Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov was born in Angarsk, in Irkutsk oblast, on March 7, 1964. He joined the militia and worked as a patrol officer in the town, married a fellow police officer, and had a daughter. Neighbours and colleagues described a normal, unremarkable man, and he continued to be one for eighteen years while killing.
He picked women up at night, often near bars and clubs, in his marked police car or in his own Niva, and offered to drive them home. The uniform and the car did the work of persuasion.
He took them into the forests and cemeteries around Angarsk, raped them, and killed them with axes, knives, screwdrivers, bats and a bayonet, in a way investigators described as growing more violent over the years. The bodies were left where they fell.
Angarsk women learned not to take lifts, and the press had names for him, the Angarsk Maniac, and later the Werewolf, long before anyone had a suspect. What they had not learned was that the safest-looking vehicle on the road was the one to avoid.
He was caught by mass screening. Investigators had DNA and a tyre print, and after years of getting nowhere they began taking samples from every man in the district with access to a vehicle of the right type, including serving and former police officers. He was arrested in Vladivostok in June 2012.
That is the point the case turns on. He was inside the organisation conducting the search for eighteen years, and the search only reached him when it stopped excluding its own.
He was convicted in January 2015 of twenty-two murders and sentenced to life. He kept confessing afterwards, in interviews with the investigator Yevgeny Karchevsky over several years, and in December 2018 was convicted of fifty-six more, including the murder of a fellow police officer, taking the total to seventy-eight. He has admitted to others that could not be corroborated.
He has said he regarded himself as cleaning the streets of women he judged immoral, and dated the beginning of it to a night in 1992 when he suspected his wife of infidelity.
Russian courts have accepted seventy-eight, which is more than Chikatilo, Pichushkin or Onoprienko. He is serving life at the Polar Owl colony above the Arctic Circle.