In early May 1995, outside the town of Salsk in the Rostov region, a man armed with a bayonet attacked a local woman, Valentina Falko, forty, and her teenage daughter. Falko died where she fell. The girl broke free and shouted for help, and passersby held the attacker, a man of thirty-five named Vladimir Mukhankin. In his pockets were women's earrings, rings, a watch and a bunch of keys. Some of them belonged to Elena Shtefan, who worked at the railway station and had not come in that day. Her body was found nearby.
Until then nobody had connected the deaths. Earlier that year the body of a schoolgirl had been found in a ravine at Tsimlyansk, a woman of fifty had been stabbed to death in Shakhty and a shop assistant killed at Kamenolomni, each with dozens of stab wounds. There was no shared electronic database, the cases were being worked locally, and, as investigators later put it, the killer's pattern kept changing, with different towns, circumstances and ages. At the same time Rostov police were getting dozens of reports of robberies of the same kind, in which a man came up from behind, struck the victim on the head with a pipe and took a hat and a handbag.
The case went to the Rostov regional prosecutor's team that had worked on Andrei Chikatilo. Its head, Amurkhan Yandiev, said he first took it for a single murder until Mukhankin began to talk about others. Mukhankin, he said, thought of himself as Chikatilo's pupil, had followed every press report about him, and dreamed of beating his record. To get him talking, Yandiev asked him to imagine himself in Chikatilo's place and write about Chikatilo's motives. As Yandiev had hoped, Mukhankin ended up writing about himself: hundreds of pages about his life and every killing, which became the basis of the prosecution and were later studied by forensic psychiatrists. He even offered investigators advice on catching men like him, describing a trance on the hunt in which sight and hearing sharpened and the body grew hot.
He had been born around 1960 into a troubled family. As a boy he often ran away from home and slept in cemeteries, in dog kennels or up in trees. When he was punished at school for drawing a swastika on his desk, he stole the teacher's German shepherd and beat it to death with an iron rod. He first offended as a teenager and spent almost half his life in prison, first for robbery and then for sexually abusing a small girl, and in the short spells between sentences he married and started a family. After six years inside he was released, and within months he killed for the first time.
That first killing, in February 1995, did not fit what followed. The victim was a man, the live-in partner of a woman he knew, and Mukhankin said he stabbed him at her request. In less than three months he killed seven more, in Shakhty, Tsimlyansk, Salsk and Kamenolomni: four women and three girls. Yandiev said the speed was the one record he did set, eight victims in about two and a half months. Psychiatric examination found him sane, though at trial he tried to persuade the experts otherwise.
In court he withdrew his statements. On December 11, 1996, the Rostov Regional Court convicted him of twenty-two crimes, including eight murders, three of them of minors, and fourteen robberies, and sentenced him to death by shooting with confiscation of property. Russia had stopped carrying out executions that year, and his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in the special-regime colony known as the Black Dolphin. Reporting in 2020 said he was still held there, writing poetry and now and then a letter to Yandiev.