In late October 1996, plumbers checking the heating in a nine-story apartment block on Pionersky Prospekt in Novokuznetsk, a steel city in southern Siberia, could not get into one apartment. The man inside shouted that he was mentally ill and that his mother had locked him in. The neighbors called the police, and officers forced the door. Inside they found human remains and a 15-year-old girl, Olga Galtseva, badly injured but alive. The tenant, 26-year-old Alexander Spesivtsev, escaped over the roof. He was arrested a couple of days later when he came back to the building.
Olga Galtseva had disappeared a month earlier with two friends aged 13. Before she died in the hospital she told investigators what had happened in the apartment and who had brought the girls there: Spesivtsev's mother, Lyudmila. Her account, the remains in the apartment, and remains that had been turning up in and near the Aba River since June led investigators to a series of killings of children, teenagers and adults in 1996.
The courts dealt with Spesivtsev in three stages, and the legal outcomes need to be stated carefully. He was convicted of one death, that of a 17-year-old girl in 1991, and sentenced to 10 years. For the 1996 killings, a court in 1999 found him not criminally responsible because of mental illness and sent him for compulsory psychiatric treatment; that case covered four victims, three of them children. In May 2024, 28 years after the crimes as the Investigative Committee put it, the Kemerovo Regional Court found that he had killed 15 more people and tried to kill a 16th, a 12-year-old boy who escaped, and again applied compulsory medical measures rather than a sentence. Neither the 1999 nor the 2024 finding is a conviction. His mother was convicted of complicity in three murders and served her sentence. As of September 2026, he was reported held in a special-type psychiatric hospital at the age of 56.
Aleksandr Nikolayevich Spesivtsev was born on March 1, 1970, in Novokuznetsk, the second child of Nikolai and Lyudmila Spesivtsev, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe. He had an older sister. His father, a factory worker, drank heavily and was seldom at home; 360.ru, drawing on the case history, describes him as unfaithful and violent. The parents separated. Novaya Gazeta Europe dates the divorce to 1985, while 360.ru says the father left without a formal divorce. Novaya Gazeta Europe also reports that his mother gave birth at home and did not register the birth for a long time, so that he received his birth certificate only in 1972.
He was a small, underweight child who was often ill, and his mother kept him under close protection. 360.ru reports that he slept in her bed until he was 12. As a boy he damaged property in his building, jammed neighbors' locks, set fire to elevator buttons and played music loudly, and his mother rejected every complaint the neighbors made. Around the age of 14 he moved from vandalism to theft. He was caught stealing radio parts from a school and put on the juvenile police register, and his mother, Novaya Gazeta Europe says, helped keep him out of a special school. The family was registered with social services as a troubled household. He left school in 1985, according to 360.ru.
Lyudmila Spesivtseva had worked as a storekeeper or bursar at a school and was dismissed after a theft case, according to both 360.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe. His sister worked as a court secretary, and with her help, Novaya Gazeta Europe reports, their mother became the assistant of a blind lawyer. Both outlets report that criminal case files were brought home and that the boy took more interest in the photographs of victims than in books or television. In 1997 The Moscow Times described his sister, then 34, as a secretary to a town judge, and quoted the local journalist Mikhail Zelenchukov as saying the mother had also worked in the courts and the prosecutor's office. The family, the paper wrote, had connections in town.
In 1988 Spesivtsev was arrested for a series of thefts and held in pretrial detention. A forensic psychiatric examination diagnosed schizophrenia, and the court ordered treatment instead of punishment. According to 360.ru, he banged his head against the bars during a hearing, and the court sent him to Novokuznetsk Psychiatric Hospital No. 12. Novaya Gazeta Europe dates his admission to October 1988. The regime was not strict. He beat weaker patients and refused his medication, 360.ru says, and after a few months he simply went home; Novaya Gazeta Europe dates his escape to March 1989 and says no one searched for him with any energy. His mother told staff and police she did not know where he was.
In 1991 Spesivtsev began seeing a 17-year-old girl, Evgenia (Zhenya) Guselnikova. At first, by the accounts of 360.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe, he was attentive and romantic. He then became violent, and she tried to end the relationship. In May 1991, Novaya Gazeta Europe reports, he took her to the family apartment while his mother and sister were away and held her there for nearly a month. Neighbors heard screams and did nothing.
