Andrey Sergeyevich Yezhov was born on August 16, 1967, in the village of Sloboda in the Pochinkovsky district of Smolensk Oblast, the younger son of a milkmaid and a tractor driver. Neighbors remembered a stable family with no drinking. By his own later account his sexual deviance began in his teens, when he spied on naked women in the bathhouse and began abusing animals. After eight years of school he trained at a vocational college as a car mechanic, served in the Soviet missile forces, and went back to the village to work as a stoker and then a driver at the dairy farm. He married a coworker, Valentina, and moved with her to the Kashira district of Moscow Oblast; the marriage ended after he began an affair with a friend of his older brother's wife, whom he then married, and they had children. By the mid-2000s that marriage had soured, and he took to peeping at women at ponds and bathhouses and through ground-floor windows, and to drinking in his garage. He worked as a plumber, and after his arrest the Russian press described him as an unremarkable family man. Neighbors knew him by a childhood nickname, Yozhik, the hedgehog.
The first killing that could be tied to him was in February 2010. Drunk on an evening walk in Kashira, he looked through a ground-floor window, saw a woman of seventy-nine lying on her bed, climbed in, strangled her and assaulted her body, and left through the window with her radio, which he hid in his garage. Investigators found plenty of biological traces, but he was not in the database of convicted offenders. From then on he attacked women to rape and kill them, nearly always on impulse and drunk. He was slight enough to get in through open vent windows, and in almost every case the woman was alone; if he found she was not, he left. One Russian account dates the start of the series to 2013 instead.
In April 2013 he climbed through a bathroom window into a house where a woman of ninety-five was asleep, strangled her, and left with the medals of her late husband, a veteran of the Second World War. A few months later he went to Stupino and raped and strangled a woman of sixty in her apartment. On March 13, 2015, near his garage, he met a drunk woman of forty-two, offered her a drink, and when she refused beat and strangled her, assaulted her body in his car and buried her in the woods near Tesna railway station. Then he stopped for almost five years.
In the autumn of 2019 he raped and strangled two more women in Kashira, a month apart, on the same street; one account gives them as a pensioner of seventy killed in November and a woman of seventy-five killed a month later, another as women born in 1940 and 1950 killed in September and October. On the night of January 3, 2020, he got into the second-floor bedroom of a ten-year-old girl in a house in the Kashira district and raped her and tried to strangle her; her father, a businessman in the next room, heard the noise, and Yezhov jumped from the window and got away. On February 24, 2020, a fourteen-year-old girl in Stupino fought him, biting and hitting him until he broke a window and fled. She called the police at once, but he was not caught.
Four months later, on the night of June 8, 2020, he climbed into a house on Dzerzhinskaya Street in Kashira, raped and strangled a woman of eighty-eight, took her documents and savings book, and tried to carry off her black and white Soviet television, which he left on the porch because it was too heavy. A social worker found her body the next day.
He was caught because of that killing. A camera near the house showed a man throwing papers into the grass or a trash container, and the papers were the dead woman's documents. On June 10 he was arrested at his apartment, and the Kashira city court remanded him for two months. His DNA matched three other killings and the attacks on the two girls, and he confessed to four more killings he had not been suspected of. On June 26 the Investigative Committee said nine attacks had been attributed to him, seven of them fatal, and investigators ordered genetic, biological, trace, ballistic and psychiatric examinations and checked him against other cases. He gave as his motives the lack of a sex life with his wife and a desire to kill that came over him from time to time. In the pre-trial detention center at Noginsk he cooperated calmly, showing and describing the crimes.
On the morning of July 6, 2020, staff found him hanged in his single cell at Noginsk. By one account guards saw it on the security cameras and could not reach him in time. Several notes were found beside him asking that nobody be blamed for his death. An official check found it was suicide. He was fifty-two. Prosecutors said at the time they expected a court to find him guilty posthumously.
No court ever ruled on the case. The seven killings rest on his own confessions and on DNA and other forensic work that was still under way when he died. A 2022 documentary on Russian television called him the fortochny maniac, the vent-window maniac.