Alexander Bychkov was 23 when police in Belinsky, a town of about nine thousand people in western Penza Oblast, detained him in January 2012 over a burglary at a household goods shop. Within days the case had turned into something else. He told investigators about men he had killed, led them to the remains of several men, and handed over a diary in which he had recorded the killings. Men had been going missing from the town since 2009, and one local man, a resident with a mental disability, had already been sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment over deaths in the town.
On March 22, 2013, the Penza Regional Court convicted Bychkov of the murder of nine people and of the burglary, and sentenced him to life imprisonment in a special regime colony. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation left the verdict unchanged. He has been reported held since then at the colony for life prisoners on Ognenny Island in Vologda Oblast.
Belinsky is a small district center in Penza Oblast. NEWS.ru, in a 2024 account of the case, gave its population as about eight thousand; 360, in a December 2025 feature, put it at about nine thousand. According to NEWS.ru, men began disappearing there in 2009, and human remains were found around the town over the following years.
In September 2010 the bodies of three men were found in Belinsky, as reported at the time of Bychkov's arrest by Life.ru and, relaying Izvestia, by the Barnaul agency Amitel. That discovery led to the arrest and trial of a local man. The disappearances did not stop.
Bychkov was born in Belinsky in the spring of 1988, according to 360. A younger brother was born two years later. Their father took his own life when the boys were young; 360 gives his age at death as forty. NEWS.ru reported that the father drank heavily and had left the family when Alexander was about twelve.
Accounts gathered in the town after the arrest describe a hard childhood. The Moscow newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK), which sent a correspondent to Belinsky in March 2012, reported that the boys' mother neglected them and that they had to earn money through odd jobs and scavenging. 360 wrote that their mother drank heavily and made the boys sell bunches of dill and collect scrap metal, and that they were beaten if they came home with too little money. NEWSru.com, summarizing Komsomolskaya Pravda in March 2012, reported that the children were made to work on garden plots and collect scrap metal for about 100 rubles a day. Bychkov himself later said that his mother had beaten him as a child, according to NEWS.ru. A neighbor told MK that the mother later had a third son.
Neighbors told MK that the one person Bychkov truly loved was his grandmother. Amitel, relaying Izvestia, reported that he had moved into her house about three years before his arrest, after her death; MK reported instead that the grandmother had moved in with another of her daughters. The two accounts differ.
MK reported that Bychkov trained at a vocational school as a repair worker for agricultural machinery and in 2007 entered the teacher training college in Belinsky. NEWS.ru also dates his vocational training to 2007. He worked for a time as a guard at the district administration, according to both MK and NEWS.ru, and NEWS.ru listed other casual jobs: laborer at a camp, loader, garden digging and car washing. Amitel, relaying Izvestia, said he had worked at a service station. NEWS.ru reported that he had no police record before 2012.
His younger brother was badly beaten by unknown attackers and left disabled. 360 reported that he was thrown from a moving car and survived only by chance. Bychkov took leave from college to care for him, according to MK and 360, and 360 adds that he also looked after a younger half-brother. MK reported that the college expelled him on January 21, 2011, for missing classes, and quoted a former director of the college, who said Bychkov had told him that sooner or later he would find everyone who had beaten his brother.
Neighbors described him as quiet and withdrawn, according to Amitel's relay of Izvestia. Other acquaintances quoted by NEWS.ru described violent outbursts at home. MK reported that he called himself "Rambo" and that some in the town called him "Spider"; 360 reported a tattoo reading "Poacher". NEWS.ru wrote that before his arrest he shaved his head, dressed in black and read about Hitler.
The account the prosecution put to the court, as reported by the regional news agency PenzaInform on the day of the verdict, was that from September 17, 2009, Bychkov killed nine people who drank heavily and lived without a settled home. The motive the investigators gave was personal hostility toward them. He lured them to deserted places and killed them, then hid the bodies. One of the men had come to suspect him and tried to blackmail him, and was killed for it. The legal news site Pravo.ru, reporting a press release of the Penza regional prosecutor's office, summarized the same case: nine people killed between September 2009 and January 2012, most of them by stabbing. The Penza Regional Court accepted nine killings as proved.
The first victim named in the press was Yevgeny Zhidkov, who was 60. MK reported that he had traveled to the district archive in Belinsky for papers he needed for his pension and never returned home; NEWS.ru dated his disappearance to September 17, 2009. According to 360 and NEWS.ru, Bychkov met him in a bar in town and took him home, and killed him there after an argument, by 360's account.
Among the later victims was a man who had been a partner of Bychkov's mother, as reported by MK and NEWS.ru. The two outlets give him different first names.