Her parents went to the police. When officers forced their way into the apartment they found her alive but gravely weakened. Novaya Gazeta Europe says she died in the hospital; Rossiyskaya Gazeta and 360.ru say she died of sepsis, and 360.ru, citing prosecutors, says she died after about a month of captivity. Vechernyaya Moskva, in a 2024 report republished by Rambler, says she was found dead in June 1991. Spesivtsev claimed that she had stayed with him willingly, and 360.ru adds that he said she had arrived already injured.
He was examined again, again found to have schizophrenia, and sent not to a prison colony but to a special psychiatric hospital in Oryol, in European Russia. Novaya Gazeta Europe places this in 1991; Rossiyskaya Gazeta says a court found him mentally ill and ordered compulsory treatment in 1992. 360.ru reported in 2024 that he spent about three years there.
The failure that allowed the 1996 killings is not disputed in the reporting. Spesivtsev was discharged from Oryol with his illness recorded as in remission, and the hospital told neither the police nor the local psychiatric service. On paper he was still an inpatient; in practice he was living with his mother in Novokuznetsk. Rossiyskaya Gazeta says the police therefore believed he was still under treatment. The date of the discharge varies: Novaya Gazeta Europe and Vechernyaya Moskva give late 1995, while 360.ru says psychiatrists reported remission in April 1994 and that he was declared well and released in late 1994. 360.ru adds that a later forensic evaluation concluded that the earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia had either resolved or had never been correct. No disciplinary action against any doctor at either hospital, or any police officer, was reported.
The investigation and the 2024 court findings place the main series of killings between about February or March and October 1996. All of them took place in the family apartment. According to the Investigative Committee of Russia, he chose people he could overpower, mainly women and children, lured them to the apartment under false pretexts, killed them, dismembered the bodies and hid the remains around the city.
360.ru's 2025 account says the first killing that year was of a 20-year-old woman he had met at a neighbor's gathering in February. He stabbed her after an argument in the apartment, claimed he had meant only to frighten her, and asked his mother to deal with the body; 360.ru says she buried the remains on waste ground nearby. The woman's name was not reported.
Novaya Gazeta Europe's 2026 reconstruction of the case file sets out the rest of the year in outline. In April and May he lured a group of boys of about 12 with the suggestion that they help burgle an apartment, which was in fact his own. Days later he brought in two girls of 12 and 14 with an offer of work selling soap door to door. In June he killed two more girls, a woman of about 40 and a man of about 35; the two adults have never been identified. In July he killed Natalya Voynova. In August he killed two 12-year-old girls. 360.ru describes a group of seven teenagers lured with the promise of new music to listen to, and says that by August he had killed 15 people, 11 of them children and four of them adults. The 2024 court finding, as announced by the Kemerovo regional prosecutor's office, covers 15 people killed between March and September 1996, 11 of them minors.
Spesivtsev was alleged to have lured drifters from the railroad station and nearby streets, The Moscow Times reported. In 1997 The Moscow Times wrote that most of the dead came from the poorest part of the city, among them village girls, runaways and children who had dropped out of school. An 11-year-old boy living in a cellar told the paper that Spesivtsev had once approached him and that he had run away. "He was always around," the boy said. "We all knew what he looked like."
Natalya Voynova was 18, according to News.ru, or 19, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe, when she was killed in the apartment in July 1996. She had a daughter, Tatyana, who was one year old. Spesivtsev later said, according to News.ru, that his mother had brought Natalya to the apartment by asking her to help carry heavy bags. Investigators knew her only by her first name at first. Her remains were identified by DNA analysis only in 2013, and her daughter received them about 17 years after her death.
Tatyana was raised by her grandmother. She learned in primary school that her mother had died, and later her grandmother told her the full story and showed her newspaper clippings, including a 1999 article on the case that named her mother. "I am not your real mother," the grandmother told her, as Tatyana recalled to News.ru in 2025.
In the summer of 1996 Spesivtsev saw a 12-year-old boy on the stairwell of his building and lured him into the apartment. He held the boy there, kept him without food or water and beat him repeatedly, putting his life in danger, according to the court's findings as reported by Fontanka.ru. The boy escaped. He told no one what had happened for many years. The Investigative Committee says investigators found him while checking old missing-person reports; Novaya Gazeta Europe says he was found by staff of the Federal Penitentiary Service in the Republic of Buryatia while he was held in a penal colony there, and that his testimony led to a renewed review of the case in 2022. His name has not been published.
