In August 2010, beside the body of a seventy-year-old woman he had raped and killed in Bashkortostan, Sergey Martynov left a note for the police. He was not afraid of them, it said, and he would be in Chelyabinsk at twelve o'clock. It was not the first message he had left at a scene. Prosecutors later said he had acted "daringly and cynically," writing letters at crime scenes and making no attempt to hide evidence, across at least ten regions of western and central Russia over five years.
He was born Sergey Kashfulgayanovich Martynov on June 2, 1962, in Nyazepetrovsk, in Chelyabinsk Oblast. In 1992 he was arrested for the rape and murder of a woman who was never identified; some accounts describe her as a teenage girl. He was convicted and served nearly fourteen years.
He was released in 2005 and started again almost at once. In Kemerovo he attacked a young girl at knifepoint and tried to rape her. She survived, and he was put on a wanted list, but he kept moving, with no fixed home, across Siberia and European Russia. In June 2007 he killed a woman in Glazov, in Udmurtia, and dismembered her body. The next month, in the village of Vyazovka in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, he raped an eight-year-old girl. In May 2008 he killed a man in a robbery, and in June an elderly woman in a forest, whose body he also dismembered. That November he killed a woman in Oryol Oblast. He often mutilated the women he killed. After the killing in Bashkortostan in August 2010 came one more, a woman in Voronezh Oblast.
He was caught by a stolen phone. On November 18, 2010, police traced him when he switched on a mobile he had taken from one of his victims. He did not resist, and said he had wanted to be caught. Prosecutors counted seven women and one man killed after his release, and a string of other assaults; of two young girls among his surviving victims, one had been sexually abused and the other badly injured.
The case was made public on May 23, 2012, when it went to trial in Moscow. He was charged with the murder of two or more persons, violent sexual acts, intentional infliction of grievous harm and hooliganism. He said he had killed for the "cleaning of society," and investigators said his motive was less sexual than a personal dislike of the people he chose. While he waited for trial he asked for a cellmate so that he could kill him, because, he said, he was bored. He was convicted of the eight murders and sentenced to life imprisonment, which, with the 1992 killing, brought his murder convictions to nine.