Mikhail Popkov was a police officer in Angarsk, an industrial city of about 260,000 people some 40 kilometers from Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. Beginning in 1992 he picked up women who were out alone at night, offered them a ride, sometimes in a police car and in uniform, and drove them out of town to forests, roadsides and cemeteries, where he killed them. He left the police in 1998 and kept killing. Investigators searched for the killer for nearly 20 years. Popkov was identified only in 2012, when a long DNA screening of local men worked its way through a list in alphabetical order and reached his name.
He was first convicted in January 2015, of 22 murders of women and attempted murders, and sentenced to life imprisonment. After that verdict he confessed to dozens more killings. A second trial ended in December 2018 with a conviction for 56 more murders and a second life sentence. Four further verdicts followed between 2021 and December 2025. By the end of 2025 the Investigative Committee and the Irkutsk regional prosecutor's office put the number of murders proven against him at 91, with three attempted murders. In April 2026 he was moved from Irkutsk to a special-regime colony in Mordovia to serve his life term.
Angarsk was built after the Second World War, partly by prisoners from the Angarlag camp complex, Meduza reported in its 2017 account of the investigation. In the 1990s the city was ringed by prisons: four correctional colonies, a remand prison and a juvenile colony, and some prisoners stayed in the city when they were released. After the Soviet Union collapsed, about ten criminal groups operated there. Many gang killings and armed robberies were never solved. Residents avoided some districts and took taxis at night, and bodies turned up often enough that the first killings of young women in a forest belt outside town did not stand out. The early cases were at first put down to the gangs, and nobody linked them.
Popkov was born in 1964. In an interview with the Meduza journalist Sasha Sulim, published in December 2017, he described an ordinary family: his father was a worker, his mother an office employee, and he had a sister five years younger. He said he did well at school and spent a lot of time out on the streets. As a teenager he trained in cross-country skiing and once wanted to be a children's sports coach; former colleagues told Meduza he held the sports rank of candidate master in biathlon. He trained as a mechanic at a vocational school, was assigned to a petrochemical company, served in the army and returned to the company afterward. A Russian report on a 2023 interview said his military specialty had been radio electronics.
He married after a short courtship and had a daughter. He joined the police in Angarsk and worked at the Central District police department, first as an assistant duty officer and later as a duty officer, Meduza reported. He described himself to Sulim as a "simple" officer who never worked on investigations. Colleagues called him "Misha the Smile" for his friendly manner. His wife worked at the passport desk in the same duty unit, and the family lived about 50 meters from the station. Colleagues described them to Meduza as an ideal family. In 1996, during an arrest, he shot a robber who resisted; former colleagues said that, in that period, the shooting surprised no one.
Popkov's later confessions put the start of the killings in 1992. The first victim was found in the summer of 1992, investigators said at his second trial, and her death was not linked to the others at the time. Only in the late 1990s did people in Angarsk begin to say that a serial killer was at work, the news magazine Profile reported in 2018, citing RIA Novosti.
The cause of the first killing is known only from Popkov's own accounts and from his former colleagues. Colleagues told Meduza that he had found used condoms in the household rubbish and suspected his wife of being unfaithful, and they believed this set off the killings; they said he had considered killing his wife and did not, for the sake of his daughter. AFP, citing Meduza, reported that Popkov himself linked the killings to his suspicions about his wife. To Sulim he said he had resolved those suspicions by confronting his wife and having her give up her job, and that the public link between his wife and his crimes was "the tip of the iceberg." He called the first killing spontaneous and reflexive, followed by panic. Later killings, he said, became more deliberate. No court made any finding on his motive, and these are his claims.
The method, as investigators and Popkov later described it, changed little over the years. He drove around Angarsk in the evening and at night, sometimes in his own Niva car and sometimes in his service car. When he saw a woman alone, often one who had been drinking and was trying to get home, he stopped and offered her a ride. Investigators said at least three of the crimes were committed while he was on duty, using the service car. Popkov told Sulim that he gave some women a ride home and asked for their telephone numbers if he liked them. Others he drove out of town and killed, with whatever came to hand: investigators later recovered axes, knives and screwdrivers from the burial places. The bodies were found in forests, at cemeteries and beside roads in the Angarsk, Usolye and Irkutsk districts.
