On October 5, 1992, mushroom pickers in the woods outside Moscow found the bodies of three boys, Yuri Sidyakin, twelve, Vladislav Sharikov, thirteen, and Denis Efremov, twelve. Three weeks earlier, on September 15, the man who killed them had lured all three into his garage with the promise of stealing from a warehouse, and raped and killed them there. The last of them he tortured and raped for twelve hours and then hanged before he left for work. He was Sergey Aleksandrovich Golovkin, a livestock specialist at a stud farm, and on October 19 police detained him on suspicion.
He stayed calm and denied everything. The investigators, Kostaryov and Bakin, decided to release him and keep him under secret surveillance, but a policeman ignored the order and locked him in solitary overnight. In the morning he confessed to the last three killings. The next day police searched the garage and found a baby bath coated with a burnt layer of skin and blood, clothes, and body parts. He then confessed to eleven murders in all and showed where he had left the bodies.
He was born in Moscow on November 26, 1959, with a defect of the sternum, and was a sickly child, prone to bronchitis. His father drank, and his parents later divorced. At school he was a loner who wet himself and was afraid his classmates could smell it; one of them was Armen Grigoryan, later the frontman of the band Krematorij. At thirteen he caught a cat in the street, hanged it and cut off its head, and he boiled aquarium fish alive. He graduated from the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in 1982 and worked at a racetrack and then at a stud farm near Moscow, and in 1989 he was given a silver medal at the VDNKh exhibition for his work in horse breeding. In 1984 he tried to rape and kill a boy.
The first murder came in April 1986, near the Katuar railway station in Moscow Oblast, where he threatened Andrey Pavlov with a knife, dragged him into the forest, raped him and strangled him. In July he took Andrey Gulyaev from a summer camp near Odintsovo and did the same, and dismembered the body. Accounts give the two boys' ages differently, fifteen or sixteen for Pavlov and twelve or fourteen for Gulyaev. Four days after Gulyaev's death the dismembered body of a sixteen-year-old with thirty-five stab wounds was found in the Odintsovo district; Golovkin later denied that killing. Sergey Strochkin, ten, followed in September 1989.
In 1988 he bought a beige VAZ-2103 and kept it in a garage, under which he began digging a basement, meant at first as a workshop. It became the place where he took boys. From August 1990 he killed eight boys between ten and sixteen, twice torturing two at once: Sergey Zakharenkov, fifteen, in August 1990; Alexey Buryakov, eleven, and Roman Dergachyov, fourteen, together on November 6, 1990; Nikita Bogdanov, thirteen, in August 1991; Sergey Plyukhin, fourteen, in April 1992; and the last three that September. He was known as Fisher and as the Boa.
Psychiatrists found him sane, with schizoid disorder and psychopathy. On October 19, 1994, he was sentenced to death. On August 2, 1996, he was executed at Butyrka Prison in Moscow with a single shot to the back of the head. He was the last person executed in Russia before President Boris Yeltsin imposed a moratorium on capital punishment.