"The women themselves are to blame, it was not necessary to walk around the city at night." A passage from the book of Sasha Sulim about how maniacs are caught in Russia

The publishing house of Alpina Plisher published a book by journalist Sasha Sulim “The Sludge Place”, in which she, on the example of the Angarsk maniac - policeman Mikhail Popkov, who killed women with impunity for many years - talks about how things about serial murders have been investigated in Russia. The Mediazone publishes an excerpt in which it tells about a strange change in the mood of the head of the investigation group and how the maniac was happy to talk about committed murders.

In July 2012-a month after the detention of Popkov, the head of the “maniac group” investigator Vasily Domoradov changed a lot. “Initially, we agreed with him that we would give Popkov a blank sheet of paper on which he will celebrate the places of his crimes, and we will check them and prove his guilt,” says Artem Dubynin. The meaning of this venture was that the criminal who does not fully knows what the investigation knows can accidentally talk about new murders.

Instead, the household for some reason showed the accused a map with the corpses of the detection of corpses inflicted on it. “After several such interrogations, Popkov confessed to 11 episodes and flatly refused the murders that he admitted earlier,” says Dubynin. - Gradually, everything began to boil down to the fact that there were only three crimes left on Popkov - and those with the outgoing statute of limitations. If everything went on, he would have received only 20 years. ” In parallel with the submission of the investigator, the maniac began to appeal how material evidence was seized and how material evidence was stored, in particular samples of sperm from the bodies of the victims, hinting that genetic material could have fallen into the case much later than the crime was committed.

In the same period, according to the operatives, Popkov began to cheer his wife in letters: he wrote to her that his life was “like a game of chess”, and promised that he would definitely win this party.

Dubynin believes that all this was prompted by the investigator, not a lawyer. At first, Galina Ovchinnikova, one of the most famous Angarsk lawyers, defend Popkov. They were going to pay for her services by selling a family garage, but the buyers were not in any way, and as a result, Ovchinnikov refused the client, transferring Popkov to her assistant Elena Maslova. She entered the process as a lawyer for their intended purpose, that is, her services were paid by the state. According to Dubynin, neither Ovchinnikov, nor Maslov did not provide any visible assistance to Popkov either during the investigative actions or during the trial.

“[This is the household] taught Popkov that it was necessary to say in order to explain where his sperm came from on the material evidence, advised to question the conditions for their storage and transportation,” says Artem. “On the one hand, nonsense, on the other, in court it could work.”

No less operational employees were alarming how the household is communicating with his wife and daughter of the accused-from some point, close killers began to almost every day on investigative actions and communicate almost freely with him. In the presence of the convoy, Elena Popkova could afford to climb onto the investigator's table and getting over with him. Artem Dubynin began to suspect that the relationship between Domoradov and Popkova - more than friendly.

After some time, the group’s employees noticed that the housekeeper stopped asking him to give him to the hotel in which he was settled in Angarsk. He explained that he was sleeping in the department in order to save business trips. However, when Dubynin called the security remote (the building was handed over to the alarm every night), there he was told that recently no one turned it off at night. “But every morning he played a performance in front of me. I came to work before everyone else, and the households went brushed my teeth, shaved, took a shower, ”recalls the operative. - And then I heard Popkova casually told Domoradova: "I will cook chicken for dinner."

One evening, Artem Dubynin and Viktor Maslakov drove past the house of the Popkovs and saw the lights in the windows, although Elena, who lived alone after her husband’s arrest (the daughter of the Ekaterina Popkovs had a separate apartment), was supposed to be at this time at work - to the night shift by the transport dispatcher. Dubynin decided to check if Popkova had everything in order: “I didn’t know, maybe she had any problems, maybe at that moment, someone threatened her with a knife?” He called the woman - and she said that he was in the service. "And who then in your apartment?" - asked Dubynin. In response, Popkov, according to the operative, began to aggressively talk and asked her to call anymore.