Russian reports agree that the victims were women, but they give different ranges for their ages: 16 to 40 (Mediazona and Snob, 2017 and 2018), 17 to 38 (Interfax and The Moscow Times), 19 to 40 for the women in the first case (Mediazona, 2016). Meduza reported in January 2017 that their average age was 24. All but one of the women had been drinking when they died, according to Meduza and Mediazona.
Popkov has said that he chose women whose behavior he disapproved of: women who were drunk, or who he felt should have been accompanied by "reliable" men. At his first sentencing he said he had meant to "clean" Angarsk of women leading a promiscuous lifestyle, The Moscow Times reported. The lead investigator in the later cases, Yevgeny Karchevsky of the Investigative Committee, rejected that claim. Although some of the victims were sex workers or used drugs, he said, most were ordinary women with families. "He wasn't cleaning up the town from sin; that was made up by the media," Karchevsky told Meduza, as quoted by AFP. Interfax made the same point in its reports: Popkov lured any woman he found returning home late.
Reliable reports name very few of the women Popkov killed, and his trials were closed to the public.
In March 1997 Popkov left the police station on a pretext and killed a young woman who was walking to the railway station to meet her mother, a few hundred meters from it, Meduza reported. She was the only one of his victims who was sober. Her case was one of three that later yielded the DNA evidence that identified him. Popkov later called the killing a "technical error" and could not explain it. On the same day, investigators told Meduza, he went back to the scene with the police team.
In October 1998 he picked up two women who were on their way home from a concert at the Sovremennik house of culture in Angarsk, Mediazona reported. Both were killed.
In 1999 he killed a fellow police officer, a man. It is the only killing of a man among his convictions, and Interfax and Snob reported that it was part of the 2018 verdict. The officer's name and the circumstances were not reliably reported.
The 2021 case concerned two women killed in Angarsk in 1995. One was killed on the night of July 14, 1995, on the bank of the Angara River; the other was killed in a forest behind a bus depot in Angarsk. The body of one of them was never found, according to The Insider, citing RIA Novosti. Kommersant reported in 2020 that a woman linked to one of the newly confessed cases had been listed as missing.
The 2023 case concerned three women killed in Irkutsk, in the Novo-Lenino district, between 1997 and 2003: two women aged 25 and 27, killed on the bank of the Angara, and a 31-year-old woman killed near the Novo-Leninsky cemetery, according to the Irkutsk regional prosecutor's office as reported by Snob and by TASS. TASS, in the version printed by Profile, placed one of the killings, of a 27-year-old woman, in 1997 in the village of Zhilkino, and another on the bank of the Angara in 1998.
In May 2011 he killed a 36-year-old woman he met in a park behind the Sovremennik house of culture in Angarsk, according to the Investigative Committee's Irkutsk office. In August 2008 he killed two women, both 27, on the Moscow Tract, the main road into Angarsk. Both of those killings were proved only in 2025.
At the end of the second investigation, 14 of the victims in that case had not been identified, the state prosecutor, Alexander Shkinev, said in December 2018, as reported by Snob. During that investigation the remains of 12 women were found, some of them buried 15 to 20 years earlier.
Two women survived attacks by Popkov in 1997 and 1998 with severe head injuries, Meduza reported. Neither could identify the man who had attacked her. One was found by workers getting off an early train, the other by mushroom pickers. His first conviction, in 2015, included attempted murders; the Investigative Committee, RAPSI, The Moscow Times and Mediazona gave the number as two.
Popkov's most active period, investigators told Meduza, was 1997 and 1998. Several of the women were found along the Moscow Tract, the federal highway between Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. In 1998 Popkov resigned from the police with the rank of junior lieutenant. Few people found that strange, because police pay was low.
