Irina Viktorovna Gaidamachuk was born in 1972 and lived at Krasnoufimsk in Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals, married with two daughters. She was small, unremarkable, and an alcoholic.
Between 2002 and 2010 she killed seventeen women aged between sixty-one and eighty-nine. She knocked at their doors and presented herself as a social worker or a pension official, which in provincial Russia is a caller an elderly woman lets in, and once inside she killed them with an axe or a hammer and searched the flat. The sums she took were small, in some cases the equivalent of a few pounds, and she spent them on drink.
Investigators spent years looking for a man. The pattern of the attacks, the weapon and the force used all pointed that way, and the possibility of a woman was not seriously considered until late in the case. The regional press called her Satan in a Skirt after her arrest.
She was caught in 2010. She was convicted on June 12, 2012 and sentenced to twenty years, reduced from a longer term because she had two young children. Her husband said in court that he had known nothing about any of it in eight years.