Vadim Nikolayevich Yershov was born on February 15, 1973, in the settlement of Rechnoy, in the Oparinsky district of Kirov oblast. His family was a troubled one: his parents drank and fought, and his father suffered from schizophrenia and was treated in a psychiatric hospital. His mother left, taking his younger sister and leaving Vadim with his sick father. After his father killed himself, the boy went to live with his mother in Krasnoyarsk krai, where her string of live-in partners made home no easier. At school he was withdrawn and could not stand up for himself, and his classmates tormented him; the girls ignored and mocked him, and the Krasnoyarsk press later traced his hatred of women to those years. He was conscripted in May 1991, into what was still the Soviet army, and served in the Far East. There he fell out with two other conscripts over the hazing, waited for one of them, hit him several times with a brick and then stabbed him. The man survived. Yershov deserted and went back to Krasnoyarsk, where he stayed, without a settled address anyone could find, for the next four years. Because he was a deserter, everything that came afterwards was eventually tried by a military court.
The second offense attributed to him was the rape of a sixteen-year-old student on the bank of the Yenisei; she survived. The first killing was on June 28, 1992, a forty-two-year-old woman who worked in catering, raped and then beaten to death with a stick. Over the next three years he attacked people in the city, in quiet parks, on the street and in the stairwells of apartment blocks. He did not hunt particular people. He picked whoever looked least likely to resist, raped the women, took purses, bags and jewelry, and stripped clothes and identity documents from the bodies, which slowed identification. He killed most often with a kitchen or an industrial knife, but also with sticks and stones. The bodies were covered with branches or not hidden at all.
The reckoning at trial was nineteen murders, fifteen of them after rape, and eight attempted murders in which the injuries left no doubt of the intention, along with some forty armed robberies: more than seventy crimes in all. Five people who were attacked survived. Kommersant, reporting the sentence, gave the conviction as seventeen murders of women and children, a Krasnoyarsk paper writing years later said more than twenty, and a 2024 retrospective put the dead at sixteen; the court and most accounts give nineteen. One investigator said afterward that it seemed to him Yershov killed to cover his tracks, the way one washes the dishes.
He was caught by accident on October 29, 1995. He attacked a sixteen-year-old girl in the stairwell of her own building and tried to pull a gold chain off her neck. She screamed, her relatives came out after him, and as he fought them off with the knife a woman who lived in the building hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher. The police took him to the district station.
He admitted nothing, gave a false name, and insisted he was homeless and had nowhere to be searched. His lodging was found. In it were both of his knives, which he called his feathers, belongings taken from the dead and their passports, and the item the case turned on: a table in which he had entered every attack in a private code. A capital П meant an industrial knife, a heavy lowercase п a kitchen knife, р hands or a stick; he noted the victim's sex, the place and the year, and the outcome, wounded or dead. He had followed the news to learn whether the people he left had lived and how the police were describing the attacks, and he had gone back near the scenes to watch officers work.
The investigation took nearly three years and the file ran to forty-three volumes. On June 9, 1998 the Siberian Military District Court, sitting in Krasnoyarsk, convicted him on every count and sentenced him to death by shooting. The Serbsky Institute had found that he suffered from a total arrest of psychosexual development with a sadistic anomaly of sexual drive expressed as a drive to rape and to kill; the court held him sane. He had been composed throughout the trial and fainted while the judge was reading the verdict. Russia had stopped carrying out executions in 1996 on joining the Council of Europe and formalized the moratorium in 1999, and the sentence was commuted to life. He was among the last men held under sentence of death in the Krasnoyarsk remand prison. He was sent to strict regime colony number 6 at Sol-Iletsk in Orenburg oblast, the prison known as Black Dolphin.
One fact in this case deserves to be stated on its own. Three of the nineteen murders he was convicted of had already been solved. Other people had been tried for them, convicted, and were serving those sentences when the table found in Yershov's room showed that he had committed them.