Sergei Vasilyevich Ryakhovsky was born on December 29, 1962 in Balashikha, in the Saltykovka district on the eastern edge of Moscow. He was a sickly child with speech problems, and his mother was overprotective. He grew enormous, well over six feet and heavily built, with a pituitary disorder, and went through special schools. The press later called him the Hippopotamus for his size and the Balashikha Ripper for what he did; he was also called the Cleaner and the forest monster of Saltykovka.
By his own account, in the 1980s he began to feel an irresistible urge for intimacy with a woman. Between March and November 1982, in Moscow, he attacked about ten elderly women and tried to rape them; Russian accounts put the number at ten or eleven. All but the last got away. That last woman raised the alarm, he was arrested, and the court gave him four years for malicious 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, stating his belief 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 charged 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, along with two attempted murders. "I'll be back!" he shouted as he was led from the courtroom.
He wrote petition after petition and lived long enough for Russia's moratorium on executions, adopted as it joined the Council of Europe, to save him; the sentence became life imprisonment. He died on November 12, 2007 of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis at the colony known as the Mordovian zone, at Sosnovka in the Zubovo-Polyansky district of Mordovia, according to Russian Wikipedia and 2026 Russian press accounts. Some earlier accounts give the year of death as 2005 and name other prisons, the Vologda Pyatak or the White Swan at Solikamsk. His mother did not visit him, and his relatives took no interest in what became of him.
Russian sources use the figures of eighteen and nineteen interchangeably; nineteen were charged and eighteen proven. A few extend the series back to 1986.