Colleagues at the Central District police department in Angarsk, an industrial city of about 260,000 people in eastern Siberia, called one of their duty officers "Misha the Smile." Mikhail Popkov, born in 1964, had trained as a mechanic and served in the army before he joined the force. By his own later account he was a "simple" officer who never worked on investigations. His wife worked at the passport desk in the same duty unit. The family lived about 50 meters from the station, and colleagues described them to the journalist Sasha Sulim of Meduza as an ideal family.
Badges and uniforms turn up in a good many criminal histories, and the question they raise is never the same twice. Sometimes the job supplied access or a reputation that kept suspicion away. Sometimes it supplied nothing but a grievance, a rejection letter from a department that wanted no part of the applicant. The six cases below involve three men who served on police forces, a former police dog handler turned security guard, a guard who never carried a commission and one man who wanted to be a cop and was refused. In every one, colleagues, supervisors or neighbors had a chance to look hard at the man, and in most they did not.
Popkov joined the police after his army service. In 1996 he shot a robber who resisted arrest, and former colleagues told Meduza that in those years the shooting surprised no one. He left the force in 1998 as a junior lieutenant. Few people thought the departure strange, because police pay was low.
The killings had begun in 1992. Over the next two decades women in Angarsk, Irkutsk and Usolye-Sibirskoye were killed, most of them between the ages of 16 and 40. Why he started has never been settled by a court. Former colleagues told Meduza that he had suspected his wife of being unfaithful, and AFP reported that Popkov himself linked the killings to those suspicions. To Sulim he said the public link between his wife and his crimes was only "the tip of the iceberg," and he called the first killing spontaneous. At his first sentencing he said he had meant to "clean" Angarsk of women who lived a promiscuous life. The lead investigator, Yevgeny Karchevsky of the Investigative Committee, rejected that explanation outright, saying most victims were ordinary women with families. No court has made a finding on motive.
What the police made of the deaths is the heart of the case. Meduza reported in 2017 that local police had essentially ignored the series until 1998. That year the Irkutsk regional prosecutor sent Nikolai Kitaev, an investigator with about 20 years in the prosecutor’s service, to review the murder files. Kitaev counted more than a dozen cases of young women killed late in the evening or at night, and he was the first to argue that a single man was responsible. His list of suspects named seven police officers. Popkov was not on it. Kitaev proposed testing about 100 officers under cover of a vaccination program.
He took his findings to the regional prosecutor, Anatoly Merzlyakov. According to Meduza’s sources, Merzlyakov ordered them kept confidential and warned that if they leaked, Moscow would "fire us all." The investigation stalled. Meduza, citing a 2002 report in Moskovsky Komsomolets, said the case was effectively suspended in 2001. The transport prosecutor’s office where Kitaev worked was dissolved in 2000, and he retired a few months later. Mediazona reported that the combined case was eventually closed for lack of evidence.
When a task force came from Moscow, one of its members, Derzhavin, told Meduza that it had to begin from nothing: local investigators had skipped most of the basic steps, and about a third of the physical evidence had been lost. Local officers were reluctant to help, and relatives of the victims distrusted the outsiders until the team won them over by solving other crimes. Until 2008 DNA testing could be done only in Moscow, at about 10,000 dollars a test and roughly five tests a year. Derzhavin said Popkov was on the team’s radar but had a good reputation and no evidence tied him to anything. There was a further problem. Popkov’s wife worked in the building that housed the task force, and officers sent their requests through her, which may have kept her husband informed.
The break came from arithmetic. Investigators had established a genetic profile from evidence connected to three of the victims, and they worked through a list of more than 30,000 local men in alphabetical order, taking samples. In March 2012 they reached the letter P, and Popkov came in and gave a sample. He was arrested near Vladivostok on June 23, 2012.
The Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him on January 14, 2015, of 22 murders of women and attempted murders, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He then confessed to dozens more. On December 10, 2018, the same court convicted him of 56 murders, 55 of women and one of a fellow police officer in 1999, and gave him a second life term and stripped him of his rank. The Supreme Court of Russia rejected his appeal in 2019. Four further verdicts between 2021 and December 2025 covered additional killings from 1995 to 2011, each folded into the single life term. Investigators and prosecutors now give 91 murders and three attempted murders. These totals do not match the sum of the verdict counts as reported, and the Interfax account of the 2018 trial noted that three confessed killings were not proven. As of April 2026 he was reported moved from Irkutsk to a special-regime colony in Mordovia.
