Nicknamed the Angarsk maniac, this Russian serial killer was convicted of 80 murders

 Sylvie Claire / May 4, 2021

Russian serial killer Mikhail Popkov, dubbed the Angarsk maniac, was convicted Friday of two more murders, bringing his total number of victims to 80, the Russian Investigative Committee said.

Arrested in 2012, the 57-year-old ex-police officer was previously sentenced in 2015 to life in prison for the murders of 22 women, then again to the same sentence in 2018 for 56 additional murders committed between 1992 and 2007.

On Friday, a court in the city of Angarsk, located in the Irkutsk region, convicted him of two other murders committed in 1995, sentencing him to nine years and eight months in prison. According to investigators, the killer himself revealed 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 a total of 79 women and one man, a policeman. He would first invite his victims, often to rape them, to get into his car at night, sometimes using his police vehicle off-duty.

He killed these women, ranging in age from 16 to 40, with an axe or a hammer, as he told the Russian news site Meduza himself in December 2017. He described himself as a cleaner purging his city of prostitutes. Only two women survived his attacks.

Among other Russian serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo was executed in 1994 for the murder of 53 teenagers and children during the Soviet era. In 2007, another, Alexander Pichushkin, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 48 people in Moscow.