Gennady Mikhasevich was born in 1947 and lived in the Vitebsk region of the Byelorussian SSR, where he worked as a mechanic, married, had children and was a member of the Communist Party.
Between 1971 and 1985 he strangled at least thirty-six women, picking most of them up in his car on rural roads at night. He said he had begun after returning from military service to find that his fiancee had married someone else.
The extraordinary part is what happened around it. Mikhasevich joined the voluntary people's druzhina, the civilian auxiliary that assisted the Soviet militia, and worked on the very investigation hunting him, wearing the armband at roadblocks. And the investigation, under enormous pressure to produce results, produced them: fourteen men were convicted of murders Mikhasevich committed. One was executed. One was blinded in custody by beatings. Several served ten years or more before being released.
He was caught by handwriting. He had begun leaving notes at the scenes signed by a fictitious patriotic group, and an investigator named Nikolai Ignatovich, brought in from Minsk to review the case, had samples compared against half a million documents in the region until one matched. He was arrested on December 9, 1985.
He was convicted and executed by firing squad on February 3, 1988. The wrongful convictions produced a formal Soviet review of the investigative practices that had generated them, and the case is the standard Soviet example of confession-driven policing.