Sergei Aleksandrovich Golovkin was born in Moscow in 1959, took a degree in veterinary science and worked as a senior specialist at a state stud farm outside the city. He was known there as a quiet, competent man who lived alone.
Between 1986 and 1992 he abducted eleven boys aged between ten and sixteen from around Moscow, several of them from a pioneer camp near the stud farm and from local railway stations. He took them to a garage he owned at Odintsovo, which he had fitted with a winch and a workbench, and tortured and killed them there, and dismembered the bodies.
He was known to the boys and to the investigation as Fisher, a nickname the children in the area used for a feared figure said to prowl the woods; it existed before he did anything and attached itself to him.
The investigation ran six years and was one of the largest in the late Soviet and early Russian period. He was arrested on October 19, 1992 after a boy was seen getting into his car.
He confessed in detail and was convicted. He was executed by shooting on August 2, 1996. Russia suspended executions immediately afterwards as a condition of joining the Council of Europe, which makes Golovkin the last person put to death by the Russian state.