On the night of November 8, 2002, a student from Peru named Agnes Carolina Santisteban left a café in central Moscow with two classmates. She told them she wanted to call her parents and do her homework, and they walked her to a suburban train station. She was never seen alive again. Nine days later, as the first snow began to melt, her body was found in a small park less than 100 meters from her student dormitory in Khimki, just outside the city.
The case drew attention as far as Latin America, and the police questioned a 27-year-old drama student from Siberia who lived nearby. They had no evidence against him, and he went home. His name was Alexei Gaskov. Twenty-two years later, DNA taken from one of the 2002 crime scenes in the Moscow Region was matched to his genetic profile. On September 28, 2026, the Moscow Regional Court found him guilty of ten killings committed between March and November 2002, among them Santisteban's, and sentenced him to life.
The conviction is at first instance, and the verdict is not final while an appeal may be pending. The site's news watch reports that an appeal was filed on October 12, 2026; that filing could not be confirmed in any published source found for this page.
Alexei Gaskov was born on July 1, 1975, in Berdsk, a town of the Novosibirsk Region in western Siberia, according to the Moscow Region news outlet RIAMO. The online outlet 360 reported that he grew up in a stable family and has a younger brother. At school, accounts agree, he was a joker and a mimic, and he was expected to become an actor.
He did not get into the Novosibirsk theater institute on his first attempt and served in the army instead, according to Moskvich Mag. After his discharge he enrolled at the Novosibirsk State Theater Institute but was expelled in his first year for drinking and missing classes. He then drove a minibus and took odd jobs. Gazeta.Ru reported that he did not continue his education after school until he tried acting again.
In the late 1990s he became close friends with another Berdsk man, Mikhail Yudin, a construction worker. Several outlets describe a friendship built around drinking and approaching young women in town. That friendship matters to his story because of what Yudin was later found to have done, and because of what Gaskov falsely claimed to have done.
In early 2002, at about 26, Gaskov moved to Moscow to try again. Gazeta.Ru reported that his mother, a senior bank employee, urged him to go and paid for his travel and tuition. He was admitted to a two-year paid acting course taught by the actor Emmanuil Vitorgan at VGIK, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. He lasted about six months. He rarely attended, drank in the dormitory and sometimes appeared on stage drunk, and he was expelled in late summer 2002 for absences and drinking. Meduza reported that he later said alcohol helped him feel confident and get into a role.
He stayed in and around Moscow on temporary work. Gazeta.Ru reported that he worked at an amusement park in Pushkino, northeast of the capital, and that he had an uncle in Podolsk, to the south. According to MSK1.ru, he lived about five minutes from the student campus in Khimki. In November 2002, after the Khimki case, he returned to Berdsk.
The Investigative Committee of Russia, in the summary it gave when the case went to court in July 2026, listed ten killings in 2002, in this order, according to Life.ru, NEWS.ru and Meduza:
three young women killed over several months in Moscow's Babushkinsky district, in the northeast of the city;
a young woman who was applying to a college, killed in a forest park in Podolsk;
two young women killed on the same day in the central park of Pushkino;
a man fatally stabbed in the same Pushkino park;
two more young women killed in northeast Moscow;
and, last, the student from Peru, killed near her dormitory in Khimki.
The Moscow Region prosecutor's office, as reported by Interfax and Gazeta.Ru, described the victims as seven women, two 17-year-old girls and one man, and said the crimes took place in Moscow, the Moscow Region and the Novosibirsk Region. None of the nine other victims has been named in any published source found for this page. What is known about them is fragmentary.
Gazeta.Ru, in its report on the verdict, gave a fuller sequence with dates. By its account, the first victim was a 17-year-old girl whom Gaskov followed into the entrance of an apartment building in the Otradnoye district of northeast Moscow on March 5, 2002. Two more women were killed on June 6 and July 8, in northeast and west Moscow. The fourth victim was killed in Podolsk. On August 18, two women were killed in different parts of the Pushkino park. On September 16, an 18-year-old woman was killed in west Moscow, and that same evening, in the Pushkino park, a man Gaskov had been drinking with was stabbed after an argument. About two weeks later a 30-year-old woman was killed in south Moscow. The tenth was Santisteban, on November 8. This sequence does not match the official summary in every detail (the official list names Babushkinsky and northeast Moscow, not west and south Moscow), and the differences have not been explained in any source.
