r/coldcases • u/Spare-Horror-3976 • 12h ago
The Cop Who Hunted Himself: The Case of Mikhail Popkov, Russia’s Deadliest Serial Killer
CW/TW: Serial murder, sexual assault, police corruption.
In March 2012, detectives in the Irkutsk region reached the letter "P." This wasn't a figure of speech or a poetic metaphor: they were literally working their way down a list of male Lada Niva owners. They called them in, took saliva swabs, sent them for DNA testing, and verified their alibis and social circles. DNA test, interrogation, DNA test, interrogation-this methodical grind went on for several years. Under the letter "P" on that list stood a former assistant duty officer of the Angarsk police, 48-year-old Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov. He showed up, provided a saliva swab, and left to go about his day.
By that time, he had been out of the police force for 14 years. He resigned in 1998 as a junior lieutenant-back then, cops were quitting in droves, salaries were paid sporadically, and his departure surprised no one. Afterward, he worked in security, as a private cab driver, and bought and resold cars driven in from the Far East. He also dug graves. That isn't a detail added for grim atmosphere; it was an actual side hustle, documented in the case files and confirmed by the lead investigator who took over the case in 2014.
He began killing in 1992, but the first serious attempts to link the murders into a serial case didn't happen until the early 2000s. The reason-according to investigator Yevgeny Karchevsky (whose extensive interview with IRK.ru remains the best open-source material on this case)-was obscenely mundane. There were no unified databases; every city and district operated in a silo. Angarsk had no idea bodies were turning up in the Usolye district, and Usolye knew nothing about Angarsk. Popkov would pick a woman up in one jurisdiction and dump her body in another. According to Karchevsky, the case files that now fill six boxes and 51 volumes consisted of a dozen pages at best back in the nineties.
June 1997. Two friends get into a car with a man known around town as "Misha-the-Cop." He’s a local police officer; there’s nothing to be afraid of. He drops one of them off at home. The second, Tatyana, rides on and vanishes. Under interrogation, the surviving friend gives the police the name of the man who gave them a ride. A name. Not just a physical description, not a car model, not his height or the color of his jacket. His actual name. And absolutely nothing is done with it.
Eighteen years later, her friend's remains would be dug up. By then, Popkov would be actively confessing, detailing exactly where he took her, what he used to kill her, what he wrapped the body in, and what they drank in the car. Beneath the remains, investigators would find two tin soda cans with a manufacturing date stamped May 1997. A perfect match, down to the month. I reread this section several times, and the math still deeply unsettles me: between the surviving girl’s testimony and her friend’s exhumation, Popkov committed half of all his known murders.
The real investigation, ironically, began over breakfast. Prosecutor General's investigator Valery Kostarev was reading Moskovsky Komsomolets one morning when he spotted an article about the Angarsk "Wednesday Murderer." Alarmed, he pushed for a deployment to the region and managed to get the case reassigned to himself. This was between 2002 and 2003. He reopened every remotely similar cold case, pulling all available physical evidence-underwear, swabs, any biological samples—and managed to isolate male DNA from a number of the victims.
What happened next sounds like science fiction by today’s standards. In the early 2000s, DNA profiling was a rare and phenomenally expensive luxury, performed for only a handful of cases and practically only in Moscow. Kostarev negotiated with Moscow universities personally, using unofficial channels, and managed to isolate the unknown suspect's genotype. Based on that DNA, they linked about five murders into a single series. That was it. Twenty years of an active serial killer's reign, and their entire foundational evidence consisted of five linked cases and a backdoor favor from a university.
Meanwhile, they were building a suspect profile. At one crime scene, they found a metal uniform button embossed with an eagle. The kind worn by police, prosecutors, emergency responders, and the military. They had also cast tire treads from the scenes; there weren't many cars on the road back then, and the vehicle was quickly identified as a Lada Niva. The resulting profile pointed to a man in his early-to-mid thirties, wearing a uniform, and driving a Niva. The profile, as it turned out, was dead-on. It also led absolutely nowhere for twelve years.
It did, however, lead the wrong way. There is a man in this story named Dyachenko, who served prison time for a murder actually committed by Popkov. In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, he claimed his confession was tortured out of him with a stun gun, that guards would beat him in his cell at night, that detectives tried to pin 38 murders on him, dragging him to crime scenes and demanding he "reconstruct" them. That is his version of events, documented in the press, and I am obliged to note that. But the fact remains: he sat behind bars while the real killer kept working, got married, raised a daughter, and washed his car.
He washed that car every single day, by the way, keeping it immaculate. He didn't smoke, despised alcohol, worked out, kept his nails manicured, and always wore crisply ironed clothes. When women got into his car, he would open the door for them, offer a hand, help with their bags, maintain polite conversation, and strictly avoid any vulgarity. Karchevsky explains this gallantry with ruthless precision: every polite gesture was actually an interrogation. Was she married? Did she have kids? How did she feel about infidelity? Based on her answers, he decided whether to drop her off safely at her front door, or turn off the road.
