Vadim Yershov was a deserter from the Russian army who, between 1992 and 1995, killed 19 people in and around the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. Most of the dead were girls and women; some were men, killed during robberies. On June 9, 1998, the military court of the Siberian Military District convicted him of the 19 murders, with attempted murders and other charges, and sentenced him to death by shooting. The sentence was never carried out. Russia had stopped executing prisoners, and his punishment was replaced with life imprisonment.
The case is remembered in Krasnoyarsk for two things. The first is the way it ended: not through the investigation, but through an attempted street robbery in October 1995, when bystanders held him until police arrived. The second is what police found afterward: a single sheet of notebook paper ruled into columns, on which he had logged each attack in a private code. The state prosecutor later described how investigators used that table, and Yershov's own statements, to tie together cases that had sat unsolved for years and to clear two men who had been charged in killings he admitted.
Yershov was born on February 15, 1973, in Kirov oblast, NGS24, the Krasnoyarsk news site, reported in 2024. Its account of his early life rests on a book by the forensic scientists Yarovenko, Kitaev and Ardashev, a study of the fingerprint and palm patterns of serial killers. According to those authors, his father suffered from schizophrenia. His mother left the marriage and took his younger sister with her, leaving the boy with his father. After his father died by suicide, Vadim went to live with his mother and sister in Primorsk, a settlement in the Balakhtinsky district of Krasnoyarsk krai, and finished school there.
Teachers remembered a quiet boy, the same authors wrote, but one drawn to setting fires and cruel to animals. NGS24 also described him as short, resentful of the girls in his class and aggressive toward them, and said he was beaten by their boyfriends as a teenager. No criminal record from before he joined the army has been reported.
He was drafted in May 1991 and sent to serve in the Far East, Moskovsky Komsomolets (MK) reported in a 2026 reconstruction of the case. NGS24 wrote that other soldiers bullied him repeatedly. He attacked one of the men who had tormented him and wounded him; it has not been reported that the soldier died. On April 30, 1992, according to MK, he fled the unit and made his way back to Krasnoyarsk.
The first offense in MK's chronology was an attack on a teenage student in Krasnoyarsk, who survived. On June 28, 1992, he killed a 42-year-old woman; MK and NGS24 both give that date as the first killing.
Over the next three years the attacks continued in Krasnoyarsk and the towns around it. NGS24 described the victims as mostly girls and women between 14 and 50, and wrote that age seemed to make no difference to him. MK reported that some of the dead were men and that the series included robberies and muggings as well as killings. The victims' names and the dates of most of the killings have not been made public.
The newspaper Trud, whose correspondent covered the trial, reported that the attacks paused in 1994 and began again in 1995, NGS24 wrote. An investigator quoted by Trud said it seemed to him that the killings were meant to destroy the evidence of the other crimes, and called them the acts of a beast. In Krasnoyarsk, people began to talk of a new Chikatilo, after the Rostov serial killer executed in 1994. Later writers gave Yershov the names "the Siberian Ripper," "the maniac with the table" and "the Krasnoyarsk Chikatilo," and MK's 2026 reconstruction called him "the Krasnoyarsk beast."
The item that defined the case was a sheet from a notebook. MK, which first published a detailed description of it in January 1999, reported in 2026 that it was ruled into columns, one line for each attack, with a code for the outcome.
The outcome was not always known to him when he left. MK reported that he read newspapers and watched the television news to learn whether the people he had attacked had lived, and then filled in the column. Lyubov Rak, Trud's correspondent at the trial, reported that he went back to the places where he had attacked people and watched investigators at work from a distance. According to NGS24, he described this himself during questioning.
Yuri Antonyan, a Russian legal scholar, wrote about the case in his book on the criminal personality, NGS24 reported. He read the collecting of press reports, the keeping of victims' belongings and documents, and the lists themselves as signs of a wish to hold on to the people he had killed for as long as possible. That is Antonyan's interpretation, not a finding of the court.
The series ended on October 29, 1995. In Krasnoyarsk that day he tried to rob a teenage girl, and bystanders who came to help her held him until a police patrol arrived, MK and NGS24 reported. He was taken to the Zheleznodorozhny district police station.
Accounts of the capture vary, including who held him; Trud, in a 2007 summary, said an officer of the FSB security service caught him. Every version ties the arrest to the same attempted robbery and to bystanders who stepped in.
At first he refused to say anything useful. He gave a false surname and told officers he lived in basements, MK reported. Then he began to talk. He gave his real name and described a place where he had been living and where he kept what he had taken. There, according to MK, police found weapons, an old jacket, worn boots, the passports of other people, and the sheet with the table. Antonyan, as cited by NGS24, wrote that the weapons and belongings of victims were recovered.
The table did not solve the case by itself. Andrei Antsiferov, who later acted as state prosecutor at the trial, described how investigators took Yershov's statements to the places he named, checked them against the table and against old unsolved files, and combined the cases into one, MK reported.
Two of the killings Yershov described had already been laid at other people's doors.
In Divnogorsk, a town in Krasnoyarsk krai, he admitted killing a woman whose husband had confessed to that killing and was serving a 10-year sentence for it, Antsiferov said, according to MK. The husband was later rehabilitated, the Russian term for being formally cleared.
