The camera that ended it was found by Nikita Lytkin's uncle. In early April 2011 police composites of the people wanted for a run of hammer attacks in Akademgorodok, the academic district of Irkutsk, were passed around the Institute of Organic Chemistry, where Lytkin's grandmother worked. She and Lytkin's uncle, Vladislav, studied the faces, and Vladislav went to the apartment. Nikita was out, but a video camera was there with a memory card still in it; some accounts say it was the uncle's own camera, lent to the boy. The card held a recording of the mutilation of Alevtina Kuydina, a sixty-three-year-old homeless woman killed two days earlier near a research institute. Vladislav took the camera to the police, and within about an hour and a half on April 5 Lytkin and his friend Artyom Anoufriev, both eighteen, were in custody. Other accounts say the grandmother recognized her grandson from a sketch shown on television.
For four months the district had been afraid of one man. The rumor was of a single maniac of about thirty. Residents formed patrols, and at a public meeting on March 11, called after another body was found, two local teenagers offered ideas and filmed the proceedings on a phone. They were Anoufriev and Lytkin. They never came under suspicion. Maxim Khomyak, one of the investigators, said later that everyone had been looking for strangers, and these boys belonged to Akademgorodok.
Both had grown up without their fathers. Anoufriev, born October 4, 1992, had good marks in literature and English and played guitar and double bass, and after school he entered the Irkutsk State Medical University while working as an auxiliary at the art museum. Lytkin, six months younger, was bullied through school, left after the ninth grade and dropped out of two colleges. They met at a friend's birthday party, and for years each was the other's only friend. They recorded noise music with violent lyrics and ran online groups admiring Alexander Pichushkin, the Bitsa Park killer in Moscow, and the Irkutsk gang known as Blood Magic, sentenced in 2010. Anoufriev spent a short time around the city's skinheads and joined the Russian March in Irkutsk in 2010. The skinheads' informal leader testified that Anoufriev had never been one of them and simply hated everyone. Captain Yevgeny Karchevsky, the chief investigator, put the motive down to a wish for notoriety.
They hunted on foot, walking the same route between the State University stop and Akademgorodok in the evenings, often letting twenty people pass before choosing one, and attacking from behind while their mothers worked night shifts. They used mallets, hammers, a baseball bat, knives and an air pistol. They told the psychiatrists who found them both sane that they had picked the weak and the drunk. Who struck first is disputed. Under questioning Anoufriev said he dealt the opening blows and Lytkin began the mutilation; investigators later concluded that Lytkin struck first in most of the attacks and made every one of the knife wounds.
The first known attack, on November 14, 2010, left Anastasia Markovskaya, eighteen, with serious head injuries. Police did not open a case because she had not been robbed. She wrote about the attack on a local internet forum, and her attackers read it and wrote to her, asking what she had felt.
The first to die was a schoolboy. On December 1, 2010, the pair came upon Danil Semyonov, twelve, a pupil at their own school, out on a hill with his snow scooter. Lytkin hit him from behind with a mallet and Anoufriev beat him with a bat. His mother and brother found him still alive, but the ambulance was caught in traffic, and he died before it arrived. Experts decided he had ridden into a birch tree, although the slope was gentle and the scooter was undamaged, and no criminal case was opened. The two later said they had used him for practice.
Olga Mikhailovna Pirog, sixty-nine, a leading researcher at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, was found on December 16 about twenty meters from where Danil had died, with some thirty knife wounds; her money and jewelry were untouched, and her killers had made an audio recording of the attack. Because Danil's death had been ruled an accident, she was taken at first for the first victim. On December 29 they attacked Inessa Svetlova, who got away, and an hour later Yekaterina Karpova, twenty-two, a pregnant coach at a local sports school, walking home with her six-year-old niece, Olya Averina. Karpova was beaten about the head as she screamed that she was pregnant, and she and the girl survived because a car came around the corner. On January 1, 2011, a homeless man was beaten to death beside garbage bins on Lermontov Street; he was never identified and appears in the case as Corpse No. 20. Alexander Petrovich Maximov, walking home drunk from his sister's on February 21, was shot in the head with the air pistol and beaten to death. Roman Faizullin, who was homeless, was shot and stabbed near the State University stop on the night of March 10, and Anoufriev photographed the body from his apartment window. Alevtina Kuydina was killed on April 3.
The killing of the unidentified man sent an innocent person to prison. On January 15, 2011, police detained Vladimir Bazilevsky, a nineteen-year-old homeless man with blood on his clothes. He said later that an officer beat a confession out of him; he gave the dead man's name as that of a friend known as Taiga, and a forensic report said the blood matched. In April 2011 he was sentenced to four years. After the arrests Karchevsky rechecked the case and found that the blood did not match and that Taiga was alive. The prosecutor's office refused to reopen it until the human rights group Public Verdict took up his case, and Bazilevsky was freed in May 2012 after a year and a half in prison. A court awarded him 300,000 rubles. An officer, Yuri Fedorov, was convicted in 2014 of falsifying evidence; the sentence was set aside on appeal in 2015 and sent back for review.
By midnight on April 5 the two had confessed to five murders and six other attacks, and the tally grew to six murders and ten attacks. In June 2011 a video was published in which Anoufriev asked the victims' families for forgiveness. The trial in the Irkutsk Regional Court opened in September 2012 on six counts of murder, nine of attempted murder, robbery, desecration of the dead and creating an extremist community; the file ran to forty-nine volumes by the usual count, though other figures were given. Anoufriev admitted only the killings of Pirog and Kuydina and said the rest had been pressed out of him by police. Lytkin denied only the extremism charge. On October 16, 2012, Anoufriev cut his neck and stomach in court with a razor he had carried in his sock. On March 6, 2013, Lytkin said without warning that Anoufriev had taken no part in four of the crimes and named other accomplices; a week later he withdrew it and said there had been no one else. In his last word Anoufriev admitted only Pirog's murder and filming the desecration.
On April 2, 2013, after an eight-hour reading of a judgment of about 150 pages, the court sentenced Anoufriev to life in a special-regime colony and Lytkin, who had been seventeen during most of the crimes, to twenty-four years. When Anoufriev shouted to the gallery asking whether they were satisfied, Danil's mother, Svetlana Semyonova, shouted back that he had been pleased when her twelve-year-old son was killed. She appealed and wrote to Vladimir Putin asking for a life term for Lytkin too, while Nina Kuzmina, whom Lytkin had attacked alone on a bench that February, said she thought his sentence fair. The court ordered 2.75 million rubles in compensation, which the prosecutor said the victims were unlikely ever to see. On October 3, 2013, the Supreme Court of Russia upheld Anoufriev's life term and reduced Lytkin's to twenty years.
In January 2014 Anoufriev was moved to the special-regime prison on Ognenny Ostrov in the Vologda region, where he told a Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter that he did not accept the verdict. Lytkin attacked another inmate with a metal dustpan in a Kemerovo colony and in 2017 was given eleven more years; investigators said he admitted wanting a life sentence so that he could be sent to the same colony as Anoufriev. He died at Correctional Colony No. 7 in Angarsk after cutting his arms, and Russian reporting treated it as suicide. Accounts disagree on the dates, placing his discovery on November 28 or on the morning of December 1, 2021, and his death on November 30 or December 1. He was twenty-eight.