Mukhankin was born in 1960 near Rostov-on-Don and grew up in orphanages after his mother's death. He had served a sentence for theft and was released in 1995.
Between 1995 and 1996 he killed eight people in the Rostov region, mostly women and girls, raping several of them. The victims included a woman and her child. He was arrested in April 1996 and confessed.
He told investigators that he had wanted to exceed Chikatilo, who had killed at least fifty-two people in the same region and had been executed in 1994, and that account was widely reported at the time. It should be treated as a statement in interrogation rather than as an established motive; the region's police and press were both extremely sensitised to the comparison in the years immediately after Chikatilo.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death in January 1997. Russia suspended executions in 1996 under its Council of Europe commitments and has carried out none since, so the sentence became life imprisonment in practice; he is understood to be still in custody.