On January 17, 1986, his thirtieth birthday, Vasiliy Kulik was caught in the middle of an attack in Irkutsk by ordinary passersby, who beat him and took him to the police. He was an emergency ambulance doctor, and his work had let him into the apartments of some of the women he killed, because they trusted him. He soon confessed to everything: in two years he had killed thirteen people, six children and seven women pensioners, and he had raped about thirty.
He was born in Irkutsk on January 17, 1956, the youngest of three children in an educated family. His father, Sergei Kulik, was a professor of entomology at Irkutsk State University and a writer; his mother had schizophrenia. He was a sickly child, a bedwetter and a sleepwalker, and between the ages of one and three his mother beat him for keeping her awake at night, while his father carried him through the streets to calm him. He grew up quiet, withdrawn and touchy, mocked by other children, liked to watch insects, and at six, with a friend, tortured and hanged cats. At school he boxed and became the city champion. After army service from 1974 to 1976 he studied medicine at the Irkutsk Medical Institute until 1982, and ran a medical club at a children's center. In 1980 he was savagely beaten and robbed by Irkutsk teenagers and diagnosed with traumatic encephalopathy and cerebral arachnoiditis; he said later that the attack was the start of his desire for children. That same year he tried to seduce a fourth-grade girl with presents and letters. He married a lawyer in 1981, and they had children in 1982.
He began in 1982 as a rapist of children, and the parents of his victims, afraid of the shame, often did not report it. In 1984 he killed for the first time: a nine-year-old girl, raped and strangled, whose body was found days later in the basement of a building in central Irkutsk. He was good at winning children's trust; he led one boy away with the promise of sliding down a snowy hill on a briefcase. He was careful, and at the slightest risk he fled. Of the six children he killed, one was a girl in Kirovograd, where he was on vacation in the summer of 1985. The seven women were pensioners. Irkutsk panicked, composite sketches went up across the city, and one of those on the investigation was Yuri Chaika, later prosecutor general of Russia.
At his trial Kulik retracted all his statements and said a gang led by someone called Chibis had forced him to confess and had committed the murders. The case was sent back for further investigation. Under a new investigator, Nikolai Kitaev, the evidence against him was assembled far more carefully, and on August 11, 1988, the court sentenced him to death. He wrote love poems to women and children in prison and gave an interview shortly before the end. He was shot in the Irkutsk pretrial detention center on June 26, 1989.