Early on the morning of December 19, 1980, after a night of vodka and dumplings at his house in Uzynagash, in the Kazakh Soviet republic, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev went into the bedroom with a woman from the party, Tatiana R. Some time later he came out covered in blood and asked his guests whether they knew what they had just eaten. They thought it had been pork. He showed them a woman's severed head. Everyone vomited and ran. One of the guests called the district police, who at first did not believe him, and when officers reached the house they found Dzhumagaliev naked, disemboweling Tatiana's body with a knife. While they were distracted he ran out carrying a compass, a hunting knife and a hatchet. He was found the next day hiding in the basement of an elderly woman who was a distant relative.
He was twenty-eight, a firefighter, and he had been killing for almost two years. Born on November 15, 1952, in Uzynagash, the third of four children of a Kazakh father and a Belarusian mother who worked on a collective farm, he had been a below-average but well-behaved student. After the ninth grade he went to a railway school, served in the Soviet Army's chemical defense troops, failed to get a driver's license or a place studying geology in Almaty, and spent years drifting across the Soviet Union from the Urals to Siberia as a sailor, freight forwarder, electrician and bulldozer driver. In 1977 he came home and joined the fire service. His nickname, Metal Fang, came from his dental crowns.
The first killing was on the night of January 6, 1979. Natalya Andronnik was walking home alone from a Seventh-day Adventist service along the Uzynagash to Maybulak highway when he ambushed her, stabbed her in the chest and dragged her to the landfill of a clothing factory near Fabrichny. He cut her throat, drank her blood, dismembered her and carried parts of her body home in a backpack. When local people found her remains on January 20, the forensic examination showed that flesh had been removed. Police set traps to draw out the killer and caught no one, and in the villages around, men armed themselves with axes and walked their wives and daughters wherever they went.
In the months that followed, L. F. Krieger disappeared on April 21 and was never found. On June 21 he broke into a house outside Almaty and cut the throats of L. I. Lavrishcheva and her adult daughter, V. P. Aksenova, as they slept; the granddaughter hid in a closet and watched him cut flesh from their bodies, but it was too dark for her to see his face. Less than a week later, on June 27, he had a girlfriend invite over a woman named M. Volkova, whom she accused of stealing from her, and he strangled Volkova and cut her throat to drink her blood. By that summer he was curing human flesh in a barrel at home. He cooked it as pelmeni and salo and kept a diary.
Then, on August 21, 1979, drunk and showing friends his grandfather's hunting rifle, he tried to shoot a pigeon off a television antenna, stumbled while reloading and shot dead a fellow firefighter, Aleksandr Sh. On November 15 a district court convicted him of negligent homicide and illegal possession of a firearm and sentenced him to four and a half years. He was a model prisoner, was allowed weekend leave at home and was released early in late 1980. On November 8, 1980, he killed T. A. Gladkikh near a construction site at Burundai, and on December 13 he broke into Valya Manukhina's home and stabbed her eighteen times as she slept beside her newborn baby, wounding her mother-in-law as well. Six days later came the party.
He confessed to eight murders and handed over the diary. "I sided with the animals," he told his interrogators. "I did to people what they do to animals." In the diary he wrote of an irresistible attraction to the female body and a belief that by eating it he would know it completely, and of a hatred of women, whom he considered inferior to men. He wrote that a book called Black Fog, with its tales of ancient Germanic seeresses who drank blood to see the future, had inspired him, and that blood had let him see his own future from 1980 to 1988. He had timed two of the killings to the anniversary of his grandmother's death and his grandfather's hundredth birthday. Psychiatrists had already diagnosed schizophrenia at his 1979 trial, and the Serbsky Center in Moscow upheld that finding against a local psychiatrist who saw signs of psychopathy and thought he might be sane. On December 3, 1981, with the Alma-Ata Regional Court ringed by three rows of machine gunners to keep the victims' relatives away, the judge ordered him committed to a special psychiatric hospital in Tashkent.
He stayed there eight years. His condition seemed to improve, and a transfer to an ordinary hospital was approved. On August 29, 1989, during the transfer, he broke through a wall during a bathroom stop and escaped. For almost two years he was sighted, or said to be sighted, in Moscow, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan; an acquaintance in Moscow sent a letter in his name to a friend in Frunze promising that one or two beautiful women would disappear and no one would notice. In 1990, in Aktobe, he was seen leaving a woman's house with blood on his face, and he got away by threatening to shoot the neighbor who shouted at him. In April 1991 he let himself be arrested for stealing sheep in Uzbekistan's Fergana region, hoping to hide inside the prison system, and told his jailers in Tashkent he was Chinese. Colonel Yury Dubyagin of the Soviet Interior Ministry, who had hunted him, flew in and identified him.
He was returned to Kazakhstan and committed to a psychiatric hospital at Nikolaevka. In September 2014 he was charged with and convicted of the 1990 murder in Aktobe. As of 2025 he was held at a specialized psychiatric clinic in Aktas, where he repairs small equipment. His doctors have described him as calm and orderly and have written that they see no grounds to think him a danger to others; specialists who study serial killers strongly disagree, and the question of his discharge has been left open. In 2016 a rumor on social media that he had escaped, and was to blame for the disappearance of a young woman, was traced to a woman from his home village, who was arrested and confessed that it was false.