Mikhail Popkov, the Angarsk Maniac, Convicted of Two More 1995 Murders
A closed hearing in Angarsk added 9 years and 8 months for two women he confessed to killing in 1995. With his two life terms, his final sentence remains life.
Published
Mikhail Popkov had already been convicted of murdering 78 women when he started talking about two more. On Friday, June 4, 2021, the Angarsk City Court in Siberia's Irkutsk region found the former police officer guilty of both killings, committed in Angarsk in 1995, and sentenced him to 9 years and 8 months. The term was folded into his existing sentence, the court's press service said, so the final punishment stayed what it had been: life, in a special-regime colony.
The hearings were closed to the press because the case file contained material of an intimate nature. Popkov admitted his guilt in full and then declined to give a final statement.
He had volunteered the cases himself. In July 2020 he was brought back to the Irkutsk region from a high-security prison in Torbeyevo, in Mordovia, and under questioning told investigators about two women he had killed in Angarsk that he had never mentioned before. According to the regional office of the Investigative Committee, he killed a woman he did not know on the night of July 13 to 14, 1995, and killed another woman in a forest behind a motor-transport depot in Angarsk the same year. The regional prosecutor's office said the first woman was killed on the bank of the Angara River while the two were drinking together, and that Popkov threw her body into the river. The body of the second, prosecutors said, was dropped into a sewer collector. One of the two women's bodies has never been found. The women were not named.
The court convicted him of the intentional murder of two people under the Soviet-era criminal code of the Russian republic, which was still in force in 1995. It also stripped him of his special rank, junior lieutenant of the militia, the old Soviet and Russian police.
Popkov had been an officer in that force. At the time of the killings he worked in the duty unit of the police department for Angarsk's Central District, and he picked out women on the city's streets at night and offered them a ride home, often in a police car. Their bodies were found by passersby in the woods outside town, along roadsides and in cemeteries. He was not arrested until 2012, by which time he had left the police. In January 2015 he was sentenced to life for the murders of 22 women. In December 2018 the Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him of 56 more and gave him a second life term. Investigators said they had proved his involvement in 81 murders and three attempted murders, but the statute of limitations had run out on some of them.
What the record does and does not say. The two women in this case were not identified in any announcement, and the published descriptions of their deaths come from investigators and prosecutors. The court's announcement, the Investigative Committee and the prosecutor's office all placed both killings in 1995; one national newspaper reported them as 1995 and 1998. The court gave the new term as 9 years and 8 months; some reports rounded it to 9.8 years or to nearly ten. The verdict had not yet taken legal effect on the day it was announced.
Sources
- Дважды осужденный на пожизненное ангарский маньяк получил новый срок (Twice-condemned Angarsk maniac receives a new term), Interfax
- «Ангарский маньяк» Попков получил еще почти десять лет колонии (Angarsk maniac Popkov gets nearly ten more years), RIA Novosti
- Суд вынес третий приговор «ангарскому маньяку» за убийства женщин (Court hands down a third verdict to the Angarsk maniac), Kommersant