clients, numbering around 40-50, included "some famous singers" and numerous beauty pageant contestants between the ages of 18 and 50. As a rule of thumb, Gosha turned down all men applying for his services and only accepted women, most of whom were young, rich and gullible, and would even sometimes sleep with them as part of his "rituals".
Murders
Modus operandi
Despite his lavish lifestyle, Martirosyan's greed got the better of him, and he devised a scheme to earn cash even quicker. This involved befriending a future victim and using his charm to convince them to transfer all of their funds into cash, bag them and go to him, where the two would ostensibly travel to a grandmother living 300 kilometers away from Moscow, with Gosha claiming that they would amass numerous riches via his magical powers. As an initial victim he chose a married businesswoman, named Olga R., but to his surprise, she caught on to his bluff and cut off all contact with him. Realising that he needed to change his plan, Martirosyan dropped the money and grandmother part of his plan, and instead offered to perform the rituals at his client's home.
Natalya Trapeznikova
For his next victim, he chose 23-year-old Natalya Trapeznikova, a beauty queen and aspiring model from Nizhny Novgorod. Due to an injury she had suffered as a teenager while rowing, Trapeznikova suffered from spinal disc herniation, which caused her pain and discomfort while walking in heels on the catwalk. After being taken in by Martirosyan's claims of spiritual healing several years back, he had managed to convince her to cut off contact with her boyfriend and that a friend from her modeling agency had attempted to poison her. Knowing that she fully believed everything he said, Martirosyan asked Trapeznikova to empty her bank accounts and bring the money to Moscow for a healing session. Against her parents' advice, she complied, withdrawing 1.5 million rubles, and on September 21, 2011, she arrived in Moscow and sat waiting for him at her apartment in the Presnensky District. At some during the night, Martirosyan arrived and entered. When he offered for them to have drinks, he went to the kitchen and got a glass of alcohol, which he laced with a mixture of heroin and methadone. Not long after drinking it, Trapeznikova passed out, and Gosha injected her with a syringe containing more heroin, before disposing of it and giving her another, clean one, in an attempt to simulate an overdose.