The case against Oleg Murayenko came down to a mark smaller than a fingernail. Near the body of one of the women killed in Petropavlovsk in 2000, investigators found a small handbag built like a miniature case, with a clasp like a suitcase's, and on the clasp a tiny smear of sweat and skin oil that held part of a fingerprint. Igor Semenov, then a senior forensic examiner with the regional police in North Kazakhstan, spent five or six days going over the ten prints on the suspect's card with a magnifying glass, hunting for the patch of ridges that matched the fragment. Twenty years later he told the Kazakh news site Liter.kz that his eyes had swum by the end of it, and that his right eye had never seen well since.
The police of 2000 had little else to work with. There was no fingerprint database, which the regional department did not acquire until years later. Crime scenes were photographed on a Soviet-made Zenit camera loaded with black-and-white film, and every print had to be developed, fixed, washed, dried and enlarged by hand in a darkroom. Measurements were taken with calipers and a ruler.
Six women died between March and November 2000, according to Russian-language Wikipedia. None of them is named in the published record. Murayenko, the investigators said later, had no fixed method of finding them. He attacked some in the street. Others got into his car, apparently without hesitation, because the driver was a strikingly handsome man; others met him by chance and invited him home. None of them lived to describe him, and the sources do not say how any of them was killed.
He had killed before. Russian Wikipedia says that in 1998 he killed a fellow prisoner in his cell and was then released by mistake, which would put that death two years ahead of the six murders, not after his arrest. A BBC report of June 26, 2001, published when he was sentenced, described his victims as six women and an inmate without saying when the inmate died. No court document explaining the release has been published.
Little is known about the man himself. Russian Wikipedia gives his full name as Oleg Vasilyevich Murayenko and his birth as 1973 in Petropavlovsk; English-language listings give 1971. Women in the city who knew him, the same account says, described him as tall and good-looking, and liked him. Ekaterina Propashcheva, a Petropavlovsk psychiatrist who took part in the forensic examinations of that period, told Liter.kz in 2020 that he was found legally sane, with what she described as signs of an unstable type of psychopathy.
The regional police spoke about him in 2020 because of two other men they had caught in the same years: Alexander Lyutov, who climbed through windows and strangled women in their beds, and Valery Krichinevsky, who struck women from behind with the back of an axe and stabbed a first-grade girl to death. Both were serving long sentences that were coming to an end, and the city was afraid of their release. Murayenko, the officers said, would never come out.
He was sentenced to death in June 2001. Liter.kz reported that he was the last person in North Kazakhstan, and perhaps in the whole country, to be sentenced to death and shot, and that the execution took place in 2002, shortly before Kazakhstan declared a moratorium in December 2003; Russian Wikipedia also dates his death to 2002. A Petropavlovsk news site, writing in 2020, instead said the last death sentences in Kazakhstan were carried out in 2001 and that Murayenko is believed to have been the last man shot. No court or prison record giving the date has been published. The moratorium held until Kazakhstan abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes in 2021.