Alexander Nikolayevich Spesivtsev was born in Novokuznetsk, an industrial city in Kemerovo Oblast in Siberia, on March 1, 1970. The case file records that his mother gave birth at home, did not register the birth for two years, and never took him to a doctor in that time. His father drank. He grew up withdrawn and quick-tempered, and his mother defended him against everything.
One detail of that childhood is in the case material and is worth stating without comment. His mother took a job as assistant to a blind lawyer at the court, and brought home files of criminal cases containing photographs of the dead. The family spent evenings going through them. Russian reporting called him the Novokuznetsk Monster and the Novokuznetsk Ripper.
In 1988 he tried to enlist and the army medical board found serious problems. He had a psychiatric history from then on. He was convicted in 1991 in connection with the death of a girlfriend and released from compulsory treatment in 1995.
He lived with his mother Lyudmila in a flat on Pionersky Prospekt. Novokuznetsk in the mid-1990s had a great many homeless children and runaways, and she brought them home to him, on the pretext of a meal or a bed. He killed them in the flat. Parts of the bodies were eaten, and the court found that he tormented his victims and caused them severe suffering before they died.
The first remains of missing adults and teenagers were found in the Aba river in 1996.
He was found out in October 1996, when a plumber called to a leak forced the door and found the state of the flat and a girl still alive inside. She died in hospital.
Two people got out of that flat alive. In the summer of 1996 he saw a boy on the landing, lured him inside, beat and tortured him, and kept him without food or water. The boy escaped.
The legal history is the part that most accounts get wrong, because it happened in three separate stages over twenty-seven years. In 1997 he was convicted of three murders and sentenced to ten years in a penal colony, having been assessed as responsible for his actions. The prosecution then brought a second case covering four killings; a fresh examination at the Serbsky Institute found him insane, and in 1999 he was committed instead to a psychiatric hospital in Volgograd Oblast under compulsory treatment.
Then, on May 21, 2024, the Kemerovo Regional Court found him responsible for fifteen further murders, eleven of the victims children, and one attempted murder. It ordered the compulsory treatment to continue. That is twenty-eight years after his arrest, and it brings the number of proven killings to twenty.
Figures circulating in the Russian press put the total as high as eighty-two, on the basis that the search of the flat turned up clothing belonging to far more people than there were bodies. That number has never been tested and Russian Wikipedia describes it as unverified. Twenty is what has been proven.
His mother was tried alongside him. Lyudmila Yakovlevna Spesivtseva, then sixty, admitted that she had brought the victims to her son and had afterwards buried their remains. She was charged with abducting three girls and with complicity in their murder in aggravating circumstances. The prosecution asked for fifteen years and the defence asked for a full acquittal; she did not admit guilt. In 1999 the court convicted her of complicity in three murders and sentenced her to thirteen years in a general-regime colony. After her release she and her daughter Nadezhda were seen near the same flat on Pionersky, to the anger of local residents.
He has never been punished as a sane man for the main series. A deputy city prosecutor, Alexander Kolomiets, made the position plain: if Spesivtsev is ever found to have recovered, he faces a long prison term for the offences he committed while responsible for his actions. Russian reporting returns periodically to the question of whether he might be discharged.