In early December 2003, police in Perm waited with a young woman named Olga for the man who had phoned her from a pay phone to arrange a date. When Alexander Valeryevich Kiselev, twenty-five, stepped out of a private car to meet her, officers had him in handcuffs before he could resist. He was carrying a man's necktie and a razor. For more than a month he had been the prime suspect in the disappearance of two students, Lilia Tarutina and Olesya Danutsa, who had vanished a day apart after going for walks with him. He admitted at once that he had killed them, and on December 11 he led investigators to a snow-covered patch of waste ground beside his building, where both were buried with men's ties around their necks.
Kiselev was born in Perm in 1978. His father worked for the prison administration; his mother is described in one account as a prison service employee too and in another as working for the fire service. He left school after nine grades, neither studied nor worked, and lived alone in his parents' former apartment at 64 Penzenskaya Street, his mother giving him money without his father's knowledge. He was sober and used no drugs, the Perm Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. To the students he presented himself as the son of a criminal boss and a man with a prison record; he had neither. Police learned from the girls' friends that he used the surname Kudinov, the name of a Perm gangster known as Kudin who had been killed in 1998.
Lilia, eighteen, a second-year law student, and Olesya, twenty, in her final year of economics, had grown up together in Kogalym, in the Khanty-Mansi region, where their mothers, childhood friends from Perm, had moved; they studied at the Perm branch of the St. Petersburg Institute of Foreign Economic Relations, Economics and Law, and lived with their grandmothers in the same building on Khimgradskaya Street. Coming back late in 2003 from a visit home, they decided to wait at the Perm-2 station for the morning bus rather than pay for a taxi, and Kiselev, who lived ten minutes from them, helped them home with their bags. They told their mothers he was kind, clever and rich. Olesya's grandmother did not like him. He told Olesya he loved her and gave her roses; she had a fiance in Kogalym and turned him down.
On October 29, 2003, he took Lilia for a walk, and she did not come home. That evening he brought Olesya roses; she was ill and went only as far as the pharmacy with him. The next day he came back, and she too went out with him and did not return. In the search of his apartment, forensic experts matched fibers and hairs on the pillows and blankets to the two young women, and a handbag holding one of their medical certificates was found under the floor. In custody he said he had played cards with Lilia, pushed her down and strangled her with a tie, and killed Olesya the next day. He said he had had sex with both before killing them, by consent; rape could not be proved. He told investigators he had wanted their gold to sell, which accounts value at a few hundred or a few thousand rubles, and, by the account of the officer who arrested him, Yevgeny Komarov, that something each had said after sex had offended him. One of the ties was multicolored with a floral pattern, the other burgundy. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that he had matched their colors to the women's shoes, a detail the press seized on in calling him the necktie maniac; the independent outlet Kholod noted in 2026 that this may have been a press invention. A forensic psychiatric examination found no chronic mental illness but a mixed personality disorder.
On June 16, 2004, the Kirov District Court in Perm convicted him on every count and sentenced him to twenty-two years, the first three in a prison and the rest in a strict-regime colony; an appeal court later cut the term to twenty. As Lilia's stepfather left the courtroom he shouted that Kiselev should rot inside. He was tried for two separate simple murders rather than an aggravated double murder, which kept a life sentence off the table. In prison he collected eighteen commendations for his work and six reprimands, five of them in his first year and a half. A request for early release was refused, in 2017 by court records Kholod examined, though other accounts date it to 2018 or 2019, when Olesya's mother came to Perm to warn the public. In 2020 a court replaced the last three years of his term with forced labor, and he was moved to a correctional center in Gremyachinsk and set to work at a woodworking plant.
He was made a foreman there. Among the workers under him was Natalya, whose surname has not been published, a woman from Chusovoy a couple of years older than him and given as forty-five in the Perm press, who had three children, one of them severely disabled, and had lived for thirteen years with their father. According to her mother, Marina, he brought her coffee on the line and covered for her, and they began a relationship. In August 2022 his remaining forced labor was replaced with restricted freedom, which some reports describe as parole, and he moved to Chusovoy. On October 21 Natalya married the father of her children.
Early on November 13, 2022, Natalya went to church with her mother and children and ordered three months of prayers for Kiselev's health. At about ten in the morning she arrived at the flat on 50 Let VLKSM Street where he was waiting. By his testimony she complained about her husband, he grew angry, and as she lay on the sofa he began to strangle her, punched her twice in the face and kept strangling her with his trouser belt and an antenna cable until both broke, then with her bag strap and plastic garbage bags. He took 1,500 rubles from her purse and her gold ring, which he later sold for 2,000 rubles. Her body was found on the evening of November 14. He told officers after his arrest that he had killed her out of jealousy, having learned she was seeing her husband again, and later changed his account to say she had pushed him to deal with her husband. The forensic examination found they had had sex before her death; he said it was consensual, her mother maintains she was raped, and rape was not charged.
For a week he moved between rented rooms every two days and changed SIM cards. On November 20, 2022, police came with the landlady of a flat on Gagarin Boulevard in Perm's Motovilikha district, who told him through the door that he must pay or leave; when he finally opened it he was pale, barely able to speak and losing consciousness, and he later said he had tried to kill himself. He admitted the killing. On September 29, 2023, the Leninsky District Court in Perm convicted him of murder and theft and sentenced him, with the unserved part of his old term, to thirteen years and six months in a special-regime colony and a further year and a half of restrictions; his confession and cooperation counted in his favor. On October 26 the Perm regional court rejected appeals from both sides. He is due for release in 2036, at fifty-seven. Olesya's mother said she had told the parole court he should never be let out, because he would do it again. Natalya's mother said she still dreams of her daughter.