No court ever heard the case against Vladimir Romanov. He was accused of twelve murders or more, and on October 12, 2006 he was found hanged with a bed sheet in a single cell at investigative prison No. 1 in Kaliningrad, about two weeks after his arrest and before any of it reached a judge. Everything known about what he did comes from the police who were building the file, and the file was never tested.
What had been tested, fifteen years earlier, was a single rape.
In 1991 two teenage girls were killed in the Kaliningrad region and buried. Because there were no bodies to find, they were recorded as missing, and the case went nowhere. Later that year a twelve-year-old girl was raped and strangled and did not die. She described the man who had done it. Romanov was arrested within days, convicted, and sentenced to ten years.
That is the whole of the case against him that was ever proved. The two girls in the ground were no part of it, and nobody was looking for them.
While he was inside he was raped by another prisoner.
He was released in 2001 and the killings began again that year, running until 2005. The victims were girls and young women. They were raped, then stabbed or beaten with a hammer. Russian reporting called him the Kaliningrad Maniac, and also the taxi driver, which is how he is said to have approached them.
He was born on December 5, 1950 at Orekhovka in the Guryevsky district, and he lived at Bagrationovsk.
After his release he worked as a driver for hire, and he planned carefully so as not to go back to prison, choosing girls and young women between twelve and nineteen and burying or sometimes burning the bodies in the forest. On September 25, 2006 he tried to rape a twenty-four-year-old woman, who got away and remembered his registration number. He was arrested two days later, and he confessed at once: to killings between 2001 and 2005, ten of which investigators established, and to the two girls in 1991. He described some of them in detail, among them a girl of about fourteen he picked up on the Kaliningrad to Mamonovo road and stabbed in the neck. He was held on an accusation of ten or more murders. Two weeks later he was dead.
The investigation recorded suicide. His relatives said he had no reason to kill himself. The prison where he died has a documented history of deaths of that kind, and no independent finding on his has ever been published.
So there was no trial, no testimony, no verdict and no sentence. The figure of at least twelve is what Russian reporting carries, and it is police attribution rather than anything a court weighed. The girls and young women killed between 2001 and 2005 are not named anywhere in the published record, which means a man who was never convicted of killing them is better documented than they are.
The one thing the record does establish is the shape of it. A girl survived him in 1991 and told the police who he was, and the state had him for ten years. Two bodies it never knew about were already buried. Five years after it let him go, he was accused of a dozen more.