Dmitry Voronenko was born in 1971 and was a Ukrainian national living in St Petersburg. He was thirty-six at his trial.
He had been in prison for rape and was released on conditional early release in 2005. Everything he was convicted of afterwards happened between December 2006 and March 2007, inside about four months.
He killed four girls and young women in St Petersburg, aged between eleven and twenty. All of them were fair-haired and about a hundred and fifty centimetres tall. He raped them and strangled them with their own clothing. He was also charged with the rape of a fifth girl, who survived.
He was arrested in late May 2007 as a suspect in the murder of a twelve-year-old girl whose body had been found in a cellar in the city.
Asked why, he said at first that as he had no children, others should not be able to have them either. Psychiatrists examined him and found him sane and fit to stand trial.
The prosecutor's office asked for the death penalty and so did the victims' relatives. Voronenko said he would accept one, despite the moratorium in force across Russia. His own counsel argued the other way, asking for leniency on the ground that he had cooperated with the police and admitted his guilt under questioning.
The court sentenced him to life imprisonment on March 20, 2008. The presiding judge said the court had ruled that he deserved capital punishment, that it could not be applied because of the moratorium, and that life imprisonment was therefore a fair punishment in the case. The sentence carries no possibility of release under amnesty or parole. An appeal to the Supreme Court was open for ten days.
In his final statement he asked to be punished and said he was guilty, which the parents of one of the girls reported afterwards. Those parents had already said they intended to campaign for the moratorium to be lifted.
The victims are not named in the accessible reporting.