In June 1996, body fragments were found in and beside the Aba River in Novokuznetsk, near the school where, according to The Moscow Times, Lyudmila Spesivtseva had worked. 360.ru reports that police also found a burial site on waste ground with the remains of children whom experts placed between the ages of three and 14, and concluded that one person was responsible. Genetic testing was then expensive and not well established, Novaya Gazeta Europe says; it indicated at least 15 children and teenagers. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that investigators pursued many theories and checked everyone on the psychiatric registers. Spesivtsev was not among them, because the register showed him in Oryol.
At the same time, 360.ru notes, a series of child killings in Tolyatti on the Volga had been attributed to Oleg Rylkov, and his composite sketch was circulating in the Novokuznetsk press.
A neighbor, the pensioner Lidiya Vedenina, called the police in early summer to report a smell of death and loud music from the Spesivtsevs' apartment, The Moscow Times reported. No one came. 360.ru says she called more than once. Tatyana, Natalya Voynova's daughter, told News.ru in 2025 that another neighbor testified in her civil case about what she had experienced in her own apartment below, and asked why the police had not come earlier.
On September 24, 1996, three girls went out together: Olga Galtseva, 15, and two 13-year-olds, Evgenia (Zhenya) Barashkina and a girl named Anastasia (Nastya), whose surname was not reported. 360.ru and RuNews24 report that the girls had been patients at a nearby hospital. An older woman approached them. In the account Olga gave investigators, as reported by The Moscow Times in 1997, the woman was carrying shopping bags and the girls helped her home; in later accounts in 360.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe, she asked them to help her open the door of an apartment. The woman was Lyudmila Spesivtseva, then about 60 and working as a kindergarten watchman, according to 360.ru. Inside were her son and a large dog. The girls could not get out.
News.ru reports that Nastya was killed almost immediately and that Olga and Zhenya were held for about a month before Zhenya was killed. Olga told investigators that the older woman had been paid for bringing them, and named her as "Nikolaevna", 360.ru says. The families went to the police and to doctors when the girls disappeared, The Moscow Times reported, and were told the girls had probably run away. The families believed their poverty was the reason no one took the disappearances seriously.
Zhenya's mother, Lyudmila Barashkina, worked at a poultry factory in a village outside the city and was partly paid in chicken legs, The Moscow Times wrote in 1997. The remains the police first returned to her had been wrongly identified, and she had to cancel her daughter's funeral.
By late October the heating season was about to start, and the building's radiators were being checked. Novaya Gazeta Europe says a neighbor had called plumbers about cold radiators; other accounts describe a routine inspection before the heating was switched on. Spesivtsev refused to open the door and, according to News.ru, said he was locked in because of a mental disorder. The plumbers said they would come back with the district police officer, and the police forced the door.
Olga Galtseva was found alive and taken to the hospital. Spesivtsev got out through the balcony or onto the roof and down a fire escape, according to 360.ru and Rossiyskaya Gazeta. His mother was detained the next day, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports, and he was arrested a couple of days later at the entrance to his building.
Olga gave investigators a detailed statement against Spesivtsev and his mother. She died in the hospital despite emergency care; News.ru reports that she died three days after she was rescued, of complications from her injuries. Novaya Gazeta Europe notes that accounts differ on whether she died the day after giving her statement or three days after her rescue.
Searches of the apartment turned up 82 sets of bloodstained clothing belonging to different people and about 40 pieces of jewelry, which 360.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe say suggested that there had been more victims than were ever charged. The figure of 82 victims that later appeared in many Russian reports comes from that count of clothing, as Fontanka.ru and News.ru note; it has never been tested in court. The Moscow Times reported in 1997 that police also found stacks of building materials, such as linoleum and light bulbs, which suggested dealing in stolen goods.
Spesivtsev at first confessed. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that he spoke of 19 victims, and in 1997 The Moscow Times wrote that he was in jail awaiting trial on 19 counts of murder. Novaya Gazeta Europe and 360.ru report that he later retracted his statements in court.
Komsomolskaya Pravda published excerpts in May 2026 from a book on the case by its special correspondent Alexander Rogoza, "Spesivtsev. Mama Knows," which draws on the case materials and on interviews with investigators. According to the excerpt, when asked about the 19 killings, Spesivtsev shouted: "I killed nineteen, and someone stole something. To each his own!" He later claimed to have killed only four people. He and his mother then changed their testimony, the excerpt says, and claimed the victims had killed one another; they complained that their first statements had been obtained by force and asked for the investigator to be replaced. Checks did not confirm their complaints.
