On January 17, 1986, the day Vasiliy Kulik turned 30, his family was getting ready for guests at home in Irkutsk, and he was sent out to buy bread. Near the canteen of the city's agricultural institute he approached a small boy and led him away toward a building under construction. A cook in the canteen saw them from a window. She had heard the rumors going around the city about a man who preyed on children, and she and a coworker went after them. They found Kulik with the child and screamed for help. Kulik ran, and two men who were passing by chased him through deep snow and held him until he could be handed to the militia, the Soviet police.
Kulik was a physician. He had trained at the Irkutsk Medical Institute, worked as a district therapist and then as a doctor on the city's emergency ambulance service, and he came from an academic family. To colleagues and friends he was a respectable married man with two sons. The day after his arrest he confessed, and in the months that followed investigators tied him to the deaths of seven elderly women and six young children in 1984 and 1985. The Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him in 1988 of a series of murders, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. He was shot in Irkutsk in June 1989.
Kulik was born in Irkutsk on January 17, 1956, according to NEWS.ru and to a 2026 IrCity account republished by MSK1.ru. His father was a professor and doctor of biological sciences who taught at the Irkutsk agricultural institute and later at Irkutsk State University; NEWS.ru describes him as an entomologist and a writer, and IrCity says he wrote a book for children. His mother had training in teaching and psychology and worked as a teacher. Several accounts say she ran a school. IrCity rejected the version that named a particular school, noting that the school in question did not exist until 1989.
He was born about two months early. His mother was around 40 at the time, IrCity reported, and had been advised against another pregnancy. NEWS.ru, citing the book "Феномен российских маньяков", says she later told investigators that the birth had been very difficult. Russia Beyond, recounting her memories, wrote that he was born without nails and with misshapen ears.
His early years were marked by illness. IrCity lists hepatitis, asthma and rheumatism, and a broken nose from a fall; after a bout of measles at about a year old he began to walk in his sleep. NEWS.ru adds bedwetting. The accounts describe a mother who was harsh with him when he could not sleep and a father who protected him and carried him through the streets at night to settle him. Later, IrCity wrote, her irritation gave way to overprotection. Family memories of him diverge: his mother said he was not spoiled, while his sister said he was indulged and grew up selfish.
He was cruel to animals as a boy. Several reports say he hanged stray cats; IrCity says he learned it from a neighbor's son, but did not harm the family's own pets. At school, according to IrCity, he once hit a classmate hard enough to injure her, and his father punished him severely.
Kulik went to School No. 13 in Irkutsk. His grades were good, but classmates teased him, and NEWS.ru describes him as withdrawn and quick to take offense. He took up wrestling and then boxing to defend himself, and in his last years at school he reached a first-category ranking in boxing and placed in city and regional competitions. After that, IrCity wrote, the other boys treated him differently. His school references described a calm, polite and well-behaved pupil.
He was called up for military service in 1974. His military record, IrCity reported, was positive: he was described as disciplined and among the best in combat training.
After the army he entered the Irkutsk Medical Institute, in part because his mother, who had diabetes, wanted a doctor in the family, according to IrCity. He was especially interested in pharmacology. He graduated from the institute's general medicine faculty in 1982, NEWS.ru reported, and led a medical club at a children's center. Life.ru wrote that he was offered training as a surgeon and turned it down, saying he could not bring himself to cut people.
He began as a district therapist, the doctor assigned to a neighborhood's adult patients, and later spoke of those patients with contempt, IrCity said. He then moved to an ambulance station in Irkutsk's Novo-Lenino district, where he was praised for his work; on one call he delivered a baby in the ambulance and received a written commendation. NEWS.ru says that by 1984 he was working as an emergency doctor, and that the job helped him win the trust of elderly patients.
In 1981 he married a lawyer from Severobaikalsk. Their first son was born in 1982, and a second son followed. Friends and colleagues saw a man who earned well, did not drink or smoke, was building a summer house and saving for a car, and wrote verses for family celebrations. Life.ru called him the kind of young man families hoped their daughters would marry.