Local police, Meduza reported in January 2017, had essentially ignored the series until 1998. In December 1998 the murder cases were combined into one, Mediazona reported. That year the Irkutsk regional prosecutor sent Nikolai Kitaev, an investigator with about 20 years in the prosecutor's service, to Angarsk to review the murder cases. Kitaev found 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 killer was responsible. He drew up a list of suspects that included seven police officers, though Popkov was not among them, and proposed testing about 100 officers under cover of a vaccination program.
Kitaev took his findings to the regional prosecutor, Anatoly Merzlyakov. According to Meduza's sources, Merzlyakov ordered that they be 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. In 2000 the transport prosecutor's office where Kitaev worked was dissolved, and he retired a few months later. Mediazona reported that the combined case was closed for lack of evidence several years after it was opened.
Popkov, meanwhile, kept an eye on the investigation. Dmitry Khmylovsky, who worked with him from 1997 to 1999, told Meduza that Popkov once asked very detailed questions about a body found in March, a woman who had disappeared the previous November. Khmylovsky believed he was checking whether he had left any traces.
In March 2002 the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets published an article about a serial killer in the Irkutsk region whom no one was looking for. The article reached the Prosecutor General, Vladimir Ustinov, and the Interior Minister, Boris Gryzlov. That year a joint task force of the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office was set up, led by Yevgeny Kostarev, an investigator for especially important cases, with Colonel Sergei Derzhavin of the Interior Ministry in charge of operational work.
Derzhavin told Meduza that the team had to start from scratch. Local investigators had not carried out most of the basic steps, and about a third of the physical evidence had been lost. Local officers were reluctant to help, and the victims' relatives did not trust the team from Moscow at first. The group won their confidence by solving other crimes, including arresting the leaders of several local gangs, and the relatives then gave detailed statements.
The team established the killer's genetic profile from semen found on three of the victims. Until 2008 DNA testing could only be done in Moscow; each test cost about 10,000 dollars, and only about five could be run a year, Meduza reported. Derzhavin said Popkov had been on the team's radar but had a good reputation, and there was no evidence against him. The investigation also suffered from leaks. Popkov's wife worked in the same building as the task force, and officers sent their requests through her, which may have kept her husband informed.
The investigators knew three things about the killer: his DNA profile, his blood type, and that he drove a Niva, from tire tracks found near several of the bodies. In 2009 Artem Dubynin, a senior operative of the regional criminal investigation directorate who had joined the team in the early 2000s, took over its leadership, after Derzhavin left Angarsk because of poor health.
A list of more than 30,000 people matched at least one of the three features. Those who matched two or more came to about 600; Meduza's January 2017 summary, citing a 2015 report in Novaya Gazeta, put the number at 589. From late 2010 the team worked through the list in alphabetical order, about 400 people a year, faster now that the regional forensic center in Irkutsk could run the tests locally. The Investigative Committee said in 2014 that investigators had checked certain categories of Angarsk residents on the basis of a social and psychological profile of the killer. Across the whole investigation, the Committee said, more than 2,500 DNA tests were carried out. The Associated Press reported in 2018 that DNA samples had been taken from 230,000 residents of Angarsk; the figure was not confirmed elsewhere.
In March 2012 the team reached the letter P, and Popkov received a summons. He came to the directorate, answered questions, confirmed that he owned a Niva and what his blood type was, and gave a sample. There were no grounds to hold him, and he was released.
He then quit his job as a security guard, visited his mother in the Lipetsk region of western Russia, came back to Angarsk, went to Vladivostok to buy a car to resell, and was back in Angarsk in May 2012, Meduza reported. Since leaving the police he had worked at the Angarsk nitrogen fertilizer plant, at a cosmetics factory and as a security guard, Mediazona reported, and he told Sulim that he had left the petrochemical plant around 2007 or 2008 and began importing and reselling cars.
At the forensic center, Natalya Davydova, deputy head of the biology department, found that his sample matched the killer's genetic profile. The Investigative Committee said in 2014 that the DNA tests linked Popkov to the crimes in June 2012.