In jail he wrote poems attacking Russia's new democracy. Asked about his crimes, he asked in return how many people democracy had destroyed, The Moscow Times reported. Zelenchukov told the paper that Spesivtsev had asked whether his head could be sold after his execution so he could buy cigarettes, on the theory that a research institute might want his brain. The prison governor, Vladimir Romanov, told the paper that the killings had produced little public outcry because people were preoccupied with getting by. Novokuznetsk had five large steelworks; nearby coal towns were bankrupt, and many people had gone months without wages. The city's chief psychiatrist, Gennady Shuryayev, declined to comment.
The investigator in charge was Alexander Shelkov, according to the Rogoza excerpt in Komsomolskaya Pravda; The Moscow Times also cites Shelkov. Of the deaths in the case, only four could be tied to Spesivtsev with the evidence then available. Shelkov separated the remaining 15 deaths into a separate case, to be archived. The Investigative Committee, describing the history in 2024, says the case sent to court concerned the killing with particular cruelty of four people, three of them children, and BFM.ru, citing the committee, says the remaining case was suspended because his link to it could not be proved.
His sister was seen by neighbors entering the apartment while the three girls were held there, The Moscow Times reported. She was given psychiatric tests and released, and according to Shelkov she would appear at trial only as a witness. No court found her guilty of any part in the crimes, and Novaya Gazeta Europe and News.ru report that she was never punished.
The question of Spesivtsev's mental state decided the legal outcome. After he was charged with the series, Shelkov ordered a new psychiatric evaluation, and in March 1997 Spesivtsev was admitted for it to Psychiatric Hospital No. 12 in Novokuznetsk, the excerpt in Komsomolskaya Pravda says. Staff described him as wary but willing to talk. He talked a great deal about his health while claiming not to care about it, and kept turning the conversation to politics, blaming democrats for what he saw as a society full of drug addicts and prostitutes. He presented himself as a misunderstood fighter for justice. The 1997 conclusion was that he had no chronic mental illness and had never had one, and that he was sane at the time of the crimes. The psychological assessment described him as egocentric, vindictive, cold and rigid. In 1997 The Moscow Times reported that he was still under evaluation and quoted the prison governor, Romanov, as saying that psychiatrists had found no grounds to declare him insane.
According to the Rogoza excerpt, Judge Kazantsev, who had earlier refused the defense's requests for further evaluation, sentenced Spesivtsev to 10 years for the death of Evgenia Guselnikova, about a year and a half before the June 1998 trial on the 1996 killings. This is his only conviction. The excerpts do not name the court, the article of the criminal code or the type of colony. Some other outlets describe the 1997 sentence differently: 360.ru (2024) and Vechernyaya Moskva (2024) say he was sentenced in 1997 to 10 years for three murders, and Rambler's republication of an Izvestia report links the 10-year sentence to the 1996 crimes. Rossiyskaya Gazeta, by contrast, says that in 1997 judges declared him insane.
The trial on four of the 1996 killings, three of the victims minors, opened on June 2, 1998, the Rogoza excerpt says. The defense lawyer, Ivan Anakin, had repeatedly asked for an evaluation at the Serbsky Center in Moscow, Russia's main institute of forensic psychiatry. Judge Kazantsev, who had refused that request before, granted it this time; the court record said the court doubted whether a mentally healthy person could have committed the killings in the way they were committed. The judge also ordered his mother to be evaluated. The excerpt notes that Russia's moratorium on the death penalty was introduced in the last days of the evaluation.
The Serbsky evaluation found him insane, 360.ru reported in 2024. In 1999 the court found him not criminally responsible for the four killings and sent him for compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital, according to Vechernyaya Moskva and 360.ru. The Investigative Committee's 2024 account uses the same terms: he was declared insane ("priznan nevmenyaemym") and placed in a psychiatric hospital. This was not a conviction, and he was not sentenced to prison for those killings. BFM.ru's 2024 statement that he was "convicted" in 1999 of killing four people does not match the legal outcome described by the Investigative Committee.
He was placed in a specialized psychiatric hospital with intensive supervision in Kamyshin, in the Volgograd region, according to Fontanka.ru, 360.ru and Life.ru.
Spesivtsev's mother admitted that she had helped dispose of remains and that she had brought victims to her son, but she denied guilt for most of what was alleged. Novaya Gazeta Europe quotes her telling investigators, in substance, that she would answer for carrying out four buckets of remains but knew nothing about the rest. Her defense asked for an acquittal. She was convicted of complicity in three murders and sentenced to 13 years, to be served in a general-regime penal colony, according to 360.ru (2025) and Novaya Gazeta Europe; Vechernyaya Moskva and Rossiyskaya Gazeta also give 13 years. News.ru (2024) gives 15 years, a figure the other reports do not support. RuNews24 reports that, at trial, she said she never went into her son's room and did not know what happened there.