Other details come from single outlets. Meduza and Moskvich Mag describe the Podolsk victim as a college applicant, and 360 gives her age as 17. Moskvich Mag reported that the two women killed in Pushkino were 30 and 22. It also reported that the man in Pushkino was a former boxer who fought back when Gaskov tried to rob him. Anna Ovchinnikova, the Moscow Region investigator who led the case, told Gazeta.Ru that the attacks tended to follow Gaskov's routes around the region rather than any plan.
According to the investigation as reported by Interfax, he approached people who were alone in parks and other public places, led them to isolated spots on some pretext, attacked them sexually and killed them to hide the crimes. Meduza and RTVI reported that he struck the women on the head with a heavy object before raping and strangling them. Gazeta.Ru reported that some victims agreed to drink with him first and that he sometimes threatened them with a knife.
Agnes Carolina Santisteban is the only victim whose life has been described in print. A 2002 report on the Peruvian community in Moscow, carried by the Mexican newspaper El Siglo de Torreón, said she was 23 and had arrived in Moscow in mid-September 2002 to study choreography at the Moscow State University of Culture and Arts. She was still learning Russian and could barely speak it. Her roommate, Bernaldina Pereira, 17, described her as shy and very quiet, and said she spent most of her time in her room writing emails to her parents.
The Russian outlets of 2025 and 2026 describe her as the niece of an adviser to the president of Peru, and Gazeta.Ru and Moskvich Mag add that her father was a Peruvian journalist. Her age is given as 23 by most Russian outlets, 22 by 360 in January 2025 and 21 by Gazeta.Ru. Her surname appears in Russian as Сантистебан and Сантистеван, and in transliteration as Santisteban, Santistevan, Santestebán and Santstebán.
Her friends last saw her on the night of November 8 near the suburban train station. A friend, Sandra Aliaga, said afterward that she seemed to have taken a shortcut through a wooded area to her dormitory. Her body was found on November 17. Peru's ambassador to Russia, Pablo Portugal, said the Russian authorities were working quickly and that he hoped the case would be solved; he called it a very sad day for the whole Peruvian community. A Mass was said for her in Moscow, and she was cremated so that her ashes could be sent home to Peru.
The case was not solved for 22 years. MSK1.ru, drawing on accounts from the time, reported that Gaskov was questioned in Khimki in 2002 and that the deputy head of the Khimki police, Oleg Mishukov, later described that interrogation. Gaskov was let go. During a reenactment after his arrest in the 2020s, NEWS.ru reported, he said he had been drawn to her because she did not look Russian.
What happened after Gaskov went home to Berdsk in late 2002 shaped the next two decades.
Between 1998 and 2002 a series of young women in Berdsk and Novosibirsk had been robbed, raped and strangled. The local press called the unknown attacker the "jeans maniac" because the victims tended to be slight, dark-haired women in tight jeans. Moskvich Mag and MSK1.ru name the women: Anastasia Fatkova, 16, a schoolgirl attacked near a bus stop in 1999; Olga Karpova; Svetlana Minina, 21; and Tatyana Samokhvalova, 22, a flute student at the Novosibirsk Conservatory whose instrument was taken.
In December 2002, a young woman named Yulia Zabiranik was found dead in her apartment in Berdsk. Her age is given as 25 by most sources and 23 by Moskvich Mag. Food and empty bottles in her kitchen suggested she had known her visitor. A fingerprint on a bottle (a beer can, in some accounts) belonged to Gaskov, and he was detained within days. Moskvich Mag reported that he was found drunk at a sobering-up station.
He soon confessed, not only to Zabiranik's death but to the whole Berdsk series. Investigators found his account unconvincing. At the reenactment he seemed lost, could not describe the victims and could not find the scenes. He had been in another city when some of the killings took place, and the DNA recovered from the victims did not match him. A shop assistant then explained the fingerprint: Gaskov and Zabiranik had bought alcohol together, and he had reached a bottle down from a high shelf for her. A woman named Marina Vlasova told police she had been raped by a man named Mikhail, whose description fitted Yudin rather than Gaskov.
