Dmitry Nikolayevich Kopylov was born on March 2, 1988 in Krasnoye Pole in Chelyabinsk Oblast. Both his parents were chronic alcoholics. His mother died of heart failure in 1990, and his father was stripped of his parental rights after offering the small boy drink. The children were distributed among orphanages.
In the early 2000s his father, by then dry, went to court to have his rights restored, and won. Kopylov was returned to him and moved to the Sosnovsky District. An investigator later said the father was frightened of the boy himself, without knowing anything about murders. Before that he had been solitary and had tortured cats and birds. His father collected him from the children's home shortly before he started killing.
The series ran from June 2004 to August 2005. He chose young women who were alone. The violence was extreme: dozens of blows, many wounds. Russian accounts also record that he abused the bodies afterwards, burning them, and describe a tendency to necrophilia.
He was sixteen at the first murder. He had begun with robberies.
He was arrested in 2005. At interview he was calm about what he had done, and the investigator on the case said there was no pity and no remorse in it. He told them, with a smirk, that he had seen them looking for him and had lain low and watched.
On August 4, 2006 the Chelyabinsk Regional Court sentenced him to ten years in a penal colony for five murders, robberies and rape. Ten years was the ceiling: Russian law caps the sentence available against a person who committed the offences as a minor, and he had committed all five before his eighteenth birthday. That fact is what the case is known for in Russia, along with the nickname the crime reporting gave him, the juvenile maniac. He is described there as one of the youngest serial killers in Russian history.
After his release he worked as a foreman at a vehicle service station in Chelyabinsk. In 2019 a woman in her thirties brought her car in to be serviced, and they began a relationship. She had a child by him. She has said that she did not know what he had done, that she asked about his prison tattoos and was told he had served time for theft, and that she only understood the nightmares he complained of once she learned the truth. Reporting gives her name variously and at least one account states it has been changed.
In 2024 the Russian press reported that he had attempted to strangle his stepson, and quoted him saying that he would have killed the boy but did not want to go back to prison.
Two figures do not agree. Russian Wikipedia and the Chelyabinsk press give five murders; the news report of the 2006 sentence is headed with a killer of seven people receiving ten years. The five is what the sources describe in detail and it is what the count here rests on.
The year of his release is also given inconsistently, as 2010 in one Chelyabinsk account and 2016 in another. Ten years from the 2006 sentence would fall in 2016, and both figures appear in print.