Nevertheless, Dubynin decided to find out what was happening. The neighbor Popkova told the operatives that a man went into the apartment a few hours ago. Then Artem called the door - no one opened him, but the light was immediately turned off. After that, the operative called Domoradov, “to report the situation,” but the investigator’s phone was turned off. As a result, Dubynin asked to come and open the door with his key to the daughter of Popkov to Ekaterina. The castle, however, did not succumb. Catherine called her mother, talked with her intensely, talked with a neighbor - and left. Dubynin continued to wait under the door - he did not want to leave until he understands what was happening.

The head of the investigation group Dubynin phoned only late at night and informed him that he was at the door of the Popkov apartment.

“I know,” he answered. “It's me inside,” and opened the door.

Dubynin asked what the investigator was doing the accused in the apartment of his wife. He replied that “he came to wash things,” because he supposedly nowhere to live. “Well, I did not need to tell these tales,” says Dubynin. “I realized that he has been dating Popkov’s wife for a long time.”

The next morning, the household accused Dubynin of surveillance, and he went to the pre-trial detention center and talked about something with Popkov without a lawyer and operational employees for a long time. Dubynin himself wrote a report in which he described in detail the incident in the house of Popkov. After that, an audit arrived from the Novosibirsk Investigative Committee to Angarsk, during which explanations were taken from all participants in the “maniac group”. Artem provided them with a video from Popkov’s apartment and an audio recording of the conversation that he took place with the household - Dubynin did them “for insurance” (he never showed them, although he promised to do this several times).

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Dubynin is still surprised at the actions of the former leader. “Domoradov had every chance of becoming a general. Why did he begin to ruin all this? He is perplexed. “I still can't understand him.” He did not receive money from the ass - rather, on the contrary, he himself helped them pay a lawyer. Looks like I fell in love with Elena Pavlovna Popkov. But this is the wife of the accused, she is on the other side of the barricades - and you are an investigator, a colonel. No matter how good it is, you have no right to have any close relationships with her. ” None of my interlocutors can explain the logic of the actions of Domoradov, who was simultaneously in relations with Popkova and tried to help her husband from prison.

This story also affected the career of Artem himself - he already annoyed his bosses, and after the resignation of Domoradov, they began to openly “mock him”. By the deadline, he had to become from Captain Major for a long time, but for this he needed to get a promotion to the senior operative. No one was in a hurry to give him a position, despite the fact that there was no special prestige in it: neither privileges, nor a significant increase in salary. “How did they do it? They asked me to write a report on raising the service, and when I brought it to them, they said that they had already taken someone else to this place, ”recalls Artem. Then the story repeated. For the third time, Dubynin did not write a report-but in the end he was still raised using the past statement. This happened in 2015 - by the captain Artem, by that time he served eight years, two and a half times longer than it usually happens.

Having left the organs, the household returned to his native Novosibirsk. Soon both the wife and daughter of Popkov moved there - according to Dubynin, the former investigator not only legally advised them, but also lent money to buy housing.

Vasily Domoradov himself calls the story of his novel with Elena Popkova fictional. According to him, their relationship was “different” in nature - which one, he refused to clarify in a conversation with me. As well as explain what he did in Popkova’s apartment when Dubynin found him there. They still communicate with the maniac’s wife-according to Domoradov, families: “They [Elena and Ekaterina Popkov] and are familiar with my wife.”

The housekeeper explains his sudden resignation in 2012 by the fact that his wife gave birth to a child and he did not want to travel on business trips, but wanted to be with his family. At the same time, in 2017, in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, he said that he resigned due to the “unexpected conflict with the investigative group”-and now he also says that his colleagues wrote anonymous anonymous, and also stole information from the computer to transmit Valery Kostarev.

After Domoradov was removed from the case, Popkov stated at cellmates, which at the first opportunity would stick to Artem Dubynin a pencil in the eye. From that moment on, Popkov began to fetch his hands from behind, and Dubynin talked with him at a distance.

