In April 1926 Western newspapers carried short wire reports 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. Later reports said he had been executed that year.
Nothing further has been established. No Soviet court record has been published, and there is no victim list, no dates, no locations and no account of how the figure of a hundred was reached. Soviet legal documentation of the mid-1920s rarely reached the West, and a round number in a wire report is not evidence of a count.
What is known amounts to a name, a city, a year, a number from a newspaper, and an execution, and all of it should be treated as unverified.