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Former Angarsk Police Officer Mikhail Popkov Jailed for Life for Murders of 22 Women

An Irkutsk court found that Popkov, 50, killed 22 women around Angarsk between 1994 and 2000 while serving in the police, and attempted to kill two more.

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Mikhail Popkov in a dark sweater standing behind the white bars of a Russian courtroom cage, a uniformed guard at the edge of the frame

For six years, women in Angarsk had gone missing and turned up dead in the countryside around the Siberian city, and for a decade and more the man responsible had been wearing a police uniform. On Wednesday, January 14, 2015, the Irkutsk Regional Court sentenced Mikhail Popkov, a former officer of the Angarsk police, to life imprisonment for the murders of 22 women between 1994 and 2000. The court found two attempted murders proven as well. Popkov, 50, was to serve his sentence in a special-regime colony, the harshest in the Russian prison system.

The trial had been held behind closed doors, because the court was examining material about the identities of the victims. Only the verdict was read in front of journalists.

The killings had followed a pattern that terrified the city of Angarsk, a short distance from Irkutsk. Women disappeared, and their bodies were later found naked, with signs of rape and violent death, in the Angarsk district and two neighboring districts of the Irkutsk region. What finally pointed investigators toward a suspect was a set of tire tracks from a Niva, the boxy Soviet four-wheel drive, found near several of the victims. When he was detained in 2012, Popkov was still a serving officer, a duty officer at the police department of Angarsk's Central district.

The scale of the investigation matched the scale of the crimes. Investigators carried out about 300 forensic examinations and more than 2,500 genetic tests, questioned more than 2,000 witnesses, and filled 195 volumes of case file.

The sentence of 2015 turned out to be only the first reckoning. In March 2017 Popkov was charged with murdering 59 more women after authorities said he had confessed. In December 2018 the same court convicted him of 56 of those murders, because investigators could not prove that three of the crimes had taken place, gave him a second life sentence and stripped him of his rank of police sergeant. Authorities said he had committed some of the killings while on duty, using his police car and uniform to win his victims' trust.

What this story covers. The sentence, the 22 murders and two attempts, the closed trial, the colony regime, the pattern of the killings, the Niva tire tracks, Popkov's post at the time of his arrest and the size of the investigation come from Lenta.ru's report of January 14, 2015, which cites the Interfax news agency. The 2012 arrest year, the 2017 charges, the December 2018 verdict and sentence and the account of killings committed on duty come from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's report of December 10, 2018, based on TASS and Interfax. The women are not named because the reports opened for this story do not name them. The photograph shows Popkov in the defendants' cage of a Russian court; the date it was taken is not established.

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