In 1980, when he was 24 and still a student, Kulik was attacked by a group of teenagers in central Irkutsk. IrCity says they hit him with a length of metal pipe and that he spent time in the hospital. He later told investigators that the beating was a turning point, and Russia Beyond, summarizing his account, wrote that he dated a change in himself to a head injury. The reports treat this as his own explanation, not as a medical finding.
The same year, according to IrCity and Russia Beyond, the mother of a young girl complained to the police about his conduct toward her daughter. No case followed.
Kulik's offenses against children began in 1982, around the time his first son was born, the reports agree. Over the following years, according to the reports, he attacked many children, some as young as two and a half. The counts in the reports range from about 30 to about 40, and IrCity wrote that investigators doubted they had found every child.
Few of these attacks reached the police. Families kept silent, NEWS.ru wrote, because such crimes were rarely spoken about in the Soviet Union in those years, and in the cases where children did tell their parents, IrCity reported, no complaint was filed. The first children he approached were often let go with a warning not to tell anyone, according to Life.ru.
Kulik's father died in 1983. Shortly afterward Kulik took an overdose of a heart medication and was saved at the city's toxicology center, IrCity and NEWS.ru reported. Psychologists quoted by IrCity believe the loss removed the last restraint on him. Life.ru also connects the loss to the rapid worsening of his behavior.
The first killing attributed to Kulik took place in March 1984. The victim was a 72-year-old woman he knew from his work as a therapist. Her death was recorded as heart disease, and there was no autopsy, according to IrCity and NEWS.ru.
Over the following months he killed other elderly women in their homes, entering as a doctor, the reports say. NEWS.ru wrote that the police did not connect the deaths and that each was taken to be natural. By late 1984, IrCity reported, he kept a notebook he called a "field diary", with information about elderly women, and Life.ru said he collected details from patients about who lived alone. In 1985, NEWS.ru reported, a 75-year-old woman was killed in her home. In all, seven women of pension age were killed, according to the reports.
One woman survived an attack and reported it, IrCity wrote, but she was dismissed as mentally ill.
None of the seven women has been publicly named.
The children's ages and the months of their deaths are known, but their names have not been made public.
In May 1984 a girl was killed in Irkutsk; NEWS.ru describes her as a nine-year-old schoolgirl. Police at first pursued a neighbor who had a previous conviction, IrCity reported, but that case fell apart before trial.
A seven-year-old boy was found dead in Irkutsk on September 25, 1984, according to IrCity; NEWS.ru places his death in December 1984. A two-year-old girl was found dead on December 4, 1984, by IrCity's dating; NEWS.ru says she was killed a few days after the boy.
In August 1985 a nine-year-old girl was killed in Irkutsk at home, while her parents were at work, NEWS.ru reported; Life.ru says he rang the doorbell, presented himself as a doctor and was let in.
The sixth child was a girl killed in Kirovograd, in Soviet Ukraine (now Kropyvnytskyi), during a family vacation in 1985. NEWS.ru gives neither her age nor the date.
By 1985 Irkutsk was full of rumors. NEWS.ru describes talk of kidnapping gangs, sects and a patient who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. The police, in the usual way of the time, looked first at men with records of offenses against children and at people with mental illness. NEWS.ru says more than ten such men were detained, and one was let go after he had been seen behaving oddly near a playground on the day a child disappeared.
Experts concluded that the killer was physically strong. A composite sketch was drawn with help from a child witness and from surviving children: a thin man of about 30 in glasses, a dark coat and a hat, carrying a briefcase, who could not pronounce the Russian letter "р". The sketch did not lead the police to Kulik. IrCity wrote that it did not look like him, though some later accounts said it did.
The arrest on his 30th birthday came not from the investigation but from people in the street. Accounts agree on the outline: he took a small boy away from the area near the agricultural institute's student canteen, canteen workers saw it and followed, found him with the child and raised the alarm, and two men caught him as he fled. Life.ru says the two men were waiting at a bus stop a few hundred meters away. On the way to the police and at the station, Kulik said he was a doctor who had gone in to help a boy who had collapsed. The cook's account, and the boy's own, contradicted him. The boy survived.
