Vasili Komaroff was born Vasili Terentyevich Petrov on January 1, 1871, in Vitebsk Governorate, into a large and poor family in which alcoholism was common. He was drinking from the age of fifteen. He served four years as a conscript, married at twenty-eight, made and lost a small fortune in the Far East during the Russo-Japanese War, and fought with the Red Army after the revolution. He then settled in Moscow as a cab driver and horse trader, living in a yard off Shabolovka Street with his wife Sofia and their children. The Moscow press called him the Wolf of Moscow.
Between 1921 and 1923 he advertised horses for sale below the market price. Buyers came to the stable beside his house, were given vodka while the deal was discussed, and were then killed, struck on the head with a hammer or strangled. He tied the bodies, put them in sacks, and disposed of them in vacant lots, in the Moskva River, or buried in the hay in his own stable.
The victims were all adult men, most of them countrymen who had come into the city to buy livestock cheaply in a period of severe hardship. The motive he gave was money, and the striking thing about the case is how little there was: the proceeds of the whole series were negligible, and he described them in court as having paid for food and drink.
What broke it was a pattern in the calendar rather than any forensic work. Bodies in sacks kept appearing in the poorer districts on the day after the horse market. That narrowed the field to horse dealers, and Komaroff, an apparently settled family man, was an unlikely name on the list. When officers came to the stable they found his most recent victim under a pile of hay, bagged and waiting to be moved. He got away and was picked up again days later.
He then confessed to thirty-three killings, eleven of which had not been under investigation at all, and took investigators to five more bodies still in their sacks. Six others he had put in the river were never recovered.
His wife Sofia had found out about the killings and had gone on to take part in them. She was charged and tried alongside him. The trial opened on June 7, 1923, and was held in the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow so that the public could attend.
He made no attempt to defend himself. He had tried to kill himself three times in custody, he asked the court for a quick trial and execution, and he told reporters that he was fifty-two, had had a good time, and did not want to live any longer. Of the killings he said it had been an easy job, that only one man had ever resisted, and that he had simply hit them on the head with a hammer or strangled them.
Both were sentenced to death and shot by firing squad on June 18, 1923, eleven days after the trial began. This is one of the few entries in this roster where the claimed figure and the convicted figure are the same number: he confessed to thirty-three, was convicted of thirty-three, and the bodies of twenty-seven of them had been found.