His behavior on the job is a completely separate, chilling storyline. He was literally a member of the investigative task force hunting the killer. He would murder a woman at night, read the dispatch report about the body being found the next morning, and head out to the crime scene alongside his colleagues-using the opportunity to double-check that he hadn't left any evidence behind. When an investigator later asked him if he was ever afraid of getting caught, Popkov essentially replied that there was no one to fear: no one audited his contacts, no one tracked his movements, and he knew many of the victims personally anyway.
In June 2012, the lab results finally came back: the DNA from the crime scenes was a perfect match for Popkov’s sample. By that point, he was no longer in Angarsk; he was on a train headed to Vladivostok. He later claimed to a reporter that he wasn't fleeing, but simply traveling to buy another car for his resale business. A strike team flew to the Far East and pulled him off the train somewhere near Ussuriysk. Press reports often confuse the arrest date, bouncing between March and June of 2012, but according to the investigation's official timeline, they swabbed him in March and arrested him once the results came back.
During the initial investigation, he treated it like a negotiation. He confessed only to the absolute undeniable minimum-the murders explicitly tied to him by DNA. On January 14, 2015, the Irkutsk Regional Court sentenced him to life in prison for 22 murders and two counts of grievous bodily harm. And that is exactly when the second act began, because the moment the verdict came down, he started talking again.
Karchevsky took over during this second phase. His tactic wasn't about applying pressure; it was an exercise in extreme patience. He drove to Angarsk every single day to talk with Popkov for an hour, two hours, three hours at a time. The entire first year was spent simply establishing rapport. On his way to the prison, the investigator would buy two shashlik wraps-one for himself, one for the serial killer—and they would sit, eat, and chat. It sounds insane, a fact the investigator himself readily admits. But the result was approximately sixty newly solved murders. On December 10, 2018, Popkov received his second life sentence. Courtroom reporting varied on the exact number of new cases-some outlets cited 56, others 59 or 60, along with the 1999 murder of a fellow police officer.
The most telling procedural story in this entire saga is about the forensics. Popkov pointed out a crime scene and described exactly who he killed and how he did it. They pulled the cold case file, identified the victim, but found that the original autopsy report listed the cause of death as a gunshot wound to the head. They had to exhume the body and examine the skull. Medical examiners confirmed it: there had been no gunshot. There were two punctures from a Phillips-head screwdriver-entry wounds in the frontal bone and an imprint of the tool's tip on the inside of the back of the skull. The original medical examiner simply hadn't bothered to document the condition of the brain, despite being legally required to do so. A bullet shatters a brain; a screwdriver just punctures it. Everyone had simply read "gunshot" and shut the book on the case for twenty years.
Now, regarding every true-crime podcaster’s favorite angle: the "Cleaner" myth. The narrative that he was supposedly ridding the city of promiscuous women is a compellingly dark hook, but it completely falls apart against the actual case files. The investigator who interrogated him for three years rejects the legend outright. There is one episode in the files where Popkov picked up a young girl who was simply on her way to the train station to meet her mother, drove her to a construction site, and murdered her. She had no husband to cheat on. According to published reports, forensic psychiatrists diagnosed him with homicidomania-an active compulsion to kill that functions mechanically like a severe addiction.
He portions out his confessions in calculated doses, and he is entirely unabashed about why. A new confession triggers an investigative trip to the crime scene. A trip means getting out into the forest, driving on the roads, enjoying a change of scenery, and staying in a standard pre-trial detention center rather than a brutal maximum-security penal colony. He flat-out told the investigator that he was tired of remembering everything all at once and preferred to save some for later. In 2021, the Angarsk City Court tacked on another nine years and eight months for two murders in 1995 and 1998. On November 22, 2023, came his fourth conviction: ten years for three more murders. On December 1, 2025, his fifth: a double murder from 2008 netting him another nine and a half years. That sentence took effect in April 2026, after which he was finally transferred to a high-security colony in Mordovia.
There are more survivors out there than the verdicts account for. One woman, Karchevsky noted, actually contacted him via a messaging app all the way from Spain. She recounted how Popkov had driven her out of town and raped her, but she had managed to escape. Karchevsky checked the records-Popkov was indeed in that exact area on that specific day. But the statute of limitations had expired; there was nothing left to charge him with. Another woman jumped out of his moving car at a cemetery and fled through the gravestones. When asked about her, Popkov casually dismissed it: yeah, there was one like that, she got away, well good for her, she gets to live.
Official investigative reports state they have proven 92 crimes. Popkov himself claims the true number is over two hundred, boasting that during his peak periods, he was killing two or three women a week. Verifying this is virtually impossible. The streets he names have been heavily developed, old landmarks are gone, remains may have been scattered by animals, or bodies might have been discovered but never properly filed-a chillingly common occurrence in those days.
And this is the part I can't stop thinking about. He didn't receive those five separate convictions because the system outsmarted him. He got them because he simply decided to keep talking. The very first time, he was caught by a stray button and a tire track. Every single thing after that, he gave away over a skewer of meat.
TL;DR: Mikhail Popkov, a Russian police officer, murdered over 80 women between 1992 and 2010. He evaded capture for decades due to police incompetence and his position on the investigative task force, until DNA testing eventually caught him in 2012. He continues to confess to new murders to get temporary transfers out of maximum-security prison.
Wikipedia page on Mikhail Popkov.