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Mikhail Popkov, Jailed for 22 Murders, Confesses to 59 More

The former Angarsk police officer had been charged with 47 of the new killings, investigators said, bringing his admitted total to 81 women.

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Mikhail Popkov, handcuffed in a black prison uniform and fur hat, under guard at an outdoor site

For two years the number attached to Mikhail Popkov had been 22. That was how many murders of women a court in Irkutsk had convicted him of in January 2015, when the former Angarsk police officer was sentenced to life. In the second week of January 2017 the number changed. Russian news agencies and newspapers carried conflicting reports of new confessions, and on January 11 the spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee in the Irkutsk region, Karina Golovacheva, set the figures straight in an interview with The Siberian Times. "To clarify the numbers, Popkov has confessed to 59 new murders," she said. "We are not counting in this total those 22 for which he was already sentenced. These cases are already closed. So there are 59 new murders. That means, if we add them to the earlier 22, it will be 81 murders in total."

He had been formally charged with 47 of the new killings, Golovacheva said, and the other 12 were still under investigation, with charges expected soon. "We are quite sure about the 12 other cases," she said. "We are now gathering all the evidence." The women were believed to be aged 17 to 38. The confessions also redrew the timeline. Popkov had long said he stopped killing in 2000, and investigators had believed him. "He was killing women from 1992 to 2010," Golovacheva said, "so he did not stop in 2000." Investigators had found that he killed in other towns of the Irkutsk region, though not, so far, anywhere beyond it.

The new cases had come largely from Popkov himself. A senior investigator, Andrei Bunayev, had described the work the year before: Popkov named the places where bodies were hidden, investigators went and found them, and then they looked for evidence to confirm what he said. "He says very clearly, when and what was done," Bunayev said. In some cases Popkov had left biological traces that had never been examined; in others, investigators dug where he led them. Asked in an Irkutsk courtroom by Judge Pavel Rukavishnikov how many women he had killed, Popkov shrugged. "I can't say exactly, I didn't keep a record," he said. "I admit my guilt in full."

The Siberian Times set out how he had worked. He offered women lifts at night, often in his police car, drove them to remote places, raped and killed them, and left their bodies in woods and by roadsides. After his arrest in 2012 he told police he had wanted to "cleanse" the streets of "prostitutes," and he admitted to contempt for women who went out drinking at night without their husbands or boyfriends. He had evaded capture for years, The Siberian Times reported, partly because no one could imagine that one of the city's own officers was the killer. He was caught by DNA, and he said so himself. "I could not anticipate the examination of DNA," he said.

Among the women of the earlier convictions were Tatiana Martynova, 20, and her friend Yulia Kuprikova, 19, found dead in an Angarsk suburb on October 29, 1998, after a night out. Tatiana's sister, Viktoria Chagaeva, had given her the concert ticket for that night. "The pain does not go away," she said.

In January 2017 the 59 new killings were confessions and charges, not convictions. Investigators had more work to do before Popkov could read the case file and a trial could begin. In December 2018 the Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him of 56 more murders and gave him a second life sentence.

What this story covers. The new figures, the 47 charges and 12 pending cases, the victims' ages, the 1992 to 2010 period, Andrei Bunayev's account of the investigation, Popkov's words in court and to reporters, and the deaths of Tatiana Martynova and Yulia Kuprikova come from The Siberian Times of January 11, 2017, which interviewed the Irkutsk Investigative Committee's spokeswoman, Karina Golovacheva; no statement from the Investigative Committee itself could be retrieved. Earlier reports that week gave different totals, and the 1990s period they cited was narrower; the spokeswoman's figures are used here. At this date the 59 killings were admissions and charges, and nothing in this story treats them as proven. The December 2018 verdict is reported in this archive's later story on that conviction. The photograph shows Popkov under guard at an outdoor site on an investigative visit; its date is not given, and it was not taken in January 2017.

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