Sergei Vasilyevich Ryakhovsky was born on December 29, 1962 in Balashikha, on the eastern edge of Moscow. He was enormous, well over six feet and heavily built, with a pituitary disorder. He had been through special schools and was regarded locally as an oddity. The Russian press called him the Hippopotamus for his size, and the Balashikha Ripper for what he did; two other names were used, the Cleaner and the forest monster of Saltykovka.
There was a conviction before the killings. In Golyanovo in Moscow, over several months of one year, he attempted to rape eleven elderly women. All but the last of them got away. That last woman raised the alarm and he was arrested, and the court gave him four years for hooliganism. Russian accounts say he met violence in the colony, and that it hardened a hatred of homosexual men. His first murder came after he was released.
That first victim was a man named Anatoly Vilkin. He went on to attack men he sought out as homosexual in parks, on the belief, which he stated, that death would make them normal.
Between 1988 and 1993 he killed in the woods, dacha settlements and cemeteries around Podolsk, Balashikha and the surrounding districts. The victims were aged from fourteen to seventy-eight. One account breaks the nineteen down as twelve men, four women and three boys, and elderly women were the group he attacked most often. He strangled with rope or with his hands, and stabbed or mutilated some of the bodies with a knife, a hammer or a screwdriver.
Six more people survived attacks by him, and one of them ended the case. In January 1993 a woman who had survived and who had a photographic memory sat with investigators and described him closely enough to produce a reliable composite portrait. Officers took it onto the suburban trains and buses and into the woods, and the search closed on him. He was arrested on April 13, 1993.
He said nothing useful at first. What opened him up was being taken to the place where he had killed a thirteen-year-old boy; from there he described his crimes one after another. He showed no remorse, and asked the investigator to let him keep a photograph of one victim's body as a souvenir. He was also, at the time, writing a science fiction novel.
The psychiatric examination found gerontophilia, necrophilia and a disposition to sadism. He was nevertheless assessed as responsible for his actions, and so was tried as a sane man.
In July 1995 the court convicted him and sentenced him to death by shooting. Of the nineteen murders charged, eighteen were proven. On hearing the sentence he left the courtroom shouting that he would return.
He was never executed. Russia suspended capital punishment as a condition of joining the Council of Europe and his sentence became life imprisonment. He died in custody of tuberculosis, in his forties.
Three details of the aftermath are reported inconsistently and none of them can be settled from the sources available here. The moratorium is dated to 1996 in some accounts and 1997 in others. The prison is given variously as the Vologda Pyatak, as the White Swan at Solikamsk, and as a colony in Mordovia. The year of his death is given as 2005 and as 2007; this roster follows January 21, 2005. His mother did not visit him and his relatives took no interest in what became of him.
The number is also reported loosely, which is why it is split here. Nineteen murders were charged and eighteen were proven, and Russian sources use both figures interchangeably. A few extend the series back to 1986 rather than 1988.