By the time the comparison report arrived, Popkov had set off for Vladivostok again the day before. Dubynin, another operative and two officers of a special rapid response unit flew there and detained him on the train two stations before Vladivostok, Meduza reported. He did not resist. Interfax gave the date of his detention as June 23, 2012, and said he had gone to Vladivostok to buy a new car. Meduza's January 2017 summary, citing Novaya Gazeta, said he had planned to flee to China; no other report confirmed that claim.
They flew him back to the Irkutsk region. Dubynin told Meduza that the journey passed in silence. He expected to charge Popkov with at least three murders and three rapes. His first impression, he said, was that Popkov did not look like a serial killer, but that his eyes were unsettling. "So we found a needle in a haystack," Dubynin said. Derzhavin said he was glad the team had caught the killer, and sorry that the killer turned out to be a police officer.
At first Popkov admitted killing three women, the Investigative Committee said. Investigators then gathered evidence of 22 murders and two attempted murders. To do it they carried out about 300 forensic medical examinations and more than 2,500 genetic tests and questioned more than 2,000 witnesses and victims' representatives. The case file ran to more than 200 volumes. In October 2013 Popkov was charged with the 22 murders and two attempts, Irkutsk Segodnya reported. On May 14, 2014, the Committee announced that the investigation was complete and that the case was going to court.
In May 2014, after the case reached court, Popkov began writing confessions to other crimes. Dubynin told Meduza that the team knew then that further cases would follow.
On January 14, 2015, the Irkutsk Regional Court found Popkov guilty of the murders of 22 women killed between 1994 and 2000, and of attempted murders, and sentenced him to life imprisonment in a special-regime colony. He was 50. Vladimir Markin, the spokesman of the Investigative Committee, announced the sentence, RAPSI reported. The Investigative Committee, RAPSI, The Moscow Times and Mediazona gave the number of attempted murders as two; Interfax, in its reports from 2018 and 2019, gave it as one. Popkov fully admitted his guilt at that trial, Meduza reported. An appeal against the 2015 verdict was not reported.
In a June 2015 interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, as summarized by Meduza, he said his victims were to blame for leaving their families to go out at night.
Popkov was not sent to a penal colony after the first verdict. While he was held in pretrial detention, in SIZO-6 in Irkutsk, he wrote more than 20 confessions to new crimes, and he reportedly told his cellmates that his count was close to that of Andrei Chikatilo, Interfax reported. In January 2017 it became known that he had confessed to 59 more murders, committed between 1992 and 2007, and one more attempted murder. Until then the killings had been thought to span 1994 to 2000.
To check the confessions, investigators exhumed bodies and ordered forensic and other examinations. Karchevsky told TASS in January 2017 that Popkov had not sought any leniency or a plea bargain. "Perhaps he wants to close the books on this criminal 'career,'" he said. Dubynin, who still met Popkov regularly, told Meduza that he had an analytical memory and recalled details without notes: approximate dates, the car he used, where he picked each woman up, what she looked like and wore, what they drank, and the weapon. Mediazona reported that he led investigators to burial sites of victims who had never been identified, some buried 15 to 20 years earlier, along with their belongings and the axes, screwdrivers and knives he had used. About 1,000 witnesses were questioned and 20 bodies exhumed.
A psychological and psychiatric examination found that he had no mental disorder, and he was found sane. A sexologist diagnosed what was described as "homicidomania with sadistic elements," a pathological drive to kill. The Investigative Committee said his true motive would not be disclosed.
He was charged with 47 more murders in January 2017, with 12 more counts to follow. In March 2017 the new charge reached 60 killings of women. The charges, as Mediazona listed them in December 2017, included murder of two or more people to conceal another crime under the old RSFSR Criminal Code, murder of two or more people combined with rape under the current Criminal Code, and attempted murder to conceal another crime. He was also charged with the 1999 murder of a police officer. The case file ran to 322 volumes. The case reached the Irkutsk Regional Court on December 15, 2017.
