Vladimir Mirgorod was born in 1979 and was living in Moscow in the early 2000s. He was in his early twenties when the killings began and was not married.
Between 2002 and 2004 he killed sixteen people in Moscow and in deserted areas around the city: fifteen women and a boy of thirteen. He strangled them, with a trouser belt in the court's finding, and all of them died of asphyxia where they were attacked. He raped eight of them and sexually assaulted seven others.
His method changed. At first he got into conversation with women and was invited into their homes; later he attacked them in parks and in the street. One of the earliest killings, in January 2003, was of a woman of twenty-five in a flat she was renting on the Leningradskoye highway.
Several women got away from him, and it is likely that the sexual assault counts he was convicted of relate to them, though the court did not say how many of them were treated as complainants. One survivor told investigators she had fought him for twenty minutes and that karate lessons had helped her; he ran off when a passer-by heard the shouting and came over. She said he was not interested in money: she had offered him some, and he told her he had enough and would not rest until he had strangled her. Women who escaped described him as having wild, glassy eyes.
By the summer of 2003 there were rumours across the north and north-east of Moscow about the bodies of young women being found tied up and strangled, some showing signs of rape, and at least ten were known about. Ordinary militia officers acknowledged privately that one man was responsible and that they could not catch him. Officially the Ministry of the Interior denied that the murders were connected, and the minister, Boris Gryzlov, told journalists that the Moscow militia did not believe a serial killer was likely.
The killings stopped in 2004, and not because of any investigation. He was arrested that year for robbery and went to prison. Accounts of the term differ: the Prosecutor General's office gave it as a sentence for rape and robbery served between 2005 and 2010, and a Russian newspaper reported it as five and a half years from 2004. Either way, the reason the murders were not solved for years is that the man who had committed them was already inside for something else.
He was found by accident. In 2010, while the police were digitising their archives, the software matched the fingerprints of the recently released Mirgorod to prints left at four of the scenes. Further forensic work produced enough evidence to charge him. He was arrested again, charged initially with seven murders, and convicted of sixteen.
The Moscow City Court sentenced him to life imprisonment on January 29, 2012, to be served in a special regime prison. The hearing was closed and he admitted part of the case against him. The court's spokesman said nothing could be offered about his motive.
The victims are not named in the accessible reporting. One source gives the killings as running through 2002 and 2003 rather than to 2004.