Sybrand Louis van Schoor served in the South African Police dog unit before going into private security. In a long interview with the journalist Chiara Carter, published by IOL in November 2004, he tied what followed to that background. He cited his police training and his service on the border, and said his police experience had made him "used to shooting and killing."
By the late 1980s he was a guard in East London, a port city on the Eastern Cape coast. Carter reported that his company covered about seven of every ten businesses in the city, and that he regarded deterring intruders as his job. The work was alarm response. Between 1986 and 1989 he answered silent alarms at business premises, and people died on his watch again and again. He telephoned the police himself after each one. Many of the deaths were treated as justifiable homicide.
A newspaper in the United States gave a sense of the pace. On November 1, 1989, the Deseret News reported that van Schoor had killed 18-year-old Lindile Hilti in East London, and that police and a businessman put him as the 27th Black burglary suspect he had killed since 1986. Van Schoor declined to comment.
The law itself, Carter argued, did much of the work of keeping him from scrutiny. The shootings fell in the states of emergency of the late 1980s. Survivors were arrested, and when someone died the only legal step was an inquest. The dead were Black and the judicial officers white. Carter wrote that this went a long way toward explaining how he escaped attention for so long. The exposure came through the reporting of Patrick Goodenough and his colleague Dominic Jones, who worked through inquest files and court records and interviewed survivors. Goodenough had trouble getting the story printed, but it ran on the front page of the Sunday Tribune, and the Black Sash, the anti-apartheid human rights organization, began to receive further accounts.
He was convicted in 1992 of seven murders and two attempted murders. He had been charged with 19 murders and 21 attempted murders. Reports agree that the sentence came to about 20 years in effect, though Carter described it as 91 years. The journalist Andrew Trench, who covered part of the trial as a young reporter, told Eyewitness News in 2024 that van Schoor showed no remorse and called him a "cold killer." Trench also recalled a support club and bumper stickers with bullet holes on local cars. Carter described similar stickers reading "I love Louis" with a heart pierced by bullets.
Only the seven murders and two attempted murders are legal findings. The figure of 39 dead appears in IOL in 2004 as an allegation, and before his conviction van Schoor told a journalist he had shot 100 people. None of that has been tested in a court.
He served his term at Fort Glamorgan prison in East London, where an official described him as a model prisoner. In 2002 his daughter arranged for a hired killer to murder her mother, van Schoor’s former wife, and IOL reported in 2004 that she was serving 25 years. He was paroled in October 2004 after 12 years, 4 months and 13 days. To Carter he rejected the labels "mass murderer" and "serial killer." He called himself a "crime fighter" and said: "It was nothing to do with race. I was purely protecting people’s property." The law, Carter wrote, was later changed to stop security personnel from carrying out shootings of this kind. A BBC documentary about him was released in July 2024.
Kenneth Bianchi wanted to be a police officer. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1951 and adopted as an infant, he applied to a sheriff’s department that turned him down, according to HistoryLink, and he worked instead as a private security guard, losing or leaving several posts after stealing from employers. After he moved to Los Angeles, where accounts differ on whether the year was 1975, 1976 or 1977, he applied to the Los Angeles and Glendale police departments. Both refused him. He lived for a time with his cousin, Angelo Buono, who ran an upholstery shop in Glendale.
Between October 17, 1977, and February 17, 1978, at least ten women and girls aged 12 to 28 were killed in the Los Angeles area. HistoryLink attributes the killings to Bianchi and Buono. In 1978 Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, and took a job with a local security agency. From August 1978 he was also assigned to a large store in the city, where one of his co-workers was Karen Mandic. In November 1978 the agency made him a patrol captain. He applied to become a reserve deputy with the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Department and took police courses. The uniform and the titles were as close to a police career as he ever came.