In 2013, the “maniac group” was headed by another investigator from Novosibirsk - Ivan Antonov. To engage in Popkov, he moved with his family for a year to Angarsk. The work began with the establishment of psychological contact with the accused - according to Antonov, they talked almost daily, but the killer went to contact only when he realized that the household would not return to the investigation. “This is a really cruel person,” says Antonov about Popkov. - Homicidoman. He behaved like a drug addict: he crunched with bones in his arms, looked to the left, then to the right, stooped, shrugged his shoulders - like a snake. He himself told me that when he kills, then he has a good mood at once, my health is normal. ”

The new investigator seemed more assertive to Popkov himself. Soon, he began to ask the cellmates about how the life sentences were serving and how the prisons are arranged where this is happening.

Late in the evening at the end of January, Popkov was unconscious - as it turned out later, he fainted when he masturbated "on Parasha." According to Dubynin, a maniac in prison in general "very often engaged in masturbation." At that time, the cellmates told Popkov: "Not to jerk off in the bastard, to sleep in the bastard." After that, he became more accurate, and such incidents were not repeated anymore.

In March 2013, trips to investigative actions resumed, Antonov interrogated Popkov only on “old” episodes, and he calmed down for some time and stopped nervous. So far, the investigator has not put him against the wall: he made it clear that he could prove his involvement in other murders by which Popkov had not yet testified.

After the story with Domoradov, Antonov actually had to revise all the materials of the investigation - only the same three murders that Popkov were presented initially on the basis of genetic material found at that time could be considered proved by that time. Those murders by which the maniac wrote a confession could not be presented to him in court, while confessions were the only evidence of guilt (besides, in the words of Popkov, he promised to abandon these confessions). Employees of the Maniac Group re -studied all the material evidence of the murders that could be committed by a maniac, and sent hundreds of objects for genetic examinations. Two of them related to various crimes found the DNA of Mikhail Popkov.

In one case, the woman was initially not even included in the list of victims of the Angarsk maniac - her legs were wrapped in barbed wire, and the killer never bored with the bodies of the victims and did not tie them with anything. When the operatives studied the materials more intently, Antonov realized that no one specially wrapped the woman’s legs - the wire just caught on the body while he was dragged from the road. On the wire there was a DNA not only of the victim, but also by Mikhail Popkov.

In another case, everything was decided by a photograph of the crime scene - Antonov noticed that on the snowdrift, next to which the victim’s body was found, a trace of a bumper, wheels and a muffler of a rare double shape was imprinted. The investigator knew that in the late 1990s, Popkov drove on a rather rare Subaru machine at that time. In order to find the same, the operatives had to go to Chita, but the trip justified themselves: the examination confirmed that it was precisely the car of this brand.

Then it turned out that not only women were still the victims of the killer. Late in the evening at the end of April 1999, Popkov picked up three very drunk men in the city, among whom was the operative of Angarsk, Yevgeny Shkurikhin. Shkurikhin asked him to take him to his mistress - and began to tell how he was sleeping with strangers (the wife of the policeman himself at that moment was in the hospital). The driver was tired of it, and he asked to pay him and get out of the car, but Shkurikhin refused. “He began to wave his official certificate, said:“ I will not pay you anything, take me home, ”says Artem Dubynin. “Instead, Popkov took him to the highway, pulled it out of the car and strangled him.”

Realizing that the investigators again took up the case, Popkov decided to write at the guilty of a guilty of new episodes himself, so that they were counted as softening circumstances. On April 25, he admitted to the seven murders, warning the investigators in advance that he had already written on these episodes of the confession and drew the schemes of the location of the corpses, although here he continually constantly tried to confuse the investigation. Once a maniac was brought to verify the murder testimony for which he had already drawn a scheme - and instead of turning right, as in a figure, he turned left. “In the end, it turned out that he also committed the murder there, and decided to evade the last moment from the initial route when he saw that he was difficult to drive there,“ did not want to break there for half a day, ”recalls Antonov. Popkov reacted to the questions of investigators as follows: “And what's the difference to you: on the left or right? A corpse and a corpse - I killed anyway. ”

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Poles with a guilty of Popkov was formalized by the operational employee Maxim Stepunenko. When he asked Popkov, why did he need to admit new crimes, he replied: “It seems that I have nothing to wait for-they will put on the full, why should I now hide something.” When the investigator specified the accused if he had already admitted to all the murders, Michael, smiling, replied: “When the time comes, I’ll tell you more.”

