Andrey Sergeyevich Yezhov was born on August 16, 1967 in the village of Sloboda in the Pochinkovsky district of Smolensk Oblast. He lived in Kashira, in the southern part of Moscow Oblast, worked as a plumber and was described in the Russian press afterwards as an unremarkable family man. Neighbours knew him by a childhood nickname, Yozhik, the hedgehog.
The method was consistent enough to be recognisable across a decade. He entered through a ground-floor window at night, strangled the woman inside and raped her. Investigators put the series in the Kashira and Stupino districts and dated it from 2010 to 2020. The victims had nothing in common but their vulnerability and the hour: the list released by investigators includes a forty-two-year-old woman raped and killed in the Kashira district on March 13, 2015, two women born in 1940 and 1950 raped and killed in September and October 2019, and an eighty-eight-year-old woman raped and killed in Kashira on June 8, 2020.
Two people he attacked lived. On the night of January 3, 2020 a businessman in a house in the Kashira district heard a noise from the second-floor bedroom of his ten-year-old daughter; the child survived the attack. On February 24, 2020 a fourteen-year-old girl in Stupino survived an attempt on her life.
He was caught because of the last killing. He had taken the elderly woman’s documents and savings book and thrown them into a rubbish container, and the container was covered by a camera. He had also tried to carry off a black and white Soviet television set and abandoned it by the porch. He was detained in June 2020, and the Kashira city court remanded him for two months on suspicion of a series of rapes and murders. At first three cases were attributed to him. He then admitted seven, and on June 26 the Investigative Committee said he had confessed to two more, making nine episodes in all, of which seven ended in death.
On July 6, 2020 he hanged himself in the pre-trial detention centre at Noginsk. Guards saw it happen on the security cameras and could not reach him in time across the length of the facility. Several notes were found beside him asking that nobody be blamed for his death. He was fifty-two.
Nothing against him was ever proved in court. The seven killings rest on his own confessions and on the forensic work that was still under way when he died, and the archive records them as attributed rather than established. Russian reporting differs on the start of the series, giving 2010 in most accounts and 2013 in one; the ages of the victims, from ten to eighty-eight, are consistent across all of them.