Mandic, 22, and Diane Wilder, 27, both students at Western Washington University, were killed on January 11, 1979. Bianchi first told the owner of the security agency he had been at a sheriff’s reserve meeting that evening and had not known Mandic. The reserve commander said he had left early, and at 2:30 the next morning Bianchi admitted to police that he had not been at the meeting. Police Chief Terry Mangan assigned two detectives, Fred Nolte and Terry Wight, to the case full time. Bianchi was arrested in Bellingham on January 12 and charged on January 26 with two counts of first-degree murder. A search of his residence two days after his arrest turned up property stolen from places he had guarded, and two pieces of jewelry matched jewelry worn by victims in Los Angeles. On April 23, 1979, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said his task force had enough evidence to charge Bianchi with ten of the Los Angeles murders. On May 9, District Attorney John Van de Kamp filed a complaint charging him with five.
Bianchi then claimed that another personality living inside him had committed the crimes. The question of whether multiple personality was real divided experts, and a psychiatrist called by the prosecution concluded that he was faking it. Martin Orne, David Dinges and Emily Carota Orne later analyzed the case in a 1984 article in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. To avoid a possible death sentence, Bianchi accepted a plea agreement in both states and agreed to testify against Buono. In October 1979 he pleaded guilty. Washington Judge Jack Kurtz sentenced him on October 19 to two consecutive life terms, and California Judge William B. Keen followed on October 22 with five life terms for murder and a further life term for conspiracy, all concurrent. Buono was convicted of nine of the Los Angeles murders in November 1983.
Bianchi has since denied the killings and says his confessions were the product of hypnosis. California denied him parole in August 2010 and again in July 2025. The Washington board declined release on July 14, 2025, and added 120 months to his minimum term. In 2023 he legally changed his name to Anthony D’Amato, and the Washington Department of Corrections lists him under that name at Walla Walla, as checked October 22, 2026.
In the first eight months of 2014, a man on a motorcycle killed women and girls in the city of Goiania, capital of the central Brazilian state of Goias, apparently at random and without taking anything from them. The youngest victim in a conviction was 13. In August the Polícia Civil formed a task force. On the night of October 14, 2014, its officers detained Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha, a 26-year-old security guard who had started a new job with a security company two months earlier.
The company, Fortesul, issued a statement after his arrest, reported in October 2014. It had hired him in August 2014 on a trial contract in its unarmed surveillance division. He had passed the required checks, including a certificate showing no criminal record and a psychotechnical examination, and his conduct at work, the company said, had been beyond reproach. Before that he had worked for another firm, Proguarda. Court records in one of his cases show that a day guard of that company was killed at his post in November 2011 and that Gomes da Rocha was later charged with the killing. At a later trial a prosecutor told the jury that three guns had been stolen from the firm. Police described him to reporters as intelligent, uneven in mood and slow in speech, and said he seemed uncomfortable with women, sometimes freezing when female clerks took down his statements.
The investigation was a slow, large piece of police work, and the guard’s job entered it only at the very end. The task force told the press in October 2014 that over 70 days its 25 police chiefs, 95 agents and 30 clerks had reviewed more than 150 hours of camera footage, analyzed 576 suspect number plates and 50,000 traffic-fine photographs, followed 150 anonymous tips, interviewed 200 people and commissioned 71 forensic reports. Camera images gave the build of the rider and the make of the motorcycle. A traffic radar photographed a motorcycle running a red light about fifteen minutes before one of the killings. The picture was too blurred to produce a fine, but an expert could read the plate, which had been reported stolen. In September and October a man on a motorcycle robbed the same lottery agency twice, and its owner noted a matching plate. The officer in charge concluded that the robber’s build and motorcycle matched Gomes da Rocha. Judge Eduardo Pio Mascarenhas da Silva granted a temporary arrest order on October 9. O Hoje reported in 2026 that the officers who made the arrest were driving back to the state security secretariat, because one of them had left his wallet there, when they saw a motorcycle like the one they were seeking.
Police said that in interrogation he confessed to 39 homicides since 2011, and that the total could reach 40. He told them he left the house with a feeling of anguish and a wish to kill, felt relief afterward, and, asked whether he was angry at his victims, said he was angry at everything. Delegado Carlos Douglas Pinto later testified that the confession was voluntary. A second police chief, Flávia Santos Andrade, told a jury in 2016 that he had confessed to some killings to raise his count, but that his method had been very similar across the crimes and that he recognized himself in video of some of them.