In late 2017 Popkov agreed to be interviewed by Sulim of Meduza, but only if he was paid. She gave him 5,000 rubles of her own money and the sudoku puzzles he asked for. Meduza's editors said in print that this broke the outlet's rule against paying sources and that it would reimburse her.
He told her that he could not name a clear cause for what he did. He thought the root lay somewhere deeper in his past, he said, but he had never found anyone qualified to help. He said he had projected his resentment of drinking, careless parents and social hypocrisy onto the women, and that he felt fear and panic rather than satisfaction. He said he had stopped picking up women in 2010. He considered himself sane and responsible for what he did. The interview's headline quoted him: "Of course I'm not normal, since I did this. Of course I'm normal, since I'm taking responsibility." He said he had never spoken to the victims' families and considered apologies meaningless.
His wife and daughter left Angarsk after the first verdict and have not returned, Meduza reported. He told Sulim that he had not seen his daughter for about two years and had never seen her child. He hoped, Dubynin said, to apply for a pardon in 2024, when he turned 60, and for parole after 25 years. Dubynin called that unrealistic.
The second trial opened at the Irkutsk Regional Court on January 10, 2018. The judge read out the charges, adjourned the hearing to January 15 and ruled that the trial would be held behind closed doors, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported; AFP said the hearing was closed to keep details of the sexual nature of the attacks out of public view. Popkov was 53. Victims' relatives declined to attend the sessions, Interfax reported. Closing arguments were heard behind closed doors on November 7, 2018.
On December 10, 2018, the court found Popkov guilty of 56 murders: 55 women killed between 1994 and 2010 and a fellow police officer killed in 1999, according to Interfax. The Irkutsk regional prosecutor's office said he was guilty of killing 56 people between 1992 and 2007, and the court also convicted him of raping 10 of the victims, according to a report printed in the Bangkok Post. He had confessed to 59 killings in that case, but three could not be proved, Interfax reported, citing the court's press service. Prosecutors said he had "a pathological attraction to killing people."
He received a second life sentence. The court also stripped him of his rank of junior lieutenant of police. The rank had entitled him to a pension of about 24,000 rubles a month, which he had continued to receive in prison after the 2015 verdict. The state prosecutor, Alexander Shkinev, said Popkov had been ready to accept a life sentence but had hoped to keep the rank because he had cooperated with the investigation. Popkov's lawyer told Russian news agencies that his 54-year-old client would appeal, the Associated Press reported.
The Associated Press said the verdict made him Russia's most prolific serial killer in at least a century. Interfax and other Russian outlets gave his total after the two trials as 78 murders.
The appeal was registered on December 20, 2018. It challenged the loss of his rank, and Popkov also argued that the statute of limitations had run out for the earliest murders, Interfax reported; a source told the agency that the pension was his only income. Before the Supreme Court of Russia, the defense asked for acquittal on the rape charges, for the statute of limitations to be applied to murders committed from 1994 to 2003, and for his rank to be restored. The prosecution asked for the verdict to be upheld. The court rejected the appeal and left the Irkutsk Regional Court's verdict unchanged, Interfax reported on April 11, 2019. The verdict took legal effect, and he was to be moved to a special-regime colony.
He served his sentence in the special-regime colony for life prisoners at Torbeyevo in Mordovia, Kommersant reported. In July 2020 the Investigative Committee's Irkutsk office said he had written a new confession there to two more killings of women in Angarsk, which he dated to 1995 and 1998. The Committee released a video in which he described picking up a young woman, going to a forest with her and killing her after a quarrel. Because of the new case he was brought back to Irkutsk and held in SIZO-1.
Popkov told Lenta.ru, as reported by Kommersant, that he had written the confession precisely so that he would be moved to Irkutsk. He had worked ten months in a sewing workshop at Torbeyevo making work clothes, he said, and simply wanted a "vacation." Karchevsky told Kommersant that his statements alone would not be enough to take the case to court and that investigators would need objective evidence, which would be hard to find after more than 20 years.
