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Russian Court Sentences Alexei Gaskov to Life for 10 Murders Committed Around Moscow in 2002

The killings went unsolved for more than two decades until DNA from archived evidence led investigators to Gaskov, who pleaded guilty at trial.

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Alexei Gaskov, gray-haired, in a dark jacket, outdoors during an investigators' crime-scene visit

Ten people were killed in and around Moscow in 2002, and the crimes went unsolved for more than 20 years. On September 28, 2026, a court sentenced Alexei Gaskov to life for the murders.

The Moscow Regional Court found Gaskov, 51, of Berdsk in the Novosibirsk region, guilty of killing seven women, two 17-year-old girls and one man between March and November 2002, and ordered him to serve his sentence in a special-regime penal colony, the Moscow Region prosecutor's office said. Prosecutors said he met his victims in parks and other public places, led them to deserted spots, sexually assaulted them and then killed them to hide the crimes. The same verdict covered sexual offenses against his underage stepdaughter in Berdsk between 2020 and 2024. Gaskov pleaded guilty and expressed remorse during the trial, prosecutors said, and the court ordered him to pay 3 million rubles to one of the victims.

In 2002 Gaskov was studying acting in Moscow at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. According to investigators, he killed three women in the Babushkinsky district of Moscow, a college applicant in a forest park in Podolsk, two young women in one day in the central park of Pushkino, a man he stabbed in the same park during a quarrel, and two more women in northeastern Moscow. The last was Agnes Carolina Santisteban, 23, a student from Peru whose body was found near a dormitory in Khimki.

That December, back in Berdsk, Gaskov was detained over another killing and confessed, but forensic evidence pointed to his friend Mikhail Yudin, who was later convicted as the "Berdsk maniac." In 2006 Gaskov was convicted of raping an 11-year-old girl and imprisoned. In July 2024, investigators reviewing unsolved killings found signs of a series, and biological traces on archived evidence were matched to him. He has claimed more than 100 murders since 1995, but investigators have not confirmed any crimes beyond the 10. His lawyers have since appealed the sentence.

The Moscow Region prosecutor's office said the 2002 crimes were committed in Moscow and in the Moscow and Novosibirsk regions. The investigators' own account of the 10 killings places every one of them in Moscow or the Moscow region, and the sources do not explain the difference.

Sources