Brazilian procedure then took over. Each killing went to its own jury trial in Goiania, and the first conviction came on February 16, 2016. By June 2018 juries had convicted him of 28 homicides, qualified homicide in the language of Brazilian law, and acquitted him of three. He was also convicted of illegal possession of a firearm and of two robberies of the lottery agency. Terms ran from 19 years and 6 months to 30 years per killing. Reported totals climbed from 524 years in November 2016 to 656 years in June 2018, and after 32 trials O Hoje put the figure at 619 years in October 2026. Under the law in force when the crimes were committed, no more than 30 years can be served, and the judge who presided over most of the trials said in October 2026 that Gomes da Rocha remained in custody.
In May 1970 two young mothers, Doreen Moorby, 34, and Helen Ferguson, 37, were killed in small communities north of Toronto, 13 days apart. Both were married, both had children, and the two did not know each other. Police believed the same person was responsible. A province-wide manhunt produced more than 3,000 interviews and no charge. Archie Ferguson, a retired commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, told CBC News decades later that one of the two cases had stayed with him more than any other he had investigated. The Ontario Provincial Police do not close murder files, and the evidence gathered in 1970 was kept.
The man the manhunt never identified was a Toronto police constable. Ronald Glenn West grew up on a farm in Amaranth, Ontario, and went to Centre Dufferin District High School in Shelburne, where in the mid-1960s he shared a Grade 12 class with Ann Burke, who later became a journalist and wrote a book about him. She described a shy teenager who avoided eye contact. CBC News said he served on the Toronto force from 1968 to 1972, while The Canadian Press, reporting on his 2022 parole decision, gave 1966 to 1972. Police records later showed that he was off duty at the times of both killings. He left the force in 1972, and his family later settled in Blind River, Ontario.
In 1995 police arrested him for a string of violent armed robberies in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and he was sentenced to eight years. That sentence is what put him within reach. Don MacNeil had been a young Ontario Provincial Police constable on the original task force in 1970. In the late 1990s, by then a veteran of the force’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, he was assigned to look again at the two killings. The bullets from 1970 were too damaged to be matched to a particular gun, so MacNeil turned to DNA, working with specialists at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. The biological evidence had been preserved since May 1970, long before DNA analysis was routine. Investigators obtained West’s DNA from a letter he had sent to his family from prison, and the profile matched the evidence from both killings.
West, then 52, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder 29 years after the killings, while serving the robbery sentence at Joyceville penitentiary. MacNeil told CBC News that he had spoken with the victims' families after the arrest and that they were satisfied: "They were satisfied and it was the start of their closure," he said. Helen Ferguson’s son, eight years old in 1970, had given police their first description of the man they wanted. In 2001 West pleaded guilty to both killings and received two life sentences.
His parole record is the clearest picture of him in later years. A psychological assessment late in 2021 rated him a moderate-to-high risk to commit further violent offenses, and Correctional Service Canada recommended against full parole. The board told him, "you remain unable to fully verbalize your reasons for offending or to demonstrate full victim empathy and recognition of the harm you inflicted." In its decision dated February 14, 2022, when West was 74, it denied full parole. Burke’s book on the case, The Seventh Shot, appeared in October 2020. She argues that West killed the women so they could not identify him, and she compares the case to that of the Golden State Killer, in which a man who had worked as a police officer went undetected for decades until preserved DNA identified him. Those are her views, and she did not interview West.
Joseph James DeAngelo joined the police department in Exeter, a farm town in Tulare County about 12 miles from Visalia, on May 18, 1973. He was 27, a Navy veteran, and a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, with a degree in criminal justice. The Exeter Sun welcomed him that year under the headline "Navy veteran serves Exeter as Policeman," quoting him that without law and order there can be no government and without a democratic government there can be no freedom. Exeter officers patrolled alone in one-man shifts. He married that fall.
From April 1974 to December 1975 a burglar broke into about 100 houses in Visalia, and the police there called him the Ransacker. DeAngelo was never charged with the Visalia burglaries. Two crimes tied to that series did reach the courts. One was the 1975 killing of Claude Snelling, which was charged. The other was the shooting at a Visalia detective in December 1975, which DeAngelo admitted in 2020 as an uncharged attempted murder of a police officer. The break-ins stopped after that night, Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward said in 2018.