On June 4, 2021, the Angarsk City Court convicted Popkov of the murder of two women in 1995 and sentenced him to nine years and eight months, combined with the 2018 verdict into a life sentence in a special-regime colony, Interfax reported, citing the court's press service. The trial was held behind closed doors. He fully admitted his guilt and declined to make a final statement. Interfax reported that the Investigative Committee linked him to 81 murders and three attempted murders committed between 1992 and 2010, of which he had been convicted of 78, the statute of limitations having run out in some cases.
In January 2023 the Irkutsk channel of the state broadcaster VGTRK aired an interview with Popkov, then 58, who had just confessed to two more killings and had been brought from Mordovia to Irkutsk again. Asked about his dream, he said he wanted to join the army and fight in the war against Ukraine, but would prefer not to be at the front before spring, NEWSru.co.il reported. Court-ordered psychiatric examinations, the report noted, had found no disorder that would prevent him from understanding or controlling his actions.
The investigation was completed in mid-August 2023, and the regional prosecutor's office approved the indictment. The Leninsky District Court of Irkutsk began hearing the case on September 7, 2023. Investigators said at that point that his involvement in 83 murders and three attempted murders had been established. In November 2023 the court found him guilty of three murders, those of the women killed in Irkutsk between 1997 and 2003, and sentenced him to ten more years, combined with his earlier sentences, according to the Irkutsk regional prosecutor's office as reported by Snob and by TASS. Evidence included his own statements, crime scene examinations and expert reports. He was 59.
In April 2025, investigators staged a reconstruction in which Popkov showed how he had killed a 36-year-old woman in the park behind the Sovremennik house of culture in Angarsk in May 2011, according to the Investigative Committee's Irkutsk office as reported by Snob. Investigators said he struck her with an axe after a quarrel and then burned her body. It was the latest killing proved against him. On August 28, 2025, the Angarsk City Court convicted him of her murder and sentenced him to nine and a half years, combined with his earlier verdicts into a life sentence, Interfax reported. He was 61. Investigators said his involvement in 87 murders and three attempted murders had then been proven.
The same day, the Investigative Committee charged him with the murder of two women in August 2008. The case had been opened when their bodies were found, and it had been suspended with the killer unidentified. Investigators reopened it in a review of old unsolved cases because of the similarity of the method, the Committee said. According to the investigation, Popkov had stopped on the Moscow Tract in Angarsk to change a flat tire and met the two women, both 27. After a quarrel he strangled them with a rope, one after the other. He fully admitted his guilt. When the case went to court on October 31, 2025, the Investigative Committee's Irkutsk office said the number of his proven victims had reached 91.
On December 1, 2025, the Angarsk City Court convicted him of the two killings and sentenced him to ten years in a special-regime colony; under the rules for combining sentences, his punishment remained life imprisonment, with the loss of his special rank. RTVI, citing the Investigative Committee, said the two women brought the number of his known victims to 89, with three attempted murders. RTVI also quoted Eva Merkacheva, a member of the presidential human rights council, who called the practice of life prisoners confessing to new crimes "very dangerous," because such prisoners gain privileges such as transfers and trips to crime scenes and courts. The criminologist Mikhail Ignatov told RTVI that some of Popkov's new confessions might not be true and could be a way of obtaining better conditions.
His lawyers appealed on January 15, 2026. They argued that the statute of limitations had run out for the 2008 killings and that the prosecution should be ended, and they cited his age and health and his circumstances at the time of the crime: no prior convictions, married, supporting a minor child, a good reference from the local police officer. The Irkutsk Regional Court rejected the appeal, finding no grounds to release him from liability because of the heightened public danger of the crime, RBC and RTVI reported on March 4, 2026.
After the last verdict took effect, Popkov, then 62, was moved from Irkutsk to a special-regime colony in the Republic of Mordovia, Altapress reported on April 6, 2026, citing the Irkutsk regional prosecutor's office as reported by TASS. The prosecutor's office said his final sentence combined the verdicts of January 2015, December 2018, November 2023 and August 2025 with the latest one, and that he had been found responsible for 91 murders and three attempted murders, committed in Irkutsk, Angarsk, Usolye-Sibirskoye and the areas around them. The report did not name the colony. As of April 2026 he was serving a life sentence in Mordovia.
