A Russian former police officer was convicted yesterday of killing 55 women and one man, bringing the total number of women he is convicted of killing to 77, a court said.
Mikhail Popkov predominantly targeted women aged 18 to 50 in urban areas in the eastern Siberian region of Irkutsk from 1992 to 2007, the Irkutsk-based court said in a statement.
He would meet them casually and flirt with them, the statement said. “The victims ended up outside of the city ... in a forest, cemeteries, roadsides.”
Many of the victims were residents of the cities of Irkutsk and Angarsk, and the town of Usolye-Sibirskoye, the statement said.
Known as the “Angarsk maniac”, his victims included a fellow police officer, Russia’s federal investigative agency said.
It took law enforcement officers rather thorough work analysing unsolved crimes to link Popkov to them, including questioning more than a thousand potential witnesses, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
As a police officer, Popkov would have had knowledge of forensic practices.
Russian media has reported that many of his victims were mutilated.
“The identities of 17 of his victims have not been determined,” the court said in its statement.
While tabloids have reported that Popkov targeted inebriated woman and prostitutes, the Investigative Committee said his victims were “women of various social status and position in society”.
Popkov was initially convicted three years ago for the murders of 22 women and sentenced to life in prison.
He has been stripped of his rank of junior lieutenant.
The court in Irkutsk sentenced Popkov to a second life term for the latest 56 murders.
He was also found guilty of raping 11 of the women.
The grey-haired 54-year-old appeared in court in prison uniform, his head bowed.
He will be sent to a prison that is exclusively for convicts serving life terms, nicknamed the “Black Dolphin”
As part of his sentence – a rare case in Russia of a convicted murderer being given a second life sentence – Popkov was also deprived of his police pension.
He intends to appeal, regional prosecutor Alexander Shkinev told Russian news agencies.
Prosecutors described Popkov as having “a pathological attraction to killing people” and “homicidal mania with sadistic elements”, but he was ruled sane enough to stand trial.
“He got pleasure from this. He saw it as his purpose in life,” criminologist Yury Antonyan, who gave expert evidence in the trial, told tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported that Popkov was motivated by his wife supposedly being unfaithful.
The murders took place while he was a serving police officer and after he left the force in 1998.
Popkov was caught in 2012 after investigators re-examined the case and carried out DNA testing of residents, focusing on those who drove a make of car that matched tracks found at crime scenes.
In a 2017 interview with Russia’s Meduza website, Popkov said he targeted women who were drunk or living in a way he saw as immoral, adding that “any society condemns the behaviour of a debauched woman”.
While in jail, he confessed to 59 further murders but was convicted only of 56 yesterday because investigators could not prove three of the crimes took place, Interfax news agency reported, citing the court’s press service.
Investigators said they uncovered the remains of some of the bodies based on Popkov’s account, as well as murder weapons including axes, screwdrivers and knives.
Several women survived attacks with serious injuries and managed to give evidence.
The number of killings for which Popkov has been convicted exceeds the totals of several notorious murderers in Russia and the ex-Soviet Union.
“Chessboard Killer” Alexander Pichushkin was jailed for life in 2007 for 48 murders, mostly of elderly men he met in a Moscow park.
He aimed to kill one person for each of the 64 squares on the chessboard.
Andrei Chikatilo was convicted of 52 Soviet-era murders that were sexually motivated.
He was executed in 1994, before Russia imposed a moratorium on the death penalty.
Popkov reportedly boasted to cellmates that he had committed more murders than Chikatilo.




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