The Werewolf of Angarsk: The Making of Russia's Most Prolific Serial Killer
In the late Soviet-built city of Angarsk, Siberia, a police officer named Mikhail Popkov drove the same streets he was paid to protect. Between 1992 and 2011, he killed at least eighty-three women - making him the most prolific serial killer in Russian recorded history. He was not caught for twenty years.
The Werewolf of Angarsk is the definitive account of how he killed, how he was enabled, and why the state that employed him failed so catastrophically to stop him. Drawing on court records, forensic evidence, investigative files, and the criminological literature on serial homicide and institutional failure, investigative journalist Cassy Anne Purcell reconstructs not only the psychology of the man but the architecture of the system that protected him: the Soviet ideological inheritance that denied serial homicide could exist in Russia, the MVD's culture of loyalty over accountability, the victim-blaming that classified murdered women as low priority, and the twenty years of institutional silence that allowed the killing to continue.
This is a book about one man. It is also a book about what happens when the state's most trusted institution becomes the predator it was built to stop - and about the women whose names the record almost lost entirely.
Rigorous, unsparing, and essential.