Every burial place was shown to the investigators by the man who had dug it. That was the fact the prosecutor's office in Altai Krai kept returning to when the case of Valery Yuryevich Kopytov came to court in 2005: nineteen people dead, most of them living rough in and around Barnaul, the regional capital in southern Siberia, and nearly all of them found only because their killer took the police to them.
He was born in 1971. According to Anton Rurich, the investigator for especially important cases at the regional prosecutor's office, Kopytov came out of prison in 1998 after serving a sentence for crimes of gain and went back to his father's house, where he found neither work that suited him nor friends. Embittered, he left and took to the streets, and on the far side of the New Bridge over the Ob, at the edge of the city, he dug himself a shelter in the ground and lived in it. Later national accounts, among them RIA Novosti, put his release in 1996 instead; the prosecution's date is 1998.
The people he killed were his neighbors in that life, other homeless men and women who drank and sheltered in the same ground. By his own account, relayed by the assistant regional prosecutor Valery Ziyastinov, nearly every killing began as a quarrel, the quarrel turned into a fight, and he struck with whatever was at hand. In some cases the motive was money or belongings. He buried the dead where he lived. Russian reporting of the case does not name them.
Investigators recovered thirteen bodies in the area around the dugout. Six more were found near Novoaltaysk, Zarinsk and Biysk, towns within reach of Barnaul. When the trial opened in July 2005, the case was reported abroad as up to eighteen killings; the verdict covered nineteen.
He was charged with aggravated murder of more than one person under article 105, part 2, of the criminal code and with robbery under article 162, part 4. On September 22, 2005, the Altai regional court convicted him and sentenced him to twenty-five years, the first ten to be served in prison and the remaining fifteen in a strict-regime colony. He was thirty-four. The court took into account that he had actively helped the investigation to find the remains of the people he had killed, which is why the sentence was a term of years rather than life. The regional prosecutor's office called the case unique for the number of people killed by one man.