For almost two decades, women in the Siberian city of Angarsk were found dead in the forests, along the roadsides and in the cemeteries outside town, killed with axes, knives, hammers and screwdrivers. Many had been raped. The killings began in 1992, when the city, like much of post-Soviet Russia, was full of violence, and at first they disappeared into the general run of crime. The man responsible was a police officer. Investigators came to suspect that early on, from the care with which the killer covered his tracks, but it took until 2012 for them to reach Mikhail Popkov.
Popkov was born on March 7, 1964, in Norilsk, in the Krasnoyarsk region, and moved with his parents to Angarsk as a small child. At school he was a keen skier. In the 1990s he was a duty officer at the No. 1 police station in Angarsk, where colleagues called him Misha the Smile for his friendliness. He married a woman named Elena, described in several accounts as a fellow officer, and they had a daughter, Ekaterina. To colleagues and neighbors he was an ordinary man. He resigned in 1998, as soon as he had made junior lieutenant, which puzzled the men he worked with. Afterward he was a security guard at the Angarsk Oil and Chemical Company and at a private security firm, where co-workers thought less of him, and he left that job in 2011; he also drove passengers for money and dug graves. He killed through both periods of his working life.
His method depended on trust. Late at night he offered women rides home, sometimes in his police car and sometimes off duty in his own vehicle, and drove them to secluded places around Angarsk and in the Usolye and Irkutsk districts. The victims were women, most often described as aged between nineteen and fifty, although some accounts put the youngest at sixteen. He also killed one man, a fellow police officer. The bodies, or parts of them, were left in the woods, beside roads and in a cemetery. Russian newspapers called the unknown killer the Angarsk Maniac, later the Werewolf, and, because so many of the bodies turned up on Wednesdays, the Wednesday Murderer.
One of the women he attacked lived, and the system nearly lost her anyway. On January 28, 1998, a teenage girl was found naked and unconscious in the snow in Angarsk's Baikalsk district with severe head injuries; she had been raped. A criminal case was opened only after nearly six months of complaints from her mother, and in June she described her attacker: the driver of a police car, in uniform, who had picked her up the evening before.
The investigation that caught him was a return to old evidence. Detectives reexamining the case had DNA from semen recovered from victims and tire tracks from the crime scenes. They began taking DNA samples on a massive scale, eventually from many thousands of residents, and concentrated on men who drove the make of car that matched the tracks, including current and former police officers. In March 2012 his genetic profile was matched to profiles taken from victims' remains back in 2003, linking him to the rapes and murders of three women in 1997. He was arrested in Vladivostok on June 23, 2012.
Once in custody he confessed, and kept confessing. In January 2015 the Irkutsk regional court convicted him of the murders of twenty-two women and of attempted murders, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He then admitted fifty-nine more killings. Working with investigators, he led them to remains buried fifteen or twenty years earlier, along with his victims' belongings and the weapons he had used. A prosecutor told the court that he could remember minute details of each crime, down to the clothes, tattoos and jewelry the women had worn.
His second trial opened behind closed doors at the Irkutsk regional court in January 2018. On December 10, 2018, the court convicted him of fifty-six more murders; three of the confessed killings could not be proved. He received a second life sentence and was stripped of his police pension. Prosecutors described a pathological attraction to killing, with sadistic elements, but he was found sane. He has said in interviews that he saw himself as cleaning the streets of women he considered immoral, and he dated the start of the killings to a night in 1992 when he suspected his wife of being unfaithful. Those are his own claims, and the court made no finding on them.
The confessions did not end with the second trial. In July 2020 he admitted two more killings, and on June 4, 2021, he was convicted of them and given an additional term of nine years and eight months. In January 2023 he wrote confessions to two more killings of women in the Irkutsk region in the late 1990s, and said he dreamed of going to fight in the war in Ukraine, though not in a cold trench, so he would wait until the weather warmed. On November 22, 2023, Irkutsk's Leninsky district court convicted him of three more murders, those two among them, and gave him ten more years, bringing the number proved against him to eighty-three. Investigators then began checking him against some fifty killings across Russia's Far East, from Vladivostok to Ulan-Ude. In April 2025 the TASS agency reported that he had confessed to another, the unsolved killing of a woman in May 2011. In December 2025 the Angarsk city court convicted him of murdering two young women in 2008 and gave him ten more years, with a final sentence of life; the verdict took effect on April 6, 2026, and that day he was moved from Irkutsk to a penal colony in Mordovia. Counts of the total now proved in court differ. English-language sources give eighty-seven; the Russian record of his six verdicts gives ninety-one, ninety women and a fellow police officer killed in 1999.
He served his earlier sentences at the Polar Owl penal colony above the Arctic Circle. No one in modern Russia has been convicted of more murders. For almost all of the nineteen years he was killing, the women of Angarsk had no reason to fear the man who offered them a ride home, because for much of that time he was the police.