Yevgeny Chuplinsky
Yevgeny Alexandrovich Chuplinsky (born March 14, 1965), known as The Novosibirsk Maniac (), is a Russian serial killer who killed at least 19 prostitutes in the Novosibirsk Oblast from 1998 to 2005. The murders were accompanied by dismemberment, extensive mutilations and removing the victims' hearts. Despite large-scale investigations by police and several arrests, Chuplinsky was only arrested in 2016, and sentenced to life imprisonment two years later. Early life. Yevgeny Chuplinsky was born on March 14, 1965, in the city of Novosibirsk. Little is known about his upbringing, but he graduated school with average grades, and in 1981 , he entered a mechanical engineering college. While studying, he was an active member of the Komsomol. Between 1984 and 1987, he served with the Soviet Border Troops, where he received physical, ideological and combat training, mastering sambo. Among his colleagues, he gained infamy as a mercantile hypocrite who, at every opportunity, tried to attract positive attention from his superiors. After finishing his service, he enlisted in the police force, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. He first worked as a security guard in the Kirovsky District, but in 2000, he was transferred to the Leninsky District. In 2003 , he retired with a medal for serving with distinction, along with 46 letters of gratitude and recommendations from his employers. After his retirement, with the help of his wife's parents, Chuplinsky founded a chain of shops where he sold wall decorations made from metal. He married three times, had two children and supported the United Russia party led by Vladimir Putin. Murders. In 1998, Chuplinsky bought a Lada Samara, after which he began to earn money as a taxi driver. In November of that year, he committed his first murder. After that, the bodies of murdered prostitutes were discovered  in various desolate areas around Novosibirsk, such as landfills, windbreaks, and hard shoulders of roads. The victims were beheaded and extensively mutilated, arrows and pentagrams carved on the skin and various amulets were often found near the crime scenes. The investigators could not reach a consensus whether the killings were ritualistic in nature, or Chuplinsky had done it to simply mislead the authorities. The killer also never hid the bodies, preferring to place them in easy-to-find locations. Due to their disfigurements, some of the victims were never identified. After years of treating them as separate cases, the murders  were combined into one case, making it clear that a serial killer was operating in the area. However, this revelation did not aid the investigation: although two identikits were compiled, they differed from one another, and neither was considered an accurate sketch of the offender. By the mid-2000s, the murders suddenly ceased, leading the investigators to believe that the murderer had been jailed for another offense or was deceased. As a result, his age and possible motives remained unclear for some time. In October 2015, a taxi driver named Alexei Ivanov was arrested by investigators who suspected him of being  the Novosibirsk Maniac. While Ivanov later confessed to and was convicted of several unrelated murders, he was ultimately cleared from those attributed to the Maniac of Novosibirsk. First and second arrest. Chuplinsky first came to the attention of the investigators in 2004, even before the murders were combined into one, in connection to the disappearance of one woman, whose body was never found. On the night of her disappearance, a new SIM card was inserted into the victim's mobile phone, registered to Yevgeny Chuplinsky. The detainee said that he worked as a taxi driver, and that two young men  to whom he had given a lift had left the phone in his car. When he was asked to given an official testimony, Chuplinsky changed his story, claiming that the young men had unsuccessfully attempted to rob him, and had dropped the phone in the process. The changing stories seemed insignificant to the investigators, who later released him. In 2006, when all the cases were combined, much circumstantial evidence pointed towards Chuplinsky. In particular, while he claimed to have never met one of the victims, but investigations had uncovered that she was a prostitute who was familiar with Chuplinsky. His  own co-workers told of rumors that he ran a protection racket centered around sex workers, including in areas where some murders took place. Because of this, Chuplinsky was arrested. While interviewing witnesses for possible further clues, authorities found that in 2000, Chuplinsky was forced to switch workplaces because of the aforementioned rumors. Some prostitutes even claimed that after they had been questioned by authorities, Chuplinsky in turn would ask interrogate them what they had told in great detail. One of his garages was inspected with the help of a police dog, but despite its strange behavior, no bodies were  located. Since there was insubstantial evidence to keep him detained, Chuplinsky was released. Final arrest, trial and sentence. In 2016, the Investigative Committee began conducting tests using DNA, requesting that all suspects, including Chuplinsky, provide a sample. The results showed that semen from the scene of one murder and sweat from two others were positive matches to Chuplinsky, who was subsequently arrested and charged with 17 murders on April 23, 2016. In January 2017, Chuplinsky was declared sane following a psychological and psychiatric examination. During the interrogations, he confessed to killing a total of 29 women, but due to insuffiecient  evidence, he was only charged with 19. On April 14, 2017, he was charged with 19 counts of murder, and subsequently recanted his testimony. During the trial, the court heard more than eight thousand witnesses regarding the case. On February 28, 2018, Yevgeny Chuplinsky was found guilty of 19 murders and one theft by jury verdict, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment in a corrective labor colony. On September 28, the verdict was canceled and the case returned to court due to the fact that some of the cases' statute of limitations had expired (under the Russian criminal code, the  statute of limitations for murders is 15 years). Two months later, Chuplinsky was again convicted in his second trial and re-sentenced to life imprisonment. As of September 2019, he is serving his sentence at the Snezhinka Labor Colony in the village of Elban, Khabarovsk Krai. Victims. The Russian media under-reported the names of victims, or their backgrounds. Due to his propensity for amputation or decapitation, often all that was found of victims were isolated hands, feet, or their head. Below is the information known thus far: