Anatoly Nikolaevich Biryukov was born about 1939 and lived in Moscow. His father, Nikolai Biryukov, was a Soviet general who had been made a Hero of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.
His victims were infants, taken from prams. An earlier version of this entry described them as boys and girls, which understates how young they were. Russian reporting called him the Hunter of Babies.
On September 16, 1977 he took a pram that had been left for a moment outside a baby formula shop on Marshal Biryuzov Street. The pram was found empty later the same day and the baby was found dead in the hallway of a block of flats on the same street.
On September 19 he took a second pram, from outside the Children's World shop on Prospekt Mira. The child was a girl of three months. At that point the Soviet authorities recognised that one person was probably responsible and mounted a large search for the missing baby. Her body was found on a landfill near Mamyri on October 17, and showed signs of sexual assault before death.
Three more infants are attributed to him after that.
He was caught by ordinary people. In October he tried to take another child at Chekhov, south of Moscow, and failed. Members of the public chased him, and afterwards gave investigators descriptions good enough to identify him. He was arrested on October 24, 1977.
He was sentenced to death. The sentence was appealed to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in 1978. He was shot on February 24, 1979.
The case was not publicised at the time. The presenter of a later Russian television programme about it said the Soviet authorities avoided publicity partly because of who his father was.
That programme, an episode of the NTV series Sledstvie veli titled The Empty Pram, is the reason much of this is on the record at all. It included two eyewitnesses, the mother of one of the victims, two of the state investigators and Biryukov's defence lawyer.
The victims are not named in anything accessible. Two of the five killings are set out in detail and the other three are attributed without particulars, which is why the count is given as it is. Russian sources place his birth around 1939, and the roster has carried 1939 as a firm date.