Original subtitles

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

[Sandra Brown] I remember, clearly, on this particular day

I was in my office and this call came out.

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.

[reporter] Police say, Vladimir Pokhilko

used a hammer and hunting knife

to kill his wife and son as they slept,

then used the knife to kill himself.

[Brown] It looks like this is a murder-suicide.

[reporter] He was a Russian immigrant who teamed up in business

with the inventor of the computer game Tetris.

[Brown] 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.

[Brown] Can I have a minute? Okay, okay.

[exhales]

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 I assigned Detective Mike Denson

and Jean Bready as the primary and the backup.

[Brown] 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,

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.

[Brown] 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.

[Brown] 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

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.

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.

[Bready] 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.

And the deceased juvenile male Peter was his son.

He was 12 years old.

[Brown] 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.

-[mimics Tetris sound effects] -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.

Uh, it's gonna constantly give you new information

Uh, 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. [laughing]

[Dan Ackerman] 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.

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.

[chuckles] Uh, 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,

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.

[Bready] 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 murder

would have anything to do with a murder

that I investigated many years later.

[Noam Levey] This was one of the first big murder 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.

[reporter] Neighbors say the boy's father is computer engineer.

Vladimir Pokhilko was involved in a company called AnimaTek.

Vladimir Pokhilko was involved in a company called AnimaTek.

The company was a computer graphics,

computer design type company based in San Francisco.

[Levey] Before he got interested in working with computers

Vladimir had studied psychology in Moscow.

[Grigoriy Shapirshteyn speaking English]

[Kathy Hunter] 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.

[reporter] 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.

[Levey] Peter, the son,

who went to the junior high in Palo Alto

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

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

and a math, and science wiz.

[reporter] Phil Done says he was the boy's teacher.

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

[Bready] The people in the neighborhood

said that they were friendly, hardworking people.

But neighbors told us that the Pokhilkos were a pretty private 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, "Ohh, 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.

[Levey] We lived under the shadow of competition with Russia.

We watched the documentaries about what nuclear war would be like

We watched the documentaries about what nuclear war 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.

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.

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

[Ackerman] 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,

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.

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.

[Shapirshteyn speaking English]

[Ackerman] 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

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.

[Joe Serio] 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 kill somebody close to you,

we'll kill 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?

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

"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.

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.

[presenter] 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.

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

[Levey] 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.

[Hunter] I met Vladimir and Yelena in 1989 in the Soviet Union.

[Hunter] 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.

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.

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.

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

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

[reporter] Investigators scour the home

on 400 block of Ferne Street looking for clues.

[Brown] 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, "Oh, this is a murder-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.

[reporter] Police say, Vladimir Pokhilko

used a hammer and hunting knife

to kill his wife and son as they slept,

then used the knife to kill himself.

Murder-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.

[Denson] Throughout the last few months

[Denson] 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.

[Levey] 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.

[Denson] 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."

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

[Levey] There was a lot of love between Vladimir and Peter,

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

[Bready] Their bodies were in different bedrooms.

And their friend, Gennady, explained

that Yelena had usually slept in her own bedroom.

[Wong] I also learned that Vladimir often participated in sleep deprivation.

[Wong] 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.

some sleep deprivation here prior to the homicide.

[Denson] They thought he wasn't sleeping hardly at all.

[Wong] If Vladimir had this sleep deprivation

and all the stressors that were going on,

he maybe snapped and murdered his wife and child and then committed suicide.

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

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

Then we found all kinds of interesting information.

[Levey] 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.

[crowd chanting]

[Levey] When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989

all of a sudden it seemed like the Cold War 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.

[Ackerman] 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,

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.

[host] If you're ready to push your creativity

[host] If you're ready to push your creativity

and imagination to the limit,

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

[Ackerman] 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.

[host] 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.

[Ackerman] 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

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, "Oh, 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.

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.

[Wong] 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.

[Brown] 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? Hmm."

The first evidence that came forward was the bodies.

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

Uh, 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.

[Chan] 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?"

[Bready] Why would Vladimir use two different hammers?

[Bready] Why would Vladimir use two different hammers?

If he is killing these two who are in his own household.

[Brown] That right there threw me for a loop.

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

[Denson] 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

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

you're gonna shock yourself, "Ohh, 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.

[Chan] 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,

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.

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

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

[Brown] We go into his office,

we see a handwritten suicide note sitting on the desk.

[Wong] 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.

[Brown] 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.

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.

[Bready] There was evidence that somebody had gone into the backyard

and burned some items in a barbecue,

which was very strange.

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, uh, 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.

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.

[Brown] 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.

[Chan] When we got the autopsy reports

it was determined that both the son and wife

were killed by two significant blows to the head with a hammer.

And then, each of them were stabbed 11 times.

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.

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

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

[Bready] 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.

I wanted answers for that.

[Chan] So that, and what was written on the note,

added to the uneasy feeling that everyone had.

[Denson] The medical examiner determined that Vladimir Pokhilko was a suicide.

[Brown] 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.

[Wong] Could he sustain that amount of pain

[Wong] 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 killed himself?

He killed his family, he killed himself?"

I really start thinking, "Am I conspiracy theorist

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 murder-suicide.

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

believing that this man

took his son and his wife's life,

took his son and his wife's life,

in such a violent manner, and then killed himself.

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

I don't think this father killed his son,

whom I believe he loved very deeply.

I don't think this man killed his wife.

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

I think there's more to the story.

I think there's more to the story.

And I know now...

there's more to the story.