NEWS.ru reported that the boy identified him, and that other witnesses recognized him from the sketch and from the way he spoke and walked.
After the arrest, IrCity wrote, either his mother or his wife destroyed the field diary, which had been kept on top of the refrigerator. Both versions give the same reason: that no one should ever read such a thing.
The day after his arrest Kulik confessed in writing. The reports differ on the numbers in it: 13 murders and about 30 other attacks (NEWS.ru, 2026, and Life.ru), 14 murders and 16 other attacks (NEWS.ru, 2025), 13 murders and about 40 attacks (IrCity), or 14 murders among about 40 crimes over four years (Russia Beyond). He showed investigators the places where children had been found and described details that, IrCity wrote, only the killer could have known.
In the written confession he declared himself mentally healthy and asked for the harshest punishment, including death. NEWS.ru quotes a line from it in which he wrote that people like him did not belong among other people.
One piece of evidence pointed the other way, NEWS.ru reported in 2025: his blood type did not match biological traces found on one victim. That examination was later found to have been badly done.
Kulik soon took his confession back. The accounts differ on when. Life.ru says it was within days; NEWS.ru (2025) says it was after he had studied the case file and taken a lawyer's advice; IrCity places it before a trial in March 1987; and NEWS.ru (2026) says he withdrew it at trial.
His new version was that a criminal gang, led by a man known as "Чибис" (Chibis), had blackmailed him and forced him to take the blame for killings the gang had committed. IrCity says he claimed the gang had learned that his father had hidden weapons in Ukraine during the war, and had threatened his family; Life.ru says he claimed they held compromising material about his father. He also said he had killed some members of the gang himself. Investigators checked the story and found nothing to support it. At trial, NEWS.ru reported in 2025, he denied all the killings and admitted only the attack on the boy for which he had been caught.
According to NEWS.ru, the case was sent back for further investigation.
In 1987 a new team took over, IrCity reported, under Николай Китаев (Nikolai Kitaev), an investigator of the Irkutsk regional prosecutor's office. Иса Костоев (Issa Kostoev), an investigator for especially important cases from the prosecutor's office of the Russian republic, who later worked on the Chikatilo case, joined it.
A 2025 tribute to Kitaev in the Baikal State University journal Сибирские уголовно-процессуальные и криминалистические чтения (Siberian Criminal Procedure and Criminalistic Readings) says that he led the investigative group in the case of Vasily Kulik, a serial killer who was a doctor with the Irkutsk ambulance service, and that he used unconventional tactics and ways of proving the case. Those methods, the journal says, helped prove Kulik guilty of 13 intentional murders of children and elderly women, and the case has since appeared in many criminalistics textbooks and manuals.
The team rebuilt the case from the start. Investigators found children who had survived attacks but had never been reported to the police, IrCity wrote, and found that many of them cried at the sight of Kulik or the sound of his voice. Life.ru says his first victims identified him. The bodies of the elderly women were exhumed, and the examinations showed that they had been strangled, not that they had died of natural causes. NEWS.ru (2026) lists other evidence that pointed to him after the case was reopened, including blood-group findings and a shoe print.
Kulik kept denying the killings, IrCity said, and claimed that what he had confessed were dreams. In the face of the evidence, according to Life.ru, he finally dropped the gang story and gave a full confession.
IrCity also describes a belief among investigators of the time that his attacks followed the phases of the moon, and says biorhythm calculations were used to choose times for questioning him. It presents this as a feature of investigative thinking in the 1980s, not as an established explanation of his behavior.
Kulik was examined at the Serbsky Institute and found sane, IrCity reported. NEWS.ru says the examination found him responsible for his actions at the time of the crimes.
In 1988 the Irkutsk Regional Court found Kulik guilty of the series of murders, with other charges, NEWS.ru reported, and sentenced him to death. IrCity dates the sentence to August 1988. The judge and the prosecutor have not been named.
Kulik spent almost a year on death row, IrCity wrote. He kept talking to journalists, kept a diary and wrote poems.
