Roman Burtsev

Victims
6
Years active
Not recorded - 1996
Location
Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Method
Not recorded
Status
Arrested in July 1996 and accused of the rape and murder of at least six children. Izvestia reported his trial as upcoming in January 1997, and no accessible source records the verdict.

The account is that a man named Roman Burtsev, born in 1970, was arrested in Rostov-on-Don in July 1996 and was to be tried for the murders of six children, whom he had molested.

The source is a single reference to an Izvestia report of January 21, 1997 about the forthcoming trial. Nothing else has been located: no verdict, no sentence, no victim names, no method. This roster's status field says "unknown," which is accurate.

Rostov-on-Don had been the region of the Chikatilo case, which ended with an execution in 1994, and Russian reporting from the area in the following years routinely framed any new arrest as the next serial killer of Rostov. That is the context in which this single report was written, and it is a reason for caution rather than a conclusion.

The entry is retained as a record of an arrest and a reported forthcoming trial. It joins Schultz, Furuya Sokichi, Peter Kulaxides and Major Singh as an entry whose entire source base is one paragraph.