The first killing, by Russian press accounts, began at a dance. In 1997 the town of Lysva, an industrial town in the Urals in what was then Perm Oblast, held a disco for its residents, and a young man who arrived drunk picked out a girl he liked and struck up a conversation. They got as far as kissing. When she decided to stop there and refused him outright, he killed her. It was the first of eight killings of girls and women in Lysva between March 1997 and June 1998, each combined with rape and robbery.
The victims were strangled or beaten to death. The press called the killer the Lysva Maniac and the Beast of Lysva, and a regional newspaper later wrote that women in the town were afraid to go out in the evening. Later retellings described victims ranging from children to old women.
He was Vladimir Anatolyevich Bratilov, born in Lysva on July 2, 1975, and he was arrested on June 10, 1998. On April 29, 1999, the Perm Regional Court found him guilty of every count against him, eight murders together with rapes and robberies, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Russia had stopped carrying out executions in 1996 and had introduced life imprisonment that year as the heaviest punishment its courts could impose in practice, and the sentence meant he would be held in a special-regime colony for the rest of his life unless a court later ordered his release.
Earlier English-language accounts gave his surname as Bratislav, his year of birth as 1976 and his victims as more than thirty; the court record is of eight. Under Russian law a prisoner serving life may apply for conditional release after twenty-five years, a point his sentence reached in 2024. No such application in his case has been reported.