The woman who finally described him had been jogging. On August 15, 2005, near the ski lodge on the edge of Chelyabinsk, a fit, athletic pensioner in her seventies was struck from behind on the back of the head, dragged by the arm into the bushes and then marched into the woods near the village of Mokhovichki-2. The case file records that her attacker made her kneel, tied her hands with rope, gagged her with tape, raped her and made her strip so that she would be harder to identify. He took a church bracelet, a gold ring, a cross and a chain, worth about fifteen hundred rubles together, hit her at least three times on the head with an animal bone he found on the ground and stabbed her at least thirty times. Then he gathered her clothes and left.
A goatherd who had seen her out running found her in the bushes, took her for dead and ran for an ambulance. The attacker saw him go, caught him in the same woods and stabbed him to death. The woman lived until September 30, long enough to give investigators a description they at first could not believe: dark hair, cropped short, ears that stuck out. A teenager. Her age is given as seventy-six in the court-based accounts and seventy-four in the investigator's.
The teenager was Dmitry Nikolayevich Kopylov, seventeen, of Krasnoye Pole in the Sosnovsky district. Over fourteen months he had killed five people, all before his eighteenth birthday, and Russian law would allow him only ten years in prison for it. In the Russian crime press he became the juvenile maniac, and he is described there as one of the youngest serial killers in the country's modern history.
The first killing was on June 22, 2004. He was sixteen. He spent almost the whole day sitting on a heap of gravel beside the railway in the settlement of Shagol on the edge of Chelyabinsk, watching the people who passed, especially the women. "He knew the timetable of every bus and commuter train," said Roman Persidsky, then the senior investigator of the Sosnovsky district prosecutor's office, who ran the case. Service was poor in those years, and anyone who missed a connection had to walk five or ten kilometers from the station home. Toward evening a woman of forty came along the tracks. He punched her twice in the face, dragged her into the woods, made her kneel and tied her hands behind her back with the lace from his sneaker. Then he struck her at least twice on the head with a stone and stabbed her at least twelve times with a small folding knife he carried everywhere. He kept her shirt.
His targets were women alone on empty stretches near woods, roads and tracks. He often waited all day, attacked in the evening and led them into the trees at knifepoint. On January 19, 2005, near the Orbita shopping center, he hit a woman of forty four times on the head with a metal pipe and took her bag; she died. On May 29, near the electrical substation by Mokhovichki, a woman of thirty-three whom he had marched through the forest for hours under threat of death broke away while he was distracted and escaped.
On July 13 he went back to the same spot, sat by the road all day and at six in the evening attacked a woman of sixty-six, dragged her along the ground into the woods and stabbed her fifty-six times. On July 22, near Krasnoye Pole, he beat a woman of twenty to death with a steel rod he had prepared in advance, then raped her body and burned it with cigarettes. Each killing was more brutal than the last, and the gaps between them were closing.
"When we started finding one woman after another, it became clear a maniac was at work," Persidsky said. The scattered cases were pulled together into a series under the regional prosecutor's office. The two survivors' accounts and a composite drawing pointed to a teenage boy, but there were far too many short-haired, freckled boys with protruding ears in the district.
The break came from a detail the jogger had remembered: a word tattooed across the attacker's fingers, which she gave as "klyon," maple. An officer from the juvenile affairs unit said she knew of no boy with that tattoo, but there was one in Krasnoye Pole whose fingers read "volk," wolf. Kopylov was already on the police register. Detectives went to his father's house in September 2005. "He looked at us like a wolf cub," Persidsky recalled. "He bared his teeth." The surviving victims were shown photographs, the jogger from her hospital bed, and picked him out. In the house the investigators found belongings of the dead.
He had destroyed evidence with care, but under questioning he admitted five murders and two attacks. He described them calmly, with no pity and no remorse, the investigator said: he had started by robbing people, then moved to killing, then to rape, and said he had found it interesting and had developed a taste for it. He also liked watching the police. "I saw you. It was interesting to me," he said with a smirk during an interrogation. "I lay low and watched you looking for me."
He was born on March 2, 1988, to parents who were both chronic alcoholics. His mother died of heart failure in the early 1990s, and his father, Nikolai, was stripped of his parental rights after he was seen encouraging the small boy to drink. Dmitry went to a children's home. There he was impulsive, constantly punished, and known as a bully; he stopped going to school after the fifth grade, though he read widely and was thought one of the best-read children in the home. He tortured cats and birds and attacked other children.
In the early 2000s his father, by then sober, went to court to have his rights restored and won, and the boy came home not long before the killings began. "The father was afraid of him himself," Persidsky said, "though he knew nothing about the murders." A forensic psychiatric examination found the son sane.
On August 4, 2006, the Chelyabinsk Regional Court convicted him on every count, five murders, robbery and rape among them, and sentenced him to ten years in a penal colony. Ten years was the ceiling: Russian law caps the sentence for offenses committed as a minor, and he had committed all of them before he turned eighteen. A contemporary report of the sentence was headlined as a killer of seven receiving ten years; the detailed record gives five dead, with the two survivors as attempted murders.
Kopylov served the full term. One Chelyabinsk account gives his release as 2010, but most give 2016, when he was twenty-eight, which is ten years from the sentence. He went back to Chelyabinsk and found work despite his record, as a laborer in a woodworking shop by one account, living in a small room above it, and as a foreman at a vehicle service station by another. On the social network VKontakte he called himself Alex Furman.
In 2019 he met a woman of thirty-four with two children from a previous marriage, and they married; their daughter was born in 2022. She has said she asked about the prison tattoos on his hands and was told he had served time for theft, and that she understood the nightmares he complained of only once she learned the truth. He would tell her he was a finished man whose place was in hell and that every night he dreamed of killing.
By then he was drinking and violent. In 2022, drunk, he made a scene in the street and hit her for the first time; she left with the children, and he persuaded her to come back. In September 2023, drunk again, he attacked her fifteen-year-old son over his long hair and began to strangle him until she pulled them apart. Friends of the boy looked him up online and found out who his stepfather was, and the family fled the same day. "Why didn't you tell me?" she asked him by phone. "Why bring up the past now?" he answered. "I blame myself for it."
She won a court order evicting him from her apartment. When she returned two months later the door had been broken in, the furniture and appliances sold, the sockets torn from the walls and the drywall hacked with an ax. He went to court, established his paternity and won the right to see their daughter, and she brought the child out to the courtyard for supervised visits. When she installed an alarm, he threatened her: "I'd kill you, but I don't want to go back to prison."
The police opened no criminal case over the strangling. The regional police press service said an administrative case had been started and the woman given a referral for a forensic medical examination, but no results reached them, the harm could not be assessed, and the case was closed. When he beat another woman and the matter reached court, he got off with a fine; the first offense of an adult life did not count as a repeat. "He doesn't regret anything," she said when the story came out in July 2024. A former investigator and prosecutor, Yevgeny Zobov, said publicly that men like him came out of the colonies untreated and unchanged, and that the law should allow a review of the danger before release.
He died on October 19, 2025, at thirty-seven, according to the register of inheritance cases. The cause of death was not given.