A True crime Podcast

In the quiet paths of Moscow’s Bitsa Park, people went for walks, shared vodka with strangers, and simply vanished. One man counted them like squares on a board. He wanted sixty-four. He nearly got there. Host Alexander Lawson tells the chilling true story of Alexander Pichushkin — the Chessboard Killer — a soft-spoken supermarket worker who murdered dozens between 1992 and 2006, marking each deat...

Seventeen elderly women. Eight years of terror. One smiling stranger at the door. Between 2002 and 2010, Irina Gaidamachuk posed as a social worker to gain entry into the homes of lonely pensioners across Russia’s Sverdlovsk region. Once inside, she bludgeoned them to death with a hammer or axe—then stole whatever cash she could find to feed her alcohol addiction. Sometimes she killed for the pric...

For nearly two decades, women in the Siberian city of Angarsk vanished into the night—only to be found murdered and mutilated in the forests. The man responsible wasn’t a stranger. He was a police officer. Join host Alexander Lawson as he examines the crimes of Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov, the former cop known as the Angarsk Maniac and the Werewolf. With more than 90 confirmed victims, Popkov stand...

In 2015, four women in Novosibirsk accepted a ride from a taxi driver and vanished. Their bodies were later found in the woods — beaten, burned, and mutilated. The man behind the wheel called himself “The Cleaner.” He said he was purifying the city of “promiscuous” women. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Alexei Yevgenyevich Ivanov, the unofficial taxi driver whose six-month killing spree t...

They knocked on a fortune teller’s door claiming they wanted their futures read. Minutes later she was dead. Over the next eight months in Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir Guryanov and his partner Elvira Egorycheva murdered at least 13 people — raping, robbing, and killing in the name of a private religion they invented. He called himself Prince Vladimir, last of the Rurikids. She called herself Mother....

In February 2011 a man walked out of an apartment in Oryol carrying a small child and leaving two bodies behind. Investigators would soon learn he had already done this before — more than once. Alexey Vladimirovich Gromov, born in the quiet town of Lyubim, became known as Sinaya Boroda — Bluebeard. Over sixteen years he killed five women: his former wife, three partners, and one of their mothers....

In the quiet villages of Belgorod Oblast, a stranger would knock on doors asking only for a place to sleep. What the elderly residents found instead was a man raised by the woods — a killer they called Leshy, The Goblin. Alexander Ivanovich Greba grew up more animal than human. Abandoned to the forest as a boy, he returned as a teenager and murdered an old woman because she reminded him of his mot...

In Chelyabinsk in the winter of 2004, young women placed ordinary ads — a wedding dress for sale, a job wanted. A polite man called, arranged a meeting, and walked through the door. Over five months Denis Alekseevich Gorbunov robbed eight women and murdered five of them. One he stabbed ninety-six times. He hunted them through the classifieds. Alexander Lawson tells the story of the man police call...

October 12, 2008. A quiet pond outside a Russian village. Two groups of men, vodka, and one insult that would not be forgotten. Dmitry Vladimirovich Golubev had already killed once. In 1991, at nineteen, he was convicted of a robbery-murder in Uzbekistan and sentenced to fifteen years. He served twelve. Released in 2003, he was stateless, unemployed, and living on the margins in Penza Oblast. Seve...

You place an ad for a room. A polite man answers, looks around, and says he’ll take it. Then he comes back with a knife. Between 1996 and 2000, Andrei Grigoryevich Golovachyov — known as the Apartment Maniac and Shvarts — traveled across six regions of Russia answering classified ads for rooms and apartments. He stabbed victims dozens of times and slit their throats. He later claimed he was taking...

“Today I will kill a huge amount of bio-waste and shoot myself.” At 8:57 a.m. on May 11, 2021, 19-year-old Ilnaz Rinatovich Galyaviev posted those words on Telegram. Eight minutes later he walked into Gymnasium No. 175 in Kazan — the school he once attended — with a legally purchased shotgun and a homemade bomb. Nine people were killed: two teachers and seven eighth-graders. He surrendered with hi...

A late-night ride in St. Petersburg. A polite driver who never haggles. One condition: stop for coffee. Minutes later, the passenger is unconscious. Seven never woke up. From 2005 to 2008, Aharon Garushovich Galstyan worked the streets of Russia’s second city as an unofficial taxi driver. He targeted people who’d been drinking, offered them a drink, and laced it with a powerful sedative. Then he r...