He was executed by shooting on June 26, 1989, in the Irkutsk pretrial detention center, according to both NEWS.ru reports and Russia Beyond. Life.ru says only that the sentence was carried out in the summer of 1989, when he was 33. IrCity wrote in 2026 that accounts of the date differ, placing the execution either in late June or in late December 1989.
His wife and two sons did not speak to journalists, IrCity reported, and they gave up the Kulik surname and disowned him. His wife later told investigators of things she had seen in his behavior toward their own children that had seemed strange to her at the time, NEWS.ru reported in 2025; the reports say such concerns in the family were brushed aside.
Kulik was arrested before the names of Anatoly Slivko, Gennady Mikhasevich and Andrei Chikatilo were known to the Soviet public, IrCity noted, and serial killers were barely recognized in the country. Life.ru wrote that the discovery that a respected, ordinary professional was responsible shook people far beyond Irkutsk.
The case was the subject of "Душегуб", a 2008 episode of the NTV series "Следствие вели..." presented by Leonid Kanevsky, in which Kitaev recalled the investigation, according to the Baikal State University journal and NEWS.ru. Kitaev later had a part in solving the case of Mikhail Popkov in Angarsk, NEWS.ru noted. Russia Beyond wrote in 2020 that the case had inspired one of the killers in the Russian television drama "Метод" ("The Method").
The number of killings. The conviction and most reports give 13: seven elderly women and six children. Two accounts of his confession give 14. The figure of 13 is the one tied to the verdict.
The number of other attacks. Reports of the confession give about 16, about 30 and about 40. The reports tie no figure to the verdict.
The date of execution. June 26, 1989, in three reports; IrCity says some accounts give late December 1989.
The retraction. Accounts place it within days of the arrest, before a trial in March 1987, or at the trial itself.
The blood evidence. One report says his blood type did not match a trace found on one victim and that the test was later found to be faulty; another lists blood-group findings among the evidence against him.
The dates of the children's deaths in 1984. IrCity dates the boy's death to September 25 and the two-year-old girl's to December 4; NEWS.ru puts both in December.
The composite sketch. Some accounts say it resembled him; IrCity says it did not.
The head injury. That the 1980 beating caused his offenses is his own account; no medical finding on it has been published.
His mother's school. Several accounts say she ran a named Irkutsk school; IrCity says that school did not open until 1989.
January 17, 1956: Vasiliy Kulik is born in Irkutsk, about two months premature.
1974: called up for military service.
1980: beaten by a group of teenagers in central Irkutsk; the same year a nine-year-old girl's mother reports his attentions to the police, and no case follows.
1981: marries a lawyer from Severobaikalsk.
1982: graduates from the Irkutsk Medical Institute; his first son is born; his offenses against children begin.
1983: his father dies; Kulik survives an overdose.
March 1984: a 72-year-old woman he knew through his work is killed; her death is recorded as heart disease.
May 1984: a girl is killed in Irkutsk.
September to December 1984: a seven-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl are killed in Irkutsk.
1984 to 1985: seven elderly women in all are killed in Irkutsk, among them a 75-year-old woman in 1985.
August 1985: a nine-year-old girl is killed at home in Irkutsk.
1985: a girl is killed in Kirovograd, Ukrainian SSR, during a family vacation.
January 17, 1986: on his 30th birthday, canteen workers and two passersby stop him with a small boy in Irkutsk; he is handed to the militia.
January 1986: confesses in writing to 13 or 14 killings.
1986 to 1987: retracts and blames a gang led by a man called "Chibis"; the case is sent back for further investigation.
1987: a new team under Nikolai Kitaev, joined by Issa Kostoev, rebuilds the case; the women's bodies are exhumed.
Before trial: examined at the Serbsky Institute and found sane.
August 1988: the Irkutsk Regional Court sentences him to death.
June 26, 1989: executed by shooting in the Irkutsk pretrial detention center (one account gives late December 1989).
2008: the NTV series "Следствие вели..." devotes an episode, "Душегуб", to the case.