DeAngelo left the Exeter police in April 1976 and joined the department in Auburn, in Placer County, where he served about three years. The crimes in the Sacramento area began within months. In July 1979 he was arrested for shoplifting a hammer and a can of dog repellent from a drugstore in Citrus Heights, and Auburn fired him that year. Deputy District Attorney Thien Ho told the court in 2020 that when store employees detained him he faked a heart attack and pretended to be feeble, a performance Ho compared to his conduct after his arrest in 2018. How the shoplifting charge was resolved has not been reported. By October 1979 the crimes had moved to Southern California, and the last killing for which he was convicted came in 1986.
Nobody connected the former officer to the crimes for decades. He worked 27 years at a supermarket distribution warehouse, married, had children and lived in the Sacramento suburb of Citrus Heights. The case was solved not by anyone who had known him but through a different method. Investigators uploaded a DNA profile from the crimes to genealogy databases, identified distant relatives, and built family trees forward until they reached a man of the right age who had lived in the right places. The Ventura County district attorney called it the first use of genetic genealogy to solve a murder case. DeAngelo was arrested in Citrus Heights on April 24, 2018, at the age of 72.
On June 29, 2020, in a university ballroom fitted out as a courtroom, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and admitted dozens of other crimes too old to prosecute. Prosecutors counted 87 victims in 11 counties. At the sentencing on August 21, 2020, the daughter of Claude Snelling, who had been killed in 1975, told the court that he died saving her life and added that the man who stalked her was a police officer, someone sworn to protect people. The judge, Michael Bowman, imposed 11 consecutive terms of life without parole, a further consecutive life term and eight years. DeAngelo was moved to the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran in January 2021.
The jobs differ and so do the outcomes, and little links them beyond the uniform. Popkov and West were police officers when, or just before, the killings began. DeAngelo was an officer while he committed the first crimes in the series, and the department that dismissed him did so for shoplifting. Van Schoor took a police education into private security and met a legal system arranged not to question him. Bianchi and Gomes da Rocha never held a police commission at all. Bianchi was refused one repeatedly. Gomes da Rocha passed the background and psychological checks that a security employer ran in 2014.
Three of the men were identified because science caught up with them: a DNA screening in Siberia, a letter mailed from a Canadian prison, a genealogy search in California. One was exposed because reporters in South Africa paid attention, and in Irkutsk a prosecutor’s investigator who saw the pattern early had his findings suppressed. Bianchi and Gomes da Rocha were caught by detectives working a fresh case. In none was the man’s own agency the one that stopped him.
• 1970, May: Doreen Moorby and Helen Ferguson are killed north of Toronto, 13 days apart.
• 1973, May 18: Joseph James DeAngelo joins the Exeter, California, police department.
• 1976, April: DeAngelo leaves Exeter for the Auburn police department.
• 1977, October, to 1978, February: ten women and girls are killed in the Los Angeles area; Bianchi is later linked to the series.
• 1979, January 12: Bianchi is arrested in Bellingham, Washington.
• 1979, July: DeAngelo is arrested for shoplifting; Auburn fires him later that year.
• 1979, October 19 and 22: Bianchi is sentenced in Washington and California.
• 1986 to 1989: Louis van Schoor answers alarms as a guard in East London, South Africa.
• 1989, November 1: The Deseret News reports van Schoor’s 27th fatal encounter since 1986.
• 1992: Van Schoor is convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders; Popkov’s killings in Angarsk have begun.
• 1995: West is arrested for armed robberies near Sault Ste. Marie.
• 1998: Popkov resigns from the police as a junior lieutenant; investigator Nikolai Kitaev reviews the Angarsk files.
• 2001: West pleads guilty to two killings.
• 2004, October: Van Schoor is paroled.
• 2011, November: A security guard is killed at his post in Goiania; Gomes da Rocha is later charged.
• 2012, March and June: Popkov gives a DNA sample; he is arrested on June 23.
• 2014, October 14: Gomes da Rocha is detained in Goiania.
• 2015, January 14: Popkov receives his first life sentence.
• 2016, February 16: First jury conviction of Gomes da Rocha.
• 2018, April 24: DeAngelo is arrested in Citrus Heights.
• 2018, December 10: Popkov receives a second life sentence.
• 2020, June 29: DeAngelo pleads guilty; August 21: sentenced.
• 2022, February 14: West is denied full parole.
• 2025, July 14: Washington’s board declines to release Bianchi.
• 2026, April: Popkov is reported moved to a colony in Mordovia.