The name in this entry has been corrected. Russian court and prosecution reporting of the case names him Valery Kopytov, not Kopylov, and places him not in a forest in the Altai mountains but in the city of Barnaul, the regional capital, where he was living rough. The slug and the old spelling are kept for reference.
Kopytov came out of prison in 1998, having served a sentence for acquisitive crimes. The investigator who handled the case, Anton Rurich of the Altai regional prosecutor's office, gave the account that has been repeated since: he went back to his father's house, could not find work he wanted or anyone who would have him, turned bitter, left home and went to live on the street. He built himself a dugout on the far side of the New Bridge over the Ob, on the edge of the city, and lived in it for years. Two later Russian accounts, one of them the national agency RIA Novosti and one a regional paper, put his release in 1996 and the killings from 2000, against the prosecution's 1998; the roster follows the prosecution and records the disagreement.
The people he killed were the people around him, other homeless men and women who drank and sheltered in the same ground. The prosecutor's summary is blunt about how it happened: almost all the killings began as a quarrel, the quarrel became a fight, and he picked up whatever was to hand. In several cases the motive was money or belongings. He buried the bodies in the area where he lived.
Investigators recovered thirteen bodies near the dugout. Six more were found at Novoaltaysk, Zarinsk and Biysk, towns within reach of Barnaul, which is how the total of nineteen is made up. When the trial opened in July 2005 the charge was reported abroad as up to eighteen killings; the verdict was on nineteen.
He was charged under article 105 part 2 of the criminal code, aggravated murder of more than one person, and article 162 part 4, robbery. On September 22, 2005 the Altai regional court convicted him and sentenced him to twenty-five years. He was thirty-four. The court took into account that he had actively helped the investigation, which is the reason the sentence is twenty-five years rather than life; without the bodies he pointed out, most of these deaths would have stayed unsolved.
That is the whole point of the case and it is worth stating plainly. Nineteen people were killed over several years in and around a regional capital and the deaths went unnoticed, because the victims were homeless. They were not registered anywhere, nobody reported them missing, and there was no list they could be missing from. In Barnaul the case is now local folklore; he is called the Barnaul Chikatilo, and his dugout is a stop on a true crime walking tour of the city.