Two of the last men to disappear were named by MK. Sergei Lisyanin, who worked as a yard keeper, left home on June 17, 2011, to go to a kiosk and did not come back. Sergei Sukharev, 34, went out for cigarettes on July 19, 2011, and was not seen again. NEWSru.com, in March 2012, gave Lisyanin's age as 37 and reported that his mother had spoken to reporters. NEWSru.com also listed a third man, Vladimir Baskakov, 46, among those identified; a Komsomolskaya Pravda report relayed by Amitel a week later described Baskakov, a former intensive care doctor, as still missing at that time.
MK reported that one of the six bodies in the first charges had never been identified and that no one had reported that person missing.
After the three bodies were found in September 2010, police arrested a local man with a childhood disability and a mental disorder, whom neighbors described as harmless and easily picked on. Amitel, relaying Izvestia, reported that he was detained on September 19, 2010, and that of three episodes only one went to court. He was found guilty and sent for compulsory treatment. NEWS.ru dates the ruling to December 2011 and says the court relieved him of criminal liability and ordered compulsory treatment.
His mother maintained from the start that there was no real evidence against him and complained to the Interior Ministry and the Investigative Committee, according to Amitel. In March 2012 the head of the Belinsky district police told a local paper that checks had not confirmed any murder by Bychkov in that series and blamed rumors for the stir, while a spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee in Penza said investigators could neither confirm nor deny that the wrong man had been convicted. MK reported that investigators were considering whether the two men could have acted together and that an application to reopen the earlier case was planned. Amitel, relaying Komsomolskaya Pravda in April 2012, reported that the earlier case would be reviewed because of newly discovered circumstances, and noted that two of the victims attributed to Bychkov had been killed before the death for which the other man was convicted.
The later outcome has been reported only in outline. NEWS.ru wrote in 2024 that the man was freed only after Bychkov confessed. 360 wrote in 2025 that he was amnestied, and that the police investigator who had obtained his confession and sent him to court was not punished: a criminal case against the investigator was closed for lack of a crime.
On the night of January 21, 2012, someone broke into a household goods shop in Belinsky. PenzaInform, reporting the verdict, put the value of the money and goods taken at 9,908 rubles. Reports differ on what was taken: three garden knives (MK and NEWSru.com), two kitchen knives (Pravo.ru, from the prosecutor's office), or two long knives, a set of drill bits and more than 9,000 rubles (NEWS.ru).
NEWS.ru reported that police looked for people known to be interested in knives and that Bychkov was seen the next day in a bar near the shop, carrying a knife. 360 reported that he was detained a couple of days after the burglary. He first denied the theft, according to NEWS.ru, then admitted it, and the goods were recovered.
He then began to talk about killings. The Moscow Times, summarizing Izvestia on March 26, 2012, reported that he led investigators to the remains of six men. NEWSru.com quoted the head of the regional investigative department, Oleg Troshin, through Interfax, as saying that investigators had found the remains of several people in Belinsky, and that the victims were mostly homeless men and heavy drinkers. Amitel reported that he identified victims from photographs and gave statements about other crimes. MK reported that he was formally charged with six murders and the shop theft in late March 2012, while investigators checked his statements about three more victims whose bodies had been found in 2010. MK and NEWS.ru both reported that investigators were checking him against 17 deaths in all.
A personal diary found at his home became the center of the case. Pravo.ru, from the prosecutor's office, said all the killings were described in it. Its length was reported differently as the case went on: MK in March 2012 said it described nine killings; Amitel, relaying Komsomolskaya Pravda in April 2012, said it listed 11 killings by date with short descriptions but no names; and Pravda.Ru reported in December 2012 that it described 11, of which two could not be included in the criminal case because no remains were found. The diary also contained claims about the bodies that the regional Investigative Committee said in March 2012 could not be confirmed because the remains were poorly preserved (MK). The prosecutor's office said a large number of violent films was found at his home (Pravo.ru).
What the diary said about motive was reported in several versions, all of them his own words or investigators' readings of them. Life.ru reported on March 26, 2012, that the diary showed he killed to prove himself to a former girlfriend who had told him he was weak, not a "wolf"; 360 reported that he called himself a lone wolf. Amitel, relaying Komsomolskaya Pravda, reported that he told interrogators he wanted to "get into history" like an earlier Soviet serial killer, and that a criminalist linked his choice of victims to his upbringing and to the men his mother drank with. Investigator Oleg Troshin, through Interfax as quoted by NEWSru.com, spoke of revenge for his brother, whom he believed homeless men had beaten; Komsomolskaya Pravda, through Amitel, said that motive had not been proved. Pravda.Ru reported investigators' view that he had developed a hostility toward people who drank and lived rough. MK, for its part, suggested he may have invented some details because he enjoyed the attention.