Proven by final verdict: the murders and attempted murders in the six verdicts of 2015, 2018, 2021, 2023 and August and December 2025.
The totals. The official running totals given by investigators and prosecutors do not line up neatly with the number of murders reported in each verdict, and the reports do not explain the difference. Interfax said in June 2021 that he had been convicted of 78 murders out of 81 linked to him by investigators, with the statute of limitations a factor in some cases. Investigators gave 83 murders established when the 2023 case went to court, 87 after the August 2025 verdict, 89 after the December 2025 verdict (RTVI) and 91 in October 2025 and April 2026 (the Investigative Committee and the regional prosecutor's office). These totals are the authorities' counts.
Attempted murders. The 2015 verdict covered two attempted murders according to the Investigative Committee and most reports, and one according to Interfax. He confessed to one more attempt in 2016. Investigators have given three attempted murders in all since 2021.
Confessions not proven. Three of the killings he confessed to in the second case could not be proved in court, Interfax reported in 2018. A criminologist and a member of the human rights council have both suggested that some of his later confessions may be motivated by the privileges they bring.
Motive. Popkov's claims that he was "cleaning" the city of immoral women, and that the killings began with his suspicions about his wife, are his own. The lead investigator rejected the first claim, and no court is reported to have made a finding on either.
Dates of the series. Early reports gave 1994 to 2000; after the 2016 confessions investigators gave 1992 to 2010. The May 2011 killing, proved in 2025, extended the series to 2011.
The arrest. Some reports date his arrest to March 2012, the month he gave his DNA sample; Interfax and Meduza describe his detention near Vladivostok, which Interfax dates to June 23, 2012.
1964: Mikhail Popkov is born.
1992: by his later confessions, the first killings; the first victim is found in the summer of 1992.
1994 to 2000: the period covered by his first conviction.
1996: as a police officer, he shoots a robber during an arrest.
March 1997: kills a young woman walking to meet her mother at the station.
1997 and 1998: his most active period, investigators say; two women survive attacks.
1998: resigns from the police as a junior lieutenant; Nikolai Kitaev begins reviewing the Angarsk cases; the cases are combined in December.
October 1998: kills two women returning from a concert.
1999: kills a fellow police officer.
2001: the investigation is effectively suspended.
March 2002: Moskovsky Komsomolets publishes its article; a federal task force is formed.
August 2008: kills two women on the Moscow Tract.
2009: Artem Dubynin takes over the task force; the suspect list is narrowed.
May 2011: kills a woman in the park behind the Sovremennik house of culture.
March 2012: summoned, he gives a DNA sample in Angarsk.
June 23, 2012: detained near Vladivostok.
October 2013: charged with 22 murders and two attempted murders.
May 14, 2014: investigation completed; he begins confessing to other crimes.
January 14, 2015: Irkutsk Regional Court sentences him to life imprisonment.
January 2017: his confessions to 59 more killings are made public; charges follow.
December 15, 2017: the second case reaches court.
January 10, 2018: the second trial opens behind closed doors.
December 10, 2018: convicted of 56 murders; second life sentence; stripped of rank.
April 2019: the Supreme Court of Russia rejects his appeal.
July 2020: new confessions from the Torbeyevo colony, Mordovia; returned to Irkutsk.
June 4, 2021: Angarsk City Court convicts him of two murders from 1995.
January 2023: further confessions; says he wants to fight in Ukraine.
November 2023: Leninsky District Court of Irkutsk convicts him of three murders.
August 28, 2025: Angarsk City Court convicts him of the May 2011 murder; charged the same day with the 2008 double murder.
October 31, 2025: the Investigative Committee says 91 murders are proven.
December 1, 2025: Angarsk City Court convicts him of the 2008 murders.
March 4, 2026: Irkutsk Regional Court rejects his appeal.
April 6, 2026: reported moved to a special-regime colony in Mordovia.