“The Avenger” Who Cleans the Streets of Sex Workers
By: Sabana Grande
Tags: Murder, True Crime, Crime, Russia, Police

An Interview With The Werewolf

Mikhail Popkov is currently serving time in a work camp in Mordovia, in the Torbeevsky Central. He says he likes the weather there. He is currently making medical masks for the pandemic. He is the only man in Russia to be charged with two life sentences.

Image via lenta.ru

He wears a black uniform with the letters ‘PZ’ marked on him, indicating that he is serving a life sentence. He conveniently continues to confess to murders as a way to get out of prison when he feels bored. In his own words: “to go on vacation.”

As he is handcuffed, you can see that his hands are also chained to an officer. This must be done at all times in his case. As he walks around crime scenes from over 20 years ago, he allegedly remembers many small details, but almost never the faces and names of his victims.

“I picked her up on the street outside the hotel. We drove around the city together, bought some light alcohol — most likely wine — and came here. We drank, then had sexual intercourse, after which a conflict arose between us, and I killed her. I dragged the body down and threw it into the water.” — Mikhail Popkov

He remembers the exact light posts that were on years ago, their location, the distance to the murder sites. Not all of the bodies of the people he killed were found, he says.

According to him, every time that prison guards enter his cell he is forced to say what he is in there for — the murder of 78 people. However, he says that that number is fictitious. Those were just the murders that he has so far remembered and that were proven to be his. The statute of limitations ran on many others. There are also more women he killed and doesn’t choose to remember where he left them because he’s waiting until he wants another holiday.

All of the members of his investigative task force remember that when he was caught, he walked into their office and looked at the map of all his crimes they had on the wall.

He immediately began correcting their errors with great accuracy — as later reports demonstrated. He would look at the map for a few seconds and say that something was incorrect — that he killed a certain person to the right of the powerline, not the left, or that he killed somebody 500 meters closer to the water tower than the police guessed.

“He does not remember the faces of his victims” — Evgeny Karchevsky

In July 2020, when leading the team that escorted him out of prison to the site of one of his murders which he committed back in 1994, he confidently tells them, “This is not the same sewer, it was a little further from the road. And this is some new one.”

As it turns out, the sewage systems were in fact altered. He was right.

His investigator, Evgeny Karchevsky, recalls that he remembered all the details, except the names and faces of his victims. He is often lost when it comes to those. He knows the places exactly; he knows the exact way he went with the bodies; he can even remember exactly what the victims were wearing. But he cannot always describe who they were. He simply didn’t care.

The police and interviewers who have spoken with him have noted something: he is not at all repentant. In his own words, “I did it because I thought so, and I’m right.”

Some of the women Popkov killed had children who were locked in their apartments for days after Popkov killed them. They said they were going out for a minute and never got the chance to come back. Neighbors heard screams of children crying a few days later.

On August 12, 1999, there was a beheaded body found in a rubbish container in Angarsk with 6 knife wounds. The girl was a medical student. Her head was allegedly found in a rubbish bin in a different district.

Most of his crimes were so gruesome that even though Russian Orthodox funerals are typically done with an open casket, the remains of most of his victims were unbearably gruesome and upsetting for families. As a result, a lot of closed-casket funerals began to take place in the Angarsk region between 1992–2012.