In the Sovetsky district of Krasnoyarsk, a schoolgirl had been killed and one of her schoolmates had been charged with her murder. Yershov confessed to that killing before the case against the boy reached a verdict, and the schoolmate, too, was later rehabilitated, MK reported.
Neither man has been named, and how long the husband spent in prison before his release has not been reported.
For many of the killings, Antsiferov said, there was little evidence beyond the table and Yershov's own word. MK recounted one example from the prosecutor. A judge asked how the prosecution could prove a particular murder. Yershov then described a robbery he had committed nearby about two hours before that killing, a robbery that had never been charged against him. The prosecution asked for the unsolved file. The woman who had been robbed had not identified Yershov at first, because she remembered her attacker as taller and stronger, but he described the attack and the contents of her handbag, and she confirmed his account. Patrol officers who had seen the robber from behind also identified him. MK noted that this check concerned the robbery, and did not set out the rest of the evidence on the murder.
The case was handled by military prosecutors and tried by a military court. In September 1996 a group from the Main Military Prosecutor's Office in Moscow joined the investigation, Antsiferov said, according to MK, and the case was sent to court in September 1997.
The file was large. MK, citing Trud, gave it as 43 volumes; NGS24 gave eight. Trud reported that the trial lasted more than eight months and that reading the verdict aloud took a full day. Yershov fully admitted his guilt, MK reported. NGS24 wrote that he told the court he had "lost the right to life."
Experts at a forensic psychiatric center found a total delay in his psychosexual development, with a sadistic disorder of drive, NGS24 reported. The court nonetheless found him sane and fit to answer for his crimes.
On June 9, 1998, the military court of the Siberian Military District sentenced Yershov to death by shooting, MK reported. He lost consciousness while the verdict was being read. The court found him guilty of 19 murders. The number of attempted murders in the record varies by report: eight according to Antsiferov, and five after the appeal, according to MK. NGS24 wrote that he admitted some 70 crimes in all. The convictions also covered other charges.
His lawyer appealed and asked for a lighter sentence. On January 28, 1999, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of Russia rejected the appeal, MK reported, and the death sentence took legal effect.
By then Russia had stopped carrying out executions. As a condition of joining the Council of Europe, it had undertaken to abolish the death penalty in peacetime and to stop executions from its first day of membership, Vedomosti reported in a 2026 history of the moratorium. On May 16, 1996, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree on phasing out capital punishment in connection with Russia's entry into the Council of Europe. On February 2, 1999, the Constitutional Court ruled that no death sentence could be imposed until jury trials operated throughout the country. In November 2009 the same court ruled that the moratorium had created an irreversible regime and that the death penalty could not be applied even after jury trials reached every region.
Yershov's death sentence was not carried out and was later replaced with life imprisonment, MK and NGS24 reported. The date of the commutation has not been reported.
Yershov was sent to serve his life term in the Black Dolphin colony, NGS24 reported in 2024. MK reported in October 2026 that he was held there, in the Orenburg region.
When NGS24 asked for the case materials in 2024, the military court that now holds the records, the Second Eastern District Military Court, declined to provide them, and NGS24 was told it was not among those entitled to a copy of the verdict.
The figures attached to the case vary. The court convicted him of 19 murders, and MK and NGS24 both use that number; NGS24's 2024 headline, however, said 16, and its narrative counted the first killing plus 16 more women. A 2007 Trud summary, written as background to another trial, gave seven attempted murders, said he had been sentenced in 1997, and described the sentence as life imprisonment, which conflicts with the 1998 death sentence and the later commutation reported elsewhere. Across accounts the number of attempted murders is given as five, seven or eight, and the size of the case file as eight or 43 volumes. Accounts also disagree on who held him at the arrest.
February 15, 1973: Vadim Yershov is born in Kirov oblast.
Childhood: after his father's death, he moves to his mother and sister in Primorsk, Balakhtinsky district, Krasnoyarsk krai, and finishes school there.
May 1991: drafted into the army and sent to the Far East.
April 30, 1992: deserts after attacking a fellow soldier and returns to Krasnoyarsk.
June 28, 1992: first reported killing, of a 42-year-old woman in Krasnoyarsk.
1992 to 1995: killings, attempted killings and robberies in Krasnoyarsk and surrounding towns, with a pause reported in 1994.
October 29, 1995: detained in Krasnoyarsk after an attempted robbery of a 16-year-old girl; police later find the coded table.
After his arrest: his statements lead to the rehabilitation of a man serving 10 years for a killing in Divnogorsk and of a schoolmate charged in a schoolgirl's killing.
May 16, 1996: President Yeltsin signs a decree on phasing out the death penalty.
September 1996: a group from the Main Military Prosecutor's Office joins the investigation.
September 1997: the case goes to court.
June 9, 1998: the military court of the Siberian Military District sentences him to death for 19 murders, with attempted murders and other charges.
January 28, 1999: the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court rejects his appeal.
February 2, 1999: the Constitutional Court bars new death sentences until jury trials operate nationwide.
Later: the death sentence is replaced with life imprisonment; he is sent to the Black Dolphin colony, Orenburg region.
November 19, 2009: the Constitutional Court rules that the death penalty cannot be applied.
July 4, 2024: NGS24 reports that the military court declined to release case materials.
October 23, 2026: MK reports that he is held in Black Dolphin.