Oleg Akraintsev, a former head of a violent crime unit who worked on the case, described Gaskov to Moskvich Mag as a clown who was acting. An unnamed officer quoted by 360 at the time of the verdict said the same thing in two words: "одним словом, клоун," or "in a word, a clown." Investigators concluded that he had confessed falsely to get attention.
Mikhail Yudin was arrested in September 2003 after his DNA matched the evidence. He admitted to killing Zabiranik late at night, after Gaskov had left her apartment, according to 360. Searches of his home and garage turned up belongings of his victims, some of which he had given to his wife and mother. He confessed to five killings and 23 robberies, assaults and rapes, was found sane and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004 (in August by one account, on December 2 by another). He is held in the Polar Owl colony. In January 2025 he filed a complaint with the Supreme Court against his sentence; RTVI later reported it was refused. The charges against Gaskov over the Berdsk case were dropped and he was released in court, in September 2003 by Moskvich Mag's account and in 2004 by RTVI's.
Two claims about the friendship remain unproven. A January 2025 article in 360 said Gaskov and Yudin killed Zabiranik together; this conflicts with the court record that convicted Yudin alone and with 360's own later account. Moskvich Mag reported that the two men had agreed that whichever of them was caught first would take the blame. No court has found either claim, and neither is supported by any official statement found for this page.
Gaskov stayed in Berdsk, married and drove a bus. In May 2006 an 11-year-old girl came to visit. Sources differ on her relationship to him: Meduza, Gazeta.Ru and Moskvich Mag describe her as the daughter of a woman he was living with, and NEWS.ru as the daughter of a friend of his wife. He gave her alcohol and raped her, and it was later found that he had passed a sexually transmitted infection to her. Stanislav Zolotarev, a senior investigator of the Berdsk prosecutor's office, told reporters at the time that she did not tell her mother for a month because she was afraid of Gaskov. Her mother reported it.
Gaskov denied the charge and said the police had set him up, according to MSK1.ru and NEWS.ru. He tried to escape from the investigators' building and was caught in a police search operation. He had also snatched a woman's handbag in 2005. On April 27, 2007, a Berdsk court sentenced him to ten and a half years in a strict-regime colony and ordered him to pay the girl's family 70,000 rubles, NEWS.ru reported. He was released in 2016.
After his release he hid his record, according to RIAMO. Moskvich Mag reported that he sold handmade board games online under the name "Aleksei Volk." He married again. His wife had a daughter who was about nine when they met, Gazeta.Ru reported.
In the summer of 2024, investigators of the Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee for the Moscow Region, working with the criminal investigation department of the Interior Ministry, went back through the unsolved 2002 cases. The Investigative Committee's account, as reported by Life.ru and RuNews24, is that a working group of investigators and forensic specialists found signs that the killings were a series, and sent surviving physical evidence for new tests.
Anton Serous, head of the directorate's first department for especially important cases, told NEWS.ru that improved genomic methods could now compare genotypes and find biological traces on items where none would have been noticed before. In June 2024, according to NEWS.ru, a biological sample from one of the Moscow Region cases matched the DNA profile of the Berdsk offender. 360 reported that the traces were sweat and fat from one of the scenes. Moskvich Mag gave a different sequence, in which a complaint from Gaskov's partner led investigators to his 2006 conviction and a fresh DNA test; Gazeta.Ru reported in September 2026 that the series was solved after he was detained in the Novosibirsk Region on suspicion of another especially grave crime.
Moscow Region investigators traveled to Berdsk and took him into custody. The date is reported differently: RTVI, in its report on the verdict, said July 2024, while 360 and an earlier RTVI report said January 2025. MSK1.ru, on January 20, 2025, reported that his brother, a retired captain of the Emergencies Ministry, and his sister-in-law confirmed that Moscow investigators had taken him from Berdsk. News of the arrest was first published in mid-January 2025.
Gaskov confessed again. This time, Meduza reported, his accounts of each crime were consistent and detailed, and they matched the evidence. During reenactments at the scenes he described how he attacked each victim, and the Investigative Committee later published a video of him calmly describing the attacks, RuNews24 reported.
