A decade after Vladimir Ionosyan sparked a local panic with the "Mosgas" murders, residents of Moscow circulated rumors of another homicidal maniac at large. According to reports, the slayer was a fair-haired, handsome young man, armed with a cobbler's bodkin or similar instrument, who trailed his female victims from the ornate subway stations, stabbing them to death in nearby streets and alleys. Manhunting is doubly difficult in a society that admits to no crime problem, but Moscow police indirectly confirmed at least some of the rumors. By October 19, extra police and militia patrols were at large, their activity officially explained as preparation for the upcoming celebration of the Bolshevik revolution, on November 7. At the same time, posters bearing sketches of a suspect surfaced in the city's seventeen taxi garages, enlisting cab drivers as lookouts in the search. By October 21, police confirmed that they were searching for the killer of "a woman." Inside sources put the body-count at seven, with the latest murder five days earlier. An eighth intended victim had survived her wounds, providing homicide investigators with the likeness reproduced in suspect sketches. Five days later, on October 26, authorities reported they were holding a suspect in a series of stabbings that had killed at least eleven Moscow women. The prisoner, unnamed, had been arrested on the evening of October 24, after three victims were slain in a period of twenty-four hours. Police maintained their news blackout as the suspect was shuffled off for psychiatric evaluation, and the disposition of his case remains unknown, but this time silence backfired. On the streets, a population starved for solid news fell back on rumor, doubting that the killer had been captured. "They caught one, but there is a second killer," one woman confided to a Western journalist. "They still have not caught the main one."