On September 16, 1977, a mother left her pram for a moment outside a children's milk kitchen on Marshal Biryuzov Street in the Shchukino district of Moscow, and when she turned back it was gone. Inside it had been her three-month-old daughter. The man who took the pram wheeled it into a neighboring courtyard, lifted the baby out and carried her into the entrance of the apartment building at No. 22 on the same street, up to the landing between the third and fourth floors. When she began to cry and he heard a door open on a floor above, he stabbed her and ran. A woman going out for a walk with her own pram found the bundle in the stairwell.
Three days later, on September 19, a second pram was taken from outside the Children's World store on Prospekt Mira, with a three-month-old girl, Yulia Ananyeva, inside. It was then that the Moscow criminal investigation department recognized that one man was probably responsible, and it mounted one of the largest manhunts in its history; according to later accounts, Leonid Brezhnev himself followed the investigation. Yulia's body was found on October 17 at a dump near Mamyri, with signs that she had been sexually assaulted before death.
Three more infants followed within the month. By most accounts all five were between three and six months old, killed in Moscow and around Chekhov, the town south of the capital where the killer had been born, and all five were sexually abused. The victims other than Yulia Ananyeva have not been named in anything published.
He was caught after a failed attempt at Chekhov in October, when people in the street chased him and then gave investigators descriptions good enough for a composite sketch. Colleagues recognized it as Anatoly Nikolaevich Biryukov, thirty-eight, a fitter in a construction administration who was regarded at work as quiet, polite and reliable, a married man with two daughters. He was arrested on October 24, 1977, and confessed quickly, describing each killing in detail; of the first, he said he had killed the child out of fear when he heard the door open. Many friends of the family were convinced there had been a terrible mistake.
His father was Lieutenant General Nikolai Ivanovich Biryukov, a Hero of the Soviet Union from the Second World War, and Anatoly had been born in Chekhov, most sources say on February 18, 1939. According to Russian accounts he had first come to police attention in 1971, after trying to take a baby from a pram outside a children's clinic. The case was not publicized at the time, which a later Russian television presenter attributed partly to his father's standing.
He was sentenced to death. An appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in 1978 failed, and he was executed by shooting on February 24, 1979. Much of what is known about the case comes from Soviet-era investigators and witnesses who spoke decades later, in documentaries such as the NTV series Sledstvie veli and Moscow 24's Bez sroka davnosti, which included the mother of one of the children and Biryukov's defense lawyer.