Alexander Valeryevich Kiselev was born in Perm in 1978, the son of a prison officer. Russian coverage describes him as a loner.
In 2003 two young women who were students and friends of each other, and friends of his, were strangled in Perm. Investigators worked out that the man they were looking for was their mutual acquaintance. He was tried and in 2004 sentenced to twenty years in a penal colony.
He killed with a necktie, and the detail Russian sources single out is that the tie was chosen to match something about the victim, which they treat as a fetish rather than a convenience. It is what gave him the name the press used, the necktie maniac. Nineteen years later, when he killed a third time, no man's tie was to hand.
One of the two students later reported that he had said something to her that has stayed in the coverage of this case: kill me, I am a bad man.
In 2019 he began applying for early release. In 2020 he obtained a softening of his sentence and was transferred off the strict regime onto compulsory labour at an enterprise in Chusovoy. At that enterprise he was made a foreman, and among the people under him was a woman named Natalya. She was married with children. They talked often, and a relationship began.
He was released at the end of August 2022, subject to restrictions on his liberty. About two months later he strangled her in her own flat. When he left he took her ring. She left children behind.
The Leninsky District Court in Perm sentenced him to thirteen years. He appealed on the ground that it was too severe, and on October 26, 2023 the Perm regional court left the sentence as it was. He admitted his guilt in all three murders.
Her age is given as forty-three in the Russian Wikipedia account and as forty-five in the Perm press. The rest of the record is consistent.
The sequence is the point of this case in Russia, and it is what put it in the news there: nineteen years served of a twenty-year sentence for a double murder, a reduction in 2020, release in August 2022, a third killing before the end of October. He met the third victim while serving the sentence for the first two.