Vladimir Bratilov was arrested in the town of Lysva, in Perm Oblast, Russia, on June 10, 1998. He was 22. The Perm Regional Court convicted him of a series of killings of girls and women in the town and, on April 29, 1999, sentenced him to life imprisonment. Russia's Prosecutor General's Office later described the case as 11 attacks, eight of them fatal.
Much of what is publicly known about the case comes from two Russian criminological works. In 2007 the legal scholar V. N. Kitaeva examined the court file while testing a claim by prosecutors that a psychological profile had helped catch him. In 2020 a monograph on the fingerprints of serial killers, published by Buryat State University, included a short profile of him alongside his fingerprint record.
Lysva was the home of the Lysva Metallurgical Plant, which put up part of a reward during the hunt for the killer.
The 2020 monograph gives Bratilov's birth date as July 2, 1975, and records his full name as Vladimir Nikolaevich Bratilov. The monograph says nothing of his family, schooling or work.
Kitaeva's article supplies two facts about his life before the arrest. He lived in the part of Lysva where the attacks took place, and he had been discharged from the army because of a head injury. Both details later mattered in the argument over the police profile, because the profile had predicted a young local man with a past head injury.
The court found Bratilov guilty of eight killings. None of the eight victims has been named, and not all of their deaths have been dated. The 2020 monograph describes five of the deaths, in order, without giving the years.
The first victim it describes was a woman of 70. She was attacked and taken to hospital, where she died without regaining consciousness. The monograph places this as his first killing and says he was 22 at the time.
About a week later a student at Lysva's medical college was killed.
The next killing it describes took place on Lysva's City Day, the town's annual holiday, on August 3. A young woman was strangled, and her belongings and money were taken. Bratilov had been drinking that day, the monograph says.
Soon afterward another young woman was killed in the town. The monograph gives no date for her death.
On November 10 a 14-year-old schoolgirl was found dead in Lysva.
The monograph does not describe the remaining three killings for which he was convicted. Kitaeva's study of the court file adds that the Perm Regional Court saw the same way of attacking in every one of the crimes, and treated that common pattern as indirect evidence linking them to one man.
By May 1998 the killings were the subject of several unsolved criminal cases in Lysva. As the series went on, the town administration offered a reward of 5,000 rubles for information, and the Lysva Metallurgical Plant added 10,000 rubles, according to the 2020 monograph.
Investigators also asked for a psychological profile. A psychologist with the internal affairs directorate (the regional police) of Perm Oblast drew up a written assessment of the likely offender, working from the files of the unsolved cases and from methods the Russian Interior Ministry used for serial violent crimes. Kitaeva, who examined this document, describes it as offering three alternative portraits.
One portrait described a man of 36 to 42 with a wife and children. Nothing in it proved correct. The other two described a man of 18 to 25 who lived and worked close to the area where the attacks happened and who had probably suffered a head injury in the past. The profile was dated May 26, 1998.
On the evening of June 10, 1998, Bratilov, who had been drinking, attacked two women in Lysva. He injured them and took their belongings. The second woman got away and reported the attack to the police at once.
Officers then patrolled the area with her, looking for the man. She recognized Bratilov, and he was detained. Kitaeva's summary of the court record says the 22-year-old lived in that part of town and had been discharged from the army after a head injury.
After his arrest Bratilov confessed to the crimes, according to the 2020 monograph, and items belonging to the victims were seized from him.
While held in pretrial detention, in pretrial detention center No. 1 (SIZO No. 1), he tried to kill himself. He survived.
The case was heard by the Perm Regional Court as criminal case No. 2-17 of 1999. At trial Bratilov argued that the women themselves were to blame for what had happened to them, the monograph says.
On April 29, 1999, the court found him guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Kitaeva records the conviction as one for murders combined with other offenses, among them robbery. The accounts agree that he was convicted of eight killings.
Earlier that year, on February 2, 1999, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation had ruled that no court could impose a death sentence until jury trials were available throughout the country. As Pravo.ru reported in 2009, no death sentences were handed down or carried out in Russia after that ruling took effect, and in November 2009 the Constitutional Court held that the death penalty was not to be applied after the moratorium's expiry either.
Where he is serving his sentence has not been reported.
