Vadim Nikolayevich Yershov was born in Krasnoyarsk on February 15, 1973. Nothing of his childhood has reached the press. 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, and he waited for one of them, hit him several times with a brick and then stabbed him. The man survived. Yershov deserted rather than face what followed and went home to Krasnoyarsk, where he stayed, without a settled address that anyone could find, for the next four years. Because he was a deserter, everything that came afterwards was eventually tried by a military court.
This entry has been substantially corrected. It previously described a conscript who killed nineteen women in Siberia during 1997 and was nineteen years old at sentence. Russian sources put the series in the city of Krasnoyarsk between 1992 and 1995, and he was twenty-five when he was sentenced. The figure nineteen is the victim count, and it appears to have been read as his age somewhere in the English-language chain.
The second offence 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. For the following 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 jewellery, 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 and eight attempted murders in which the injuries were severe enough that the intention was not in doubt, along with dozens of robberies and rapes. Five people who were attacked survived. Kommersant, reporting the sentence, gave the conviction as seventeen murders of women and children rather than nineteen, and a Krasnoyarsk paper writing years later said more than twenty. The roster figure of nineteen is the one the case reports and the court used, and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.
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, they held on to him and called the police. He fought with the knife and someone hit him with a fire extinguisher.
He admitted nothing, and insisted he was homeless and had nowhere to be searched. His lodging was found. In it were both of the knives, belongings taken from the dead and their passports, and the item the case turned on: a table he had kept, in which he had entered every one of his crimes in a private notation, recording the date, the sex of the victim, the weapon used, the place and the outcome, dead or wounded. He had been following the crime pages to learn whether the ones 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 formalised 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 is serving the sentence at strict regime colony number 6 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.