Mikhail Popkov Convicted of 56 More Murders and Given a Second Life Sentence
The former Angarsk police officer, already jailed for 22 killings, was found guilty of murders he confessed to from prison, bringing his convictions to 78.
Published
For three years after his first conviction, Mikhail Popkov kept talking. Already serving a life sentence for murdering 22 women around Angarsk, the Siberian city where he had worked as a police officer, he confessed from prison to 59 more killings. On Monday, December 10, 2018, a court in Irkutsk found him guilty of 56 of them and sentenced him to a second life term. With 78 murder convictions, the 54-year-old former officer became Russia's most prolific convicted serial killer of recent times.
The court found that Popkov had committed the murders between 1992 and 2007, both while he was a serving officer and after he left the force in 1998. He offered women rides late at night, sometimes in his police car while off duty, drove them to secluded places and killed them with axes, hammers, knives and screwdrivers. He left their bodies in the woods, by the roadside and in a cemetery. He was also found guilty of raping 11 of the women. Investigators said his victims were women between the ages of 16 and 40, with one exception: a fellow police officer he had given a ride to late at night and killed in a forest.
For years the killings went unnoticed amid the mafia violence that gripped Angarsk. Investigators came to suspect a policeman because of how carefully the killer covered his tracks, and in 2012, after re-examining the case, they carried out DNA testing of local men who drove the make of car that matched tire tracks found at the scenes. That led them to Popkov. He was sentenced to life in January 2015 for 22 murders and two attempted murders.
His later confessions gave investigators what they needed for the second trial. Officials said his accounts led them to exhume the remains of victims killed 15 to 20 years earlier, along with their belongings and the weapons used to kill them. A state prosecutor told the court that Popkov could recall minute details of his crimes, down to the clothes, tattoos and jewelry the women had worn. Prosecutors described "a pathological attraction to killing people," but he was ruled sane enough to stand trial. Popkov had called himself a "cleaner" ridding his city of prostitutes, and in a 2017 interview he said he had targeted women who were drunk or who lived in a way he considered immoral.
Gray-haired and in prison uniform, he stood in court with his head bowed. Besides the second life term, the court stripped him of his police pension. Regional prosecutor Alexander Shkinev told Russian news agencies that Popkov intended to appeal.
What the verdict of December 10, 2018, established. The court convicted Popkov of 56 of the 59 murders he confessed to; the Interfax news agency, citing the court's press service, reported that investigators had not been able to prove the other three took place. Reports of the day did not name the victims. Published accounts give different years for this group of killings; this account follows the 1992 to 2007 range reported on the day of the verdict. The court's own records and the investigators' statements could not be opened.
Sources
- Siberian killer policeman Mikhail Popkov convicted of 56 more murders, The National (Agence France-Presse)
- Jailed Russian serial killer Mikhail Popkov convicted of 56 more murders, NBC News (Reuters)