Nicholas Trapishkin

Victims
100 stated in a 1926 wire report; unverified
Years active
1920 - 1926
Location
Russia
Method
Not recorded
Status
Convicted at Moscow in April 1926 of murdering a hundred people over six years, with several robberies, and executed that year.

The entire record of this case in English consists of short wire reports carried by Western newspapers in April 1926, stating that a man named Trapishkin had gone on trial in Moscow accused of murdering a hundred people over the previous six years in the course of robberies committed with several accomplices, and that he was executed later that year.

Nothing further has been established. There is no accessible Soviet court record, no victim list, no dates, no locations and no account of how the figure of a hundred was arrived at. The Soviet legal system of the mid-1920s was not producing documentation that reached the West reliably, and a round number in a wire report is not evidence.

He is kept in this archive because he appears in the reference works, and the honest description of what is known is: a name, a city, a year, a number that came from a newspaper, and an execution. Anyone using this entry should treat all of it as unverified.