She was released in 2008 and went to live with her daughter in a village in the Kemerovo region, 360.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe report. In 2013, 360.ru says, she and his sister asked for Spesivtsev to be released, arguing that he had recovered and was no danger to anyone. The request did not succeed. She was not prosecuted in the reopened case, Vechernyaya Moskva noted in 2024, and the authorities did not say why.
Life.ru reported in 2024 that he had been treated in the Kamyshin hospital for the previous two decades. News.ru, summarizing media reports in 2024, wrote that he receives a disability pension, spends part of it on chocolate and sends part to his mother, with whom he corresponds; that he writes poetry and prose and makes handicrafts; and that staff describe him as intelligent and reserved, a reader of science fiction whose favorite author is Ray Bradbury. 360.ru reports that the regional governor asks the hospital for reports on his condition twice a year and publishes them, and News.ru says the Novokuznetsk prosecutor requests information about him twice a year. Under Russian law his compulsory treatment is reviewed periodically, and 360.ru notes that the prosecutor can seek a review every six months.
The 15 deaths that had been split off in 1998 were never closed. The Investigative Committee's directorate for the Kemerovo region (Kuzbass) later resumed the case and ordered hundreds of forensic examinations, including molecular genetic analysis of the remains and of items seized from the apartment 28 years earlier. The tests identified the bones of 15 people. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that a comprehensive psychological and psychiatric examination in 2024 confirmed his diagnosis.
On May 21, 2024, the Investigative Committee and the Kemerovo regional prosecutor's office announced the result. The Kemerovo Regional Court found that Spesivtsev had committed acts falling under points "g" and "z" of Article 102 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, the murder of two or more persons with particular cruelty, and under Article 15 with point "g" of Article 102, attempted murder with particular cruelty. The code applied was the Soviet-era code in force in 1996. Between March and September 1996, the court found, he had held 15 people in his apartment, 11 of them minors, inflicted severe physical suffering on them and killed them with repeated blows from a bladed object; the attempted killing was the boy who escaped. The forensic examination found that he has a mental illness, did not understand the social nature of his actions and could not control them. The court therefore applied compulsory medical measures in the form of placement in a psychiatric inpatient facility with intensive observation.
In legal terms, the court found that he had committed the acts while not criminally responsible. He was not convicted of the 15 killings and was not sentenced. Several outlets reported the decision as a guilty verdict or a conviction; BFM.ru's headline said he had been "found guilty" of 15 more murders. That wording does not match the measure the court applied. Novaya Gazeta Europe's statement that the court held him responsible for 19 killings including the one in 1991 is also not supported by the official announcements, which concern the 15 killings and one attempt.
The 2024 outcome left some people asking whether Spesivtsev had been wrongly found insane in 1999. Leonid Isaev, a member of the Moscow Bar Chamber, told News.ru in December 2024 that the expert finding should have been challenged at the time, with public and political pressure on prosecutors. In mass-killing cases, he said, forensic experts usually find the accused sane, and he was surprised by the result. To reopen the case now, he explained, it would not be enough to show that Spesivtsev is sane today; it would have to be shown that the experts' conclusion in the 1990s was knowingly false, and a court verdict on that falsity would have to take effect before a new examination could be ordered. He called this practically unachievable. "You would have to try very hard to prove Spesivtsev's sanity," he said.
In December 2024, Tatyana Kotsyuk, the daughter of Natalya Voynova, filed a civil claim against Spesivtsev for 10 million rubles in moral damages. Vechernyaya Moskva reported that a hearing was set for January 16 at the Zavodskoy District Court of Novokuznetsk. She also said publicly that she believed he had been pretending to be ill and should be serving a life sentence in a prison colony. The Zavodskoy District Court partly granted the claim and ordered Spesivtsev to pay 1 million rubles, News.ru reported in December 2025. He did not attend the hearing and sent the court a written statement in advance.
From the spring of 2025, small monthly payments from Spesivtsev began arriving in her bank account. She told News.ru that she had not opened the notifications. "Every month it is as if this person is knocking on my door," she said.
The apartment is still registered in Spesivtsev's name, and court proceedings have been opened over unpaid utility bills, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe; 360.ru reported in 2025 that the debt had reached 100,000 rubles the year before and that the apartment stays locked. Residents of the building told MSK1.ru in January 2026 that dozens of teenagers and children come to the entrance to look.