At first he was reported to be linked to four killings: the Podolsk case, the two women in Pushkino and the Khimki case, according to MSK1.ru and RTVI. By July 2025, RTVI reported, an investigator said evidence connected him to ten victims. Life.ru reported in July 2026 that investigators had added eight killings he had at first concealed, and that the investigation was still looking for further episodes; how the eight were counted against the original four is not explained in any source.
In late 2025 a further charge came. On December 1, 2025, RTVI, citing the Telegram channel SHOT, and 360 reported that Gaskov had confessed to sexually abusing his stepdaughter, who was 17 at the time of the abuse reported for 2023. 360 reported that he wrote to his wife through his lawyer denying it and saying the girl was lying. His wife, who had been married to him for seven years, told reporters she had known nothing of the killings and had seen a completely different side of him. The indictment, as reported by Interfax and the prosecutor's office, put the offenses against the stepdaughter in Berdsk between 2020 and 2024, and said he gave her alcohol to break down her resistance.
In an interview with Eduard Petrov, a journalist for the state news program Vesti, reported by RTVI on March 28, 2026, Gaskov said he had killed "100 с лишним," more than 100 people, beginning in 1995. He said the figure was approximate and that he had not kept count, because, he said, only abnormal maniacs keep tallies. He also said he had repented and written confessions to help investigators. Gazeta.Ru reported in September 2026 that he had claimed more than 100 killings over thirty years.
This is his own claim and it is unverified. Investigators did not confirm his involvement in any killing beyond the ten in the indictment, Meduza reported. 360 wrote that the figure may have been an attempt to draw attention, and Moskvich Mag described it the same way. Investigators had seen him confess falsely before: in 2002 he claimed a series of killings that DNA later proved were Yudin's. No court has examined the claim, and no further charges based on it have been reported.
The Investigative Committee completed its investigation in early July 2026. Materials gathered in three regions were sent to the Moscow Regional Court, and Life.ru, NEWS.ru, RuNews24 and Meduza reported the transfer between July 6 and July 11.
Gaskov was charged under five articles of the Russian Criminal Code: murder of two or more persons with particular cruelty and to conceal another crime, together with rape and sexual violence (Article 105, Part 2); rape (Article 131); violent acts of a sexual nature (Article 132); lewd acts (Article 135); and involving a minor in antisocial acts (Article 151). A forensic psychiatric examination, according to 360 and Gazeta.Ru, diagnosed him with homicidomania, a compulsive drive to kill, and raptophilia, sexual arousal from attacking a person who does not consent. He was found sane and responsible for his actions.
On September 15, 2026, the state prosecutor asked the court for a life sentence in a special-regime colony, the Moscow Region prosecutor's office said on Telegram. The prosecutor described the crimes as cynical and unprincipled, Gazeta.Ru reported. The prosecutor's office said Gaskov admitted guilt and expressed remorse during the trial.
On September 28, 2026, the Moscow Regional Court found Gaskov guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment, to be served in a special-regime correctional colony, as the prosecutor had asked. The verdict was reported by the prosecutor's office, Interfax, TASS (through Meduza), Gazeta.Ru, RTVI, 360, Moskvich Mag and the Public News Service. The court granted a civil claim and ordered him to pay 3 million rubles in moral damages to his stepdaughter. His property remains under arrest, Gazeta.Ru reported. Published reports of the verdict do not name the judge, and no victim's relatives are quoted.
Sergei Gruzdev, a lawyer and former judge of the Moscow City Court, told RIA Novosti, as quoted by RTVI, that a person serving life may ask for parole after 25 years, that the court then looks at his conduct over the previous three years, and that if parole is refused he may apply again after three more years. 360 noted that Gaskov could not apply before he is about 75.
As of the latest source found for this page (Moskvich Mag, October 1, 2026), Gaskov had been sentenced at first instance and no appeal had been reported. The site's news watch reports that an appeal was filed on October 12, 2026; no published report of that appeal was found in this run, including searches in Russian and English and the pages of Meduza, RTVI, 360, Moskvich Mag and Interfax. If the appeal was filed, the verdict is not yet final and the conviction stands only at first instance until a higher court rules. Moskvich Mag wrote that he would probably be sent to the Polar Owl colony, where Yudin is held, though it was unlikely the two would be allowed to meet. Where he is held as of October 2026 has not been published.