The Bratilov case reached a national audience through a document issued after his arrest. On December 31, 1998, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation sent out information letter No. 28-17/98-905, "On the experience of using special knowledge in the field of psychology in the investigation of serial murders." The letter was meant to show investigators how psychological profiles could help them find unknown serial offenders.
It cited five cases from different regions: Artamonov in Udmurtia, Kuzmichev in Kostroma, Retunsky in the Voronezh and Volgograd regions, Voroshilov in Samara, and Bratilov in Perm. In the Bratilov case, Kitaeva writes, the letter presented his arrest as the result of the search features set out in the Perm psychologist's profile.
Kitaeva, a candidate of legal sciences at the Baikal State University of Economics and Law, went back to the court files that lay behind the letter. Her article, "On the effectiveness of the psychological portrait of an unidentified serial killer," appeared in the journal Sovremennoe Pravo (Modern Law) in 2007.
For the Bratilov case she drew on the archive of the Perm Regional Court. Her reading was that the police patrol during which he was caught had nothing to do with the profile. Officers were searching the area with the woman who had escaped, and she identified him. The profile's prediction of a young local man with a head injury turned out to fit him, but, in her account, it did not lead anyone to him.
She reached the same view about the other cases in the letter. In none of them, she concluded, had the psychological portrait of a serial killer played a part in exposing the offender.
Bratilov's case appeared again in 2020, in a monograph by V. V. Yarovenko, N. N. Kitaev and R. G. Ardashev, "Dactyloscopic and dermatoglyphic study of the papillary patterns of serial killers," published by Buryat State University in Ulan-Ude.
The authors set out to test claims by some researchers that the patterns of a person's fingerprints and palm prints could help build a search profile of an unknown serial killer. They examined the fingerprint cards of 95 known serial killers. They also wrote that such cards are destroyed after 30 to 40 years, and that publishing them would keep them available for later research.
The book's second chapter deals with offenders who committed serial murders, and gives a brief personal profile of each, followed by the fingerprint record. Bratilov's entry sits between those of two other offenders, Aroyan and Burtsev. Its fingerprint record lists a basic formula of 9/19 and a total delta index of 13, and records differences in pattern type between the thumbs, index fingers and ring fingers of his two hands.
How he was caught. The Prosecutor General's Office presented Bratilov's arrest in December 1998 as an example of a psychological profile at work. Kitaeva's 2007 study of the court file found that a survivor's escape and her identification of him during a police patrol led to the arrest, and that the profile played no role.
The number of attacks. The court convicted him of eight killings. The figure of 11 attacks comes from the Prosecutor General's letter, as reported by Kitaeva. Which of the nonfatal attacks formed part of the charges has not been reported.
His name and birth date. The 2020 monograph gives his patronymic as Nikolaevich and his birth date as July 2, 1975. The verdict itself has not been published.
The dates of the series. The criminological accounts give dates only for some events (August 3, November 10, and the arrest on June 10, 1998). The years of the earlier killings have not been published.
July 2, 1975: Vladimir Bratilov is born, according to a 2020 monograph.
Before June 1998: eight girls and women are killed in Lysva, Perm Oblast; the victims described include a 70-year-old woman, a medical college student, young women and a 14-year-old schoolgirl.
During the series: the Lysva town administration offers a 5,000-ruble reward, and the Lysva Metallurgical Plant adds 10,000 rubles.
May 26, 1998: a psychologist with the Perm Oblast police completes a probable profile of the offender, with three variants.
June 10, 1998: Bratilov, 22, attacks two women in Lysva; one escapes, reports the attack, and identifies him during a police patrol. He is detained and later confesses.
After his arrest: he tries to kill himself in pretrial detention center No. 1 and survives.
December 31, 1998: the Prosecutor General's Office issues information letter No. 28-17/98-905, citing his case as an example of psychological profiling.
February 2, 1999: Russia's Constitutional Court rules that no death sentence may be imposed until jury trials are available nationwide.
April 29, 1999: the Perm Regional Court convicts Bratilov and sentences him to life imprisonment.
2007: V. N. Kitaeva's article in Sovremennoe Pravo concludes that the profile did not lead to his arrest.
November 19, 2009: the Constitutional Court rules that the death penalty cannot be applied after the moratorium's expiry.
2020: Buryat State University publishes a monograph on serial killers' fingerprints that includes his entry.