Mikhail 'The Werewolf' Popkov, 53, was today formally charged with 60 new murders on top of 22 for which he is already convicted and serving a life sentence.
A former policeman , he has already confessed to all the killings, saying he wanted to "clean up" his Siberian city Angarsk of "prostitutes" and "immoral women".
Prosecutors believe 82 to be the "final toll" of a killer who raped almost all his victims before butchering them with knives, axes or screwdrivers.
In leaked testimony from the macabre case, he described to criminal investigators how he separated his "ordinary" family life from his other existence as one of history's worst and most bloodthirsty serial killers using axes, knives and screwdrivers to murder his victims "I had a double life," he told investigators working on his case.
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| His wife |
He coldly revealed how he cruelly selected women to kill during his 18-year reign of terror in Irkutsk region between 1992 and 2010.
"The victims were those who, unaccompanied by men, at night, without a certain purpose, were on the streets, behaving carelessly, who were not afraid to enter into conversation with me, get into my car, and then go for a drive in search of adventures, for the sake of entertainment, ready to drink alcohol and have sexual intercourse with me."
He used his police car, offering lifts to some victims, then taking them to remote areas to rape and murder them.
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| His daughter |
"Not all women became victims, but those of a certain negative behaviour, I had a desire to teach and punish," he said of his decision who would live and die.
"Others did not behave in such a way, they were afraid ...
"The exception was the murder of (victim) Elena Dorogova, who was hurrying to the [railway] station to meet her mother. On this occasion, the woman was sober.I never prepared beforehand to commit a murder, I could use any object that was in the car - a knife, an axe, a bat.
"I never used rope for strangulation, and I did not have a firearm either. I did not cut out the hearts of the victims."On one occasion he murdered a teacher at his daughter Katya's music school, he said.
"Her corpse was found in the forest along with the body of another woman,' he said.
"My daughter asked me to give her money, because the school was collecting to organise funerals. I gave her."
Once he went back to the crime scene after leaving two women for dead, because he realised he had lost a police identity token at the site, which would identify him as the serial killer.
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| Victim Maria Lyzhina |
"I found the token right away, but saw that one of the women was still breathing," he said.
"I was again shocked by the fact that she was still alive. I finished her with a shovel."
These victims in the year 2000 were Maria Lyzhina, 35 and Liliya Pashkovskaya, 37.
The killer has been judged mentally fit to stand trial.
Culled from Daily Mirror