Found proven by the first-instance court on September 28, 2026: ten killings in Moscow and the Moscow Region between March and November 2002, of seven women, two 17-year-old girls and one man, with rape and sexual violence; and sexual offenses against his stepdaughter between 2020 and 2024. The verdict is not final if an appeal is pending.
Proven by a final conviction: the 2006 rape of an 11-year-old girl and a 2005 robbery in Berdsk, for which he served about ten years.
Not proven and rejected: his 2002 confession to the Berdsk series. DNA tied those killings to Mikhail Yudin, who was convicted, and the charges against Gaskov were dropped.
His own claim, unverified: more than 100 killings since 1995. Investigators confirmed none beyond the ten.
Unproven reports: that he and Yudin killed Yulia Zabiranik together (360, January 2025); that the two men had a pact to cover for each other (Moskvich Mag). Investigators were reported in 2025 to be checking his possible involvement in other crimes in Moscow, the Moscow Region and elsewhere; no further charges have been reported.
The case is one of a number of Russian cold cases from the 1990s and 2000s that investigators have reopened with newer DNA methods; Meduza placed it beside the case of a man in Barnaul sentenced in October 2025 for eleven killings. For Santisteban's family in Peru, the conviction came almost 24 years after her death. For the families of the other nine victims, whose names have not been published, there is no public record of how they learned the outcome.
The record also shows how close the 2002 investigations came. Police in Khimki questioned Gaskov in November 2002 and let him go. Weeks later in Berdsk, investigators correctly rejected his confession to killings he had not committed, and he walked free in court. He went on to commit a crime against a child in 2006, and the court in 2026 found that he had abused a second child from 2020. The DNA that linked him to the Moscow cases was available only after his profile was taken and the old samples were tested again.
July 1, 1975: Alexei Gaskov born in Berdsk, Novosibirsk Region.
1990s: Army service; expelled from the Novosibirsk State Theater Institute for drinking and absences; friendship with Mikhail Yudin.
Early 2002: Moves to Moscow; enrolls in Emmanuil Vitorgan's paid course at VGIK.
March 5, 2002: A 17-year-old girl is killed in northeast Moscow, the first of the ten killings (date per Gazeta.Ru).
Summer 2002: Killings in Moscow and Podolsk; expelled from VGIK in late summer.
August 18, 2002: Two women killed in the Pushkino central park (date per Gazeta.Ru).
September 16, 2002: A woman killed in Moscow and a man stabbed in the Pushkino park (dates per Gazeta.Ru).
November 8, 2002: Agnes Carolina Santisteban last seen; her body is found near her Khimki dormitory on November 17. Gaskov is questioned and returns to Berdsk.
December 2002: Yulia Zabiranik found dead in Berdsk; Gaskov detained and falsely confesses to the Berdsk series.
September 2003: Mikhail Yudin arrested; charges against Gaskov later dropped.
2004: Yudin sentenced to life.
May 2006: Gaskov rapes an 11-year-old girl in Berdsk.
April 27, 2007: Sentenced to ten and a half years in a strict-regime colony.
2016: Released.
2020 - 2024: Offenses against his stepdaughter in Berdsk, as later found by the court.
June - July 2024: Moscow Region investigators reopen the 2002 cases; DNA match to Gaskov.
January 2025: Arrest reported; linked at first to four killings.
December 1, 2025: Reported confession to abusing his stepdaughter.
March 28, 2026: Vesti interview, reported by RTVI, in which he claims more than 100 killings.
July 6, 2026: Investigation completed; case sent to the Moscow Regional Court.
September 15, 2026: Prosecutor asks for life imprisonment.
September 28, 2026: Convicted at first instance of ten killings and sexual offenses; sentenced to life in a special-regime colony and ordered to pay 3 million rubles.
October 1, 2026: Latest source found; no appeal reported. An appeal filed October 12, 2026 is reported by the site's news watch but unconfirmed.