In southern Siberia, Mikhail Popkov, a policeman nicknamed the "Maniac of Angarsk", claims a terrifying record: 80 feminicides, plus the homicide of one of his colleagues from the local police station committed over twenty years.
His first murder dates back to 1992, when the mutilated body of a mother was discovered along the M53, a blizzard-swept highway that connects Irkutsk, Siberia, to the country's capital, Moscow.
Soon, the M53 becomes the road of death: women disappear, often at night in Angarsk, a former prison city under Stalin that has become a huge petrochemical complex.
The victims vanish when leaving a bar or entering the station and their bodies are found along the highway.
Some women are also found dumped in cemeteries.
They were killed with axes, hammers or screwdrivers.
Some have been raped.
The local police are not very concerned, and some investigations amount to only three pages.
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In 1998, Svetlana, an 18-year-old girl, crosses paths with the killer.
She missed the last tram and agrees to get into a stranger's car.
Hit, beaten and pulled by the hair, she screams and attracts the attention of witnesses.
The attacker pretends to run away but comes back a few minutes later and hits her again.
She will wake up the next day in the morgue, while she is very much alive.
Svetlana has partly lost her memory and the police are reluctant to take her complaint, until a hypnosis session where she evokes details that suggest that the maniac may be a policeman.
But the local police station is dragging its feet and new bodies appear along the M53.
Confused by his DNA
In 2000, a clue appeared at a crime scene: the tire tracks of a 4x4 Lada Niva, a car provided by the Russian police.
Mikhail Popkov, like other agents, is auditioned without further action.
At the time, he was often the first to go to the crime scene.
He is at the forefront to clean the premises before the arrival of his colleagues.
In 2002, Popkov left the police force and embarked on the car trade and now surveys the country to its borders, in Vladivostok.
It will make new victims along these roads.
It was not until 2012 and the arrival of DNA in Siberia that the murderer's terrible career came to an end.
Popkov's saliva matches a DNA fingerprint found at three murder scenes.
Arrested, he first recognizes 22 crimes.
To justify them, he speaks of women of bad life who spent their evenings in bars.
Sentenced to life for the first time, he was interrogated again and admitted to 59 other murders.
He will finally be judged for 56 murders and receives a second life sentence.
Today, at 58, Mikhail Popkov is serving his sentence in a penitentiary called "Black Dolphin", near the border of Kazakhstan.