Investigators had doubts about his mental state at first, Life.ru reported, and ordered a psychiatric examination. Pravda.Ru reported in December 2012 that the examination was being repeated. The combined forensic psychological and psychiatric examination found that he had a mixed personality disorder which did not prevent him from understanding what he was doing, and the court found him sane, according to PenzaInform and Pravo.ru.
The case was heard in the Penza Regional Court. On Friday, March 22, 2013, the court found Bychkov guilty of the murder of nine people and of the theft, according to PenzaInform. Pravo.ru, reporting the prosecutor's office, gave the counts: murder of two or more people and murder to conceal another crime, under Article 105, Part 2, points "a" and "k" of the Russian Criminal Code, and theft with unlawful entry into premises, under Article 158, Part 2, point "b". The prosecutor withdrew the charge of desecrating a dead body before the verdict, PenzaInform reported. 360 later wrote that the diary's claims about the bodies, like several of the killings, could not be proved, and that nine episodes were enough for the sentence.
The court sentenced him to life imprisonment in a special regime colony. The court's press secretary, Natalya Bychenkova, confirmed the sentence to PenzaInform, and the senior assistant to the regional prosecutor, Yulia Makarova, also commented on the case.
Bychkov appealed, arguing that the sentence was too harsh and asking for it to be reduced. Pravo.ru reported on April 4, 2013, that the appeal had reached the Penza Regional Court the day before and would go to the criminal division of the Supreme Court, and that the regional prosecutor's office was preparing its objections. On June 21, 2013, Pravo.ru reported that the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation had left the verdict unchanged and rejected the appeal. He was 25.
Bychkov was sent to Correctional Colony No. 5 on Ognenny Island in Vologda Oblast, a colony for life prisoners known as the "Vologda Pyatak", according to 360 and NEWS.ru. NEWS.ru reported in 2024 that he was serving his sentence there.
In 2018 he gave an interview to the MK journalist Eva Merkacheva, as summarized by NEWS.ru, in which he said he was corresponding with a woman from Nevada and planned to marry her. He told Merkacheva that reports about what he had done to the bodies were false. NEWS.ru reported that in the autumn of 2020 his mother said he had married and had a son; 360 wrote that the woman, an American, had written to him after reading about him, and after about three years of letters came to Russia to visit him, and that they married at her second visit. 360 reported that the boy lives with his mother in the United States and that she hoped to have her husband transferred there.
His mother has always insisted that he is innocent, according to 360, saying he was a quiet son who would not hurt anyone even with words.
Several claims about the case come from his diary, his statements or press reports, not from the verdict.
The number of killings: the court found nine proved. His diary was reported to describe 11, and investigators checked him against 17 deaths in all. No court found him responsible for any killing beyond the nine.
The bodies: the diary's claims about what he did to the bodies gave the case its press nicknames. The Investigative Committee said in 2012 that they could not be confirmed, the prosecutor withdrew the related charge, and in 2018 he told an interviewer they were false (NEWS.ru).
The 2010 deaths: in 2012 Bychkov claimed killings that had been attributed to the other man, according to MK, and investigators said at the time they could neither confirm nor deny a wrongful conviction. The press later reported that the man was freed or amnestied.
Motive: the diary and investigators gave several motives (proving himself to a former girlfriend, a wish for fame, revenge for his brother, hostility toward heavy drinkers). The verdict as reported names personal hostility toward the victims.
1988, spring: born in Belinsky, Penza Oblast (360).
2007: vocational training; enters the teacher training college in Belinsky (MK, NEWS.ru).
September 17, 2009: Yevgeny Zhidkov, 60, disappears; the first killing in the prosecution's case.
September 2010: bodies of three men found in Belinsky; a local man with a mental disability is detained on September 19.
January 21, 2011: Bychkov expelled from college for missed classes (MK).
June 17 and July 19, 2011: Sergei Lisyanin and Sergei Sukharev disappear (MK).
December 2011: the other man is found guilty and sent for compulsory treatment (NEWS.ru).
January 21, 2012: burglary at a household goods shop in Belinsky.
January 2012, a few days later: Bychkov, 23, detained.
March 2012: he leads investigators to remains; charged with six murders and the theft.
December 2012: psychiatric examination repeated (Pravda.Ru).
March 22, 2013: Penza Regional Court convicts him of nine murders and theft; life in a special regime colony.
April 2013: appeal filed.
June 2013: Supreme Court of the Russian Federation leaves the verdict unchanged (reported June 21).
2018: interview with the MK journalist Eva Merkacheva (NEWS.ru).
Autumn 2020: marriage and a son reported by his mother (NEWS.ru).
December 2025: reported held at IK-5 (360).