Dzhumagaliev was born in 1952 in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and worked as a builder. He had lost his teeth and wore metal dentures, which is where the name Metal Fang comes from.
Between 1979 and 1980 he killed at least seven women, and probably nine, in and around Alma-Ata, now Almaty. He met them in the street or in bars, walked with them into open country, and killed them with a knife and an axe. He dismembered the bodies and cooked parts of them, and on at least one occasion served the meat to people at his flat without telling them what it was. He was arrested in December 1980 after guests found a severed head and hands in his kitchen.
He was examined and found to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, held not responsible, and committed on December 3, 1981 to a psychiatric institution in Tashkent. In 1989, during transfer, he escaped, and he remained free until he was recaptured in 1994. He was returned to psychiatric detention and has been reported since in a facility near Almaty; his condition and whereabouts are not reliably documented in accessible sources.
Because he was never tried, there is no judgment and no tested evidence. The count and the detail come from the Soviet investigation and from later Russian-language press accounts, which is a source base that in this period tended to be both incomplete and sensational.