Spesivtsev was reported held in a special-type psychiatric hospital, at the age of 56, by Rossiyskaya Gazeta on September 23, 2026, in an article marking 30 years since his arrest. Earlier reports place the hospital in Kamyshin, Volgograd region. No release, transfer, death or new criminal proceeding had been reported by October 21, 2026. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that Rogoza's book on the case was presented at the Red Square book festival in Moscow in June 2026.
Proven by a final judgment of conviction: only the death of Evgenia Guselnikova in 1991, for which he was sentenced to 10 years (as reported in the Rogoza excerpt). The details of that judgment, including the court and the article of the code, were not reported.
Found by courts while he was not criminally responsible: four killings in 1996 (the 1999 finding) and 15 further killings and one attempted killing in 1996 (Kemerovo Regional Court, May 2024). These are court findings of fact under compulsory-treatment proceedings, not convictions.
Admitted: 19 killings in his first statements, later retracted; at another point he said four.
Unproven: totals of 80 or more. The figure of 82 comes from the clothing found in the apartment and has not been tested in court. 360.ru wrote in 2025 that investigators believe he had more than 80 victims but that only 20 episodes could be proven; that figure of 20 is the one most outlets now cite, and it combines one conviction with findings made while he was held not criminally responsible.
Allegations that the family ate parts of their victims or fed them to the captives appear in many Russian accounts, including Olga Galtseva's statement as summarized in The Moscow Times. Rossiyskaya Gazeta wrote in 2026 that it is not known whether the Spesivtsevs were cannibals. These allegations formed no part of any reported court finding.
Points on which sources differ: whether the 1997 sentence was for the 1991 death (Rogoza excerpt) or for three killings (360.ru and Vechernyaya Moskva, 2024), and whether a 1997 court found him insane (Rossiyskaya Gazeta); the year of his discharge from Oryol (1994 or 1995); whether Evgenia Guselnikova died in the hospital or was found dead; Natalya Voynova's age (18 or 19); how the three girls in September 1996 were approached (carrying bags or opening a door); and his mother's sentence (13 years in most sources, 15 in one).
March 1, 1970: Aleksandr Nikolayevich Spesivtsev is born in Novokuznetsk.
1972: his birth is registered.
1985: he leaves school; his parents separate.
1988: arrested for thefts; diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent for treatment; admitted to Psychiatric Hospital No. 12 in October.
March 1989: leaves the hospital and goes home.
May to June 1991: holds Evgenia Guselnikova, 17, in the family apartment; she dies.
1991 or 1992: sent for compulsory treatment to a special psychiatric hospital in Oryol.
1994 or 1995: discharged in remission without the police being told.
February 1996: kills a 20-year-old woman (360.ru).
Spring to August 1996: the killings in the apartment, including boys of about 12, girls aged 12 to 14, two unidentified adults, and Natalya Voynova in July.
Summer 1996: a 12-year-old boy escapes from the apartment.
June 1996: remains are found in and by the Aba River.
Early summer 1996: neighbor Lidiya Vedenina reports the smell and noise to police; no one comes.
September 24, 1996: Olga Galtseva, Zhenya Barashkina and Nastya are brought to the apartment.
Late October 1996: police force the door; Olga is found alive and later dies. Spesivtsev escapes; his mother is detained the next day and he is arrested a couple of days later.
March 1997: a Novokuznetsk evaluation finds him sane.
About early 1997: sentenced to 10 years for the death of Evgenia Guselnikova.
June 2, 1998: trial on four of the 1996 killings begins; Serbsky evaluation ordered.
1999: found not criminally responsible for the four killings and sent for compulsory treatment; his mother is convicted of complicity in three murders and sentenced to 13 years.
2008: Lyudmila Spesivtseva is released.
2013: Natalya Voynova's remains are identified by DNA; mother and sister ask for his release.
2022: the boy who escaped is found; the case is reviewed again.
May 21, 2024: Kemerovo Regional Court finds that he committed 15 further killings and one attempted killing while not responsible, and applies compulsory medical measures.
December 2024: Tatyana Kotsyuk sues for moral damages.
2025: the Zavodskoy District Court awards her 1 million rubles; monthly payments begin in the spring.
June 2026: Alexander Rogoza's book on the case is presented in Moscow.
September 23, 2026: Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports him held in a special-type psychiatric hospital at 56.