Mikhail Popkov, a Russian serial killer nicknamed "
the maniac of Angarsk
", was sentenced on Friday (June 4th) for two additional murders, bringing the total of his victims to 80, said the Russian Investigation Committee.
Arrested in 2012, the 57-year-old former police officer was already sentenced in 2015 to life imprisonment for the murders of 22 women, then to the same sentence in 2018 for 56 additional murders committed between 1992 and 2007.
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Friday, June 4, a court in the city of Angarsk, located in the Irkutsk region, found him guilty of two other murders committed in 1995, sentencing him to nine years and eight months in prison. According to investigators, the killer himself exposed these two crimes in 2020.
Mikhail Popkov committed most of his crimes in the city of Angarsk, a Siberian city of 230,000 inhabitants.
He killed 79 women in total and a man, a policeman.
He first invited his victims, often to rape them, to get into his car at night, sometimes using his police vehicle outside of his working hours.
He killed these women, aged 16 to 40, with an ax or a hammer, as he himself recounted in December 2017 to the Russian news site Meduza.
He described himself as a "
cleaner
" purging his city of its prostitutes.
Only two women survived his attacks.
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Among the other Russian serial killers, Andrei Tchikatilo was executed in 1994 for the murder of 53 teenagers and children during the Soviet era. In 2007, another, Alexander Pitchushkin, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 48 people in Moscow.