Vladimir Mirgorod was born in 1979. When he was small his mother separated from his father and took him to live with his grandmother in Aleksandro-Nevsky, a town in the Ryazan region. By the early 2000s he was living in the north of Moscow, and he was twenty-three when the killings began in 2002.
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 met them on one pretext or another and offered them a lift or a chance to spend time together, then strangled them, with a trouser belt in the court's finding. All of them died of asphyxia where they were attacked. He raped eight of them and sexually assaulted seven others. The Russian press would later call him the Strangler and the Polite Maniac.
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 an apartment 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 rumors 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. In January 2005 he was arrested for rape and robbery, and he served that sentence until 2010. The reason the murders went unsolved for years is that the man who had committed them was already inside for something else.
He was found through his own mouth and an accident of record-keeping. Out again in 2010, he bragged about what he had done to men he was drinking with, and they went to the militia. At the same time the police were computerizing their fingerprint records, and the database matched his prints to those left at the scenes of women's murders in the north of Moscow. He first admitted eight killings; genetic testing tied him to sixteen, and a psychiatric examination found him sane.
The Moscow City Court convicted him on January 30, 2012, of sixteen murders, eight rapes and seven further sexual assaults, and sentenced him to life in a special regime colony. The hearing was closed and he admitted part of the case. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence on June 21, 2012.
It was not the end. Years later, reexamination of old cases linked him to more deaths. In August 2024 he was charged again with the murder of two or more persons combined with rape, and a woman who had survived him identified him from photographs. Brought from his colony to a Moscow detention center, he confessed to killing fifteen more women and a man, aged from fifteen to forty-eight. On June 18, 2025, the Golovinsky District Court of Moscow convicted him of those sixteen murders, an attempted murder and sexual offenses, and imposed a second life sentence; one report gave the new term as twenty-two years in a colony. The verdict took effect in December 2025. The count against him now stands at thirty-two, killed between 2000 and 2004. His victims have not been named publicly.