In the lawless years between the Chechen wars, families in a small village vanished overnight. Homes were entered. Occupants were never seen again. The victims were almost always ethnic Russians. This episode of A True Crime Podcast, hosted by Alexander Lawson, examines the 1997–1999 crime spree led by Ramses Lobazanovich Gaichayev and his gang. Prosecutors tried to charge him with genocide — the...

October 2000. Chelyabinsk police arrest identical twins Farit and Timur Gabidullin for the rape and murder of a young woman on the railway tracks. Then the brothers start talking. They claim thirty killings. Then more. They say their first victim was their own mother. They point investigators to a cemetery pit — and officers dig up more than a hundred skulls. Only a fraction of those claims ever s...

By day he was a firefighter with Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations — the man who rushed into burning buildings to save lives. He had a wife, two children, and what neighbors called a kind face. By night, Alexey Sergeevich Falkin hunted women across Yekaterinburg and Verkhnyaya Pyshma. For thirteen years, from 2004 to 2017, he lived a double life that ended only when a young mother named Ir...

In Moscow between 2005 and 2007, six people got into an old green Zhiguli and never got out alive. The driver looked like a family man. Neighbors said he was kind. Under the seat he kept a sawn-off shotgun. Alexander Ivanovich Elistratov worked as an unlicensed cabbie, hunting at night in the city’s eastern districts. He robbed passengers who looked like they had money. Those who resisted were sho...

In November 1998, a teenager gathering firewood on the outskirts of Novosibirsk lifted a sheet of metal and found a severed head. Nearby, a woman’s mutilated torso lay inside an abandoned refrigerator. She was never identified. Over the next seven years, body parts kept appearing across the city—heads in hoods, limbs on dumps, pentagrams carved into skin. Nineteen women, most of them sex workers....

In a quiet Russian village, a man set a house on fire… then sat down next to his sleeping friend and watched him die. German Lyubomirovich Christan first killed as a teenager. After prison, he returned to the Leningrad region and began a new series of murders — stabbing, beating, and burning people alive, sometimes staying to watch the flames. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the so-called...

In a quiet Russian town of just 8,000 people, men began vanishing without a trace. Alcoholics. The homeless. A pensioner collecting paperwork. One after another they disappeared… until a 23-year-old was arrested for stealing knives from a hardware store. Inside his house police found a notebook titled “The Bloody Hunt of a Predator Born in the Year of the Dragon.” The author called himself Rambo....

He was a soft-spoken construction worker, a husband, and a father of four. Neighbors trusted him. His family loved him. By night, Pavel Vladimirovich Bondarenko — the Sevastopol Maniac — stalked the quiet streets of Crimea, raping and strangling women for nearly a decade. Host Alexander Lawson uncovers the double life of a killer who hid in plain sight from 2007 to 2015, the botched early investig...

In the late 1990s, Russian women answered newspaper personal ads promising romance, security, and a better life. What they found instead was Viktor Nikolayevich Bolkhovsky — a convicted killer who called himself a “professional maniac.” From the murder of his own wife in 1980 to a calculated campaign of killings across Kemerovo and Chita, Bolkhovsky refined a chilling method: polish the perfect ad...

In a small Russian industrial town, a man bludgeoned three people to death with a dumbbell disc, stabbed them, and set the apartment on fire. That triple murder finally stopped Stanislav Nikolayevich Beloruscev—but only after a decade of killing. Between 1999 and 2009, the man known as the Krasnokamsk Maniac murdered at least seventeen people through stabbing, strangulation, bludgeoning, rape, and...

On the morning of September 20, 2021, 18-year-old law student Timur Bekmansurov walked onto the campus of Perm State University in Russia armed with a pump-action shotgun. Within minutes, six people were dead and dozens more were wounded. He had studied the mistakes of other mass killers. He chose a crowded day. And he aimed to kill as many as possible. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast , ho...

In the spring of 2011, women in Yekaterinburg began vanishing after dark. Four were found murdered—raped, robbed, and left in abandoned buildings or isolated corners of the city. Two more barely escaped with their lives. Police had almost nothing… until the survivors’ descriptions led them to a 21-year-old illegal migrant from Tajikistan who barely spoke Russian and worked nights as a parking-lot...

In one of Russia’s harshest Arctic prisons, a man serving life for rape and murder picks up a chunk of cement and beats his cellmate to death. It is not his first killing behind bars—and it will not be his last chance to take a life. Host Alexander Lawson traces the crimes of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Ageyev, the so-called Ural pedophile with a hammer. From an early prison murder and a controversial...