Mikhail ‘Werewolf’ Popkov, 62, has appeared in court over the killings of two more young women, both aged 27, while already in a Russian prison for the murder of 90 more
Russian maniac Mikhail ‘Werewolf’ Popkov, 61, has confessed to killing two more women, taking his appalling toll to 92.
Known as ‘The Werewolf’, he appeared in court in Irkutsk today over the deaths in 2008 of two friends, both 27. He was also seen in a macabre crime reenactment when he admitted to strangling the women. The vile sex attacker raped most of his victims – all female and aged 18 to 50 – before killing them with axes, hammers, knives, screwdrivers, spades and by strangling.
Ex-cop Popkov – Russia’s worst serial killer, also known as the Angarsk Maniac – is already serving two life sentences and will never be freed, even though he volunteered to fight in Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.
The latest two victims were strangled near Angarsk Electromechanical Plant. At the time, their bodies were found in a forest near the M-53 highway, but the perpetrator was not identified.
He had sought to “get acquainted” with the women who snubbed him, he said. He stranded one of the women on the street, and another in a car.
In sickening testimony, he told Russian state investigators how he killed the second woman, after the first was already dead. “She leaned over the other woman,” he said. “I strangled her with force. I feel that she is no longer showing any signs of life. I strangled her and that was it. She lay down on top of the other one.And I didn’t touch them. One remained lying on top of the other.”
Earlier this year, Popkov confessed to using an axe to kill Tatyana S, a cleaner, and burn her body, in Angarsk, in 2011. A handcuffed Popkov said: “I committed the murder. I was on a bicycle, about to cross the park… I met this woman I didn’t know, or she asked me something, and some conversation ensued.”
Police say this turned into an argument, and he struck her with a small axe before dousing her in solvent and striking a match. “And I just got on my bike and took off. I put the axe right on the grass,” he said.
While his current total is now 92, police sources fear his eventual toll will be “closer to 200”.
Last year, Popkov confessed to three new murders in the Primorsky region of Russia, some 2,400 miles from Angarsk in the Irkutsk region of Siberia where most of his brutal murders took place.
They were committed when – after leaving the police – he travelled to the Russian Pacific port Vladivostok where he bought second hand Japanese cars which he drove back to sell in his home region.
Married father-of-one Popkov conducted his reign of terror against lone women between 1992 and 2011, mainly in Angarsk which he wanted to “cleanse of prostitutes”.
A psychiatric evaluation diagnosed Popkov with homicidal mania, “a condition when a person has an irrational desire to kill someone”, reported TASS. Nevertheless, the mass murderer was declared sane.
Russia has had a moratorium on use of the death penalty since 1996. Before this, the condemned were shot to the back of the head by an executioner.
A chilling video from his family archive shows the killer in the 1990s walking towards the camera clutching a knife and reciting a post-war nursery rhyme based on Nazi prisoners of war attacking locals.
“I will slash you. I will beat you. Now it’s your turn,” he says with a sinister smile. He often offered victims nighttime lifts in his police car before taking them to remote locations where he raped and killed them, leaving their naked bodies in woods on roadsides.
Popkov once told a judge he could not remember his true tally of victims. But the mass killer told the court: “Committing the murders, I was guided by my inner convictions.” After he was detained in 2012, he told police he wanted to “cleanse” the streets of “prostitutes”.
“They abandoned their husbands and children at home and went out to party as if it was the last day on earth,” he said. One theory is that an affair his wife Elena had with a work colleague drove Popkov to his killing spree. Alexey Mulyavin, 52, admitted he and Elena had a liaison before her husband began butchering women.
“He did not catch us red handed, but he learned about it,” said the lover. “You know, it was a very short affair. We were young. And probably everyone has love affairs at work.”
Popkov told previously how he found used condoms at his home, and accused Elena of an affair. She denied it, saying she let some friends use their house for a tryst.
“This was the impetus for my future,” Popkov has said. “If I had seen the treason with my own eyes, I would perhaps have done everything differently. Everyone goes through such things differently. Some take it easily and forget, others take it painfully. What happened to me? The worst-case scenario.”