For eight years the police in Russia's Sverdlovsk region looked for a man. The victims were women of pension age, from sixty-one to about ninety, killed in their own apartments by blows to the back of the head with a hammer or an axe, and robbed of whatever money could be found. Sometimes the apartment was set on fire afterward, once or twice arranged so the fire would look like an accident. The police linked the deaths, but the investigation moved slowly and had few leads. At one point a woman was detained and confessed to the killings; it was later established that she had confessed under pressure from investigators and had nothing to do with them.
The break came in 2010, when an elderly woman fought off an attacker, got away, and told the police that the person who had attacked her was a woman. Soon afterward Alexandra Povaritsyna was killed, and her neighbor had seen a woman leaving at about the time of the murder. That led the police to Irina Gaidamachuk, who confessed quickly. She said she had done it to buy vodka, because her husband would not give her money.
Her birth date and place are recorded differently: one account has her born Irina Mashkina on March 9, 1972, in Karpinsk, in Sverdlovsk Oblast, another on May 22, 1972, in Nyagan, in the Khanty-Mansi region. She drank heavily from a young age, and she lost her parental rights over her elder daughter. She settled in Krasnoufimsk in the 1990s, where she met her husband, Yuri, and had another daughter. She did not work and lived without an internal passport, and Yuri refused to give her money because he knew it would go on drink.
Most of the killings were in Krasnoufimsk, where she lived with her children; others were in Yekaterinburg, Serov, Achit and Druzhinino. She would knock at the door and present herself as a social worker, and once inside she struck from behind. After a killing she would change her appearance and cover her tracks.
She was charged with seventeen murders and with robbery and the attempted murder of the woman who escaped. The case file ran to 443 volumes, and twenty-one relatives of the dead were recognized as victims. A forensic psychiatric examination at the Serbsky Center in Moscow found that she had some mental abnormalities but was legally sane. The case went to court in Yekaterinburg in February 2012. She had confessed during the investigation, but at trial she disputed the indictment and showed no clear remorse.
In June 2012 she was sentenced to twenty years. Under Article 57 of the Russian Criminal Code, life imprisonment cannot be imposed on a woman, so twenty years was in practice the heaviest sentence the court could give. The victims' relatives were outraged, pointing out that she had received little more than a year for each woman she killed, and said she should never be freed. The case became the model for the character Anna Sviridova in the 2015 Russian television series The Method.