In April 2013, Popkov was transferred to another camera. One of the new neighbors of the Angarsk maniac was the former employee of the military fire department Evgeny Goncharuk, who was accused of fraud. Like Romanov, he was also engaged in a block of cars, and with Popkov they often discussed the car markets of the Far East, spare parts and tuning.

The maniac seemed to Goncharuk a calm and sociable person. He loved to tell stories from life (for example, about how he distilled cars), he discussed films and books with cellmates, spoke about his relatives. “You will never say that he committed so many murders,” Goncharuk said later. - Although sometimes he closed in himself, he was taciturn. Sometimes it seemed to me that Popkov lives in some unreal world-on his mind. ”

“Popkov spoke about perfect murders calmly, without any regret or repentance,” Goncharuk recalled. - He said that the women themselves were to blame for what happened, that they did not have to walk around the city at night and look for adventures to the "back place". That a normal woman should always be at home with a family, and not walk with others. ” Another Magnacian cellmate also said that he talked about murders without any sympathy - and even with rapture, relishing the details.

At the same time, Popkov, until the last, had the hope that due to the expiration of the statute of limitations for his crimes and the written at some point, he will be able to at some point go out and understand his grandchildren. He shared his thoughts with cellmates and operatives. “He hoped to get 19 years and go out at parole,” says Romanov. “But I immediately told him that in any case he would receive a lifelong, and then he would start telling him, only to stay in a pre -trial detention center - to breathe fresh air there sometimes.”

When it became clear that there was nothing to hope for, Popkov had thoughts of suicide. According to Romanov, at some point the maniac asked him to bring him "some kind of pill, from which in the morning you could not wake up." “I told him:“ No, Misha, you have to live with it, ”recalls the operative. - He loves himself very much, considers himself with seven kots in his forehead - before a penny he calculated a pension in my mind. But hanging or opening is not his topic. God forbid he will hurt himself. But he could swallow a pill. ”

At the same time, Life wrote that Popkov tried to hang himself in the cell - after that he was even registered as a prone to suicide. Тем не менее не только Романов, но и другие оперативники считают, что на самоубийство маньяк бы никогда не пошел. «По сравнению с ним мы с вами даже халатно относимся к своей жизни, — объясняет один из следователей. — Он за собой ухаживает, бережет себя, зарядочку делает, следит за здоровьем, лишний раз не провоцирует никого, чтобы не быть втянутым в конфликты, в которых он может пострадать или получить какое-то заболевание. Жить-то ему очень хочется».

Сам Попков о самоубийстве (как и о многом другом) рассуждает уклончиво — мол, он, может, и был бы рад покончить с собой, но технической возможности нет, а значит, и думать об этом незачем. «Я круглосуточно нахожусь под камерой, каждые 15 минут в глазок заглядывает охранник. Когда я в туалете, он мне в дверь стучит. А неудавшаяся попытка может ухудшить мне условия содержания: не хочу оказаться в камере с мягкими стенами, — объяснял мне убийца Попков. И, немного подумав, добавил: — Так еще скажу: это можно всегда успеть сделать. Пока мне неплохо живется, сегодня у меня есть книжка, сигареты, кофе. Когда уже совсем тяжело будет, писем из дома нет, журналисты не приезжают, никакого разнообразия — тогда и сделаю. Я сам себе хозяин».

В какой-то момент Антонов и его коллеги собрали столько материалов и доказательств, что было понятно: пожизненного заключения Попкову не избежать, дело можно передавать в суд. Сам Антонов считал, что после суда в остальных преступлениях маньяк будет признаваться даже более охотно — поскольку надеяться ему будет уже не на что, а на время следствия его будут из колонии перевозить в СИЗО. Так или иначе, самому Попкову обо всех этих рассуждениях решили не сообщать. Он продолжал писать явки с повинной — в какой-то момент их количество превысило четыре десятка.

Тем временем в мае 2014 года следователь Антонов направил первое дело против Попкова в суд: бывшего милиционера обвинили в 22 убийствах и еще двух покушениях на убийство. <…> 14 января 2015 года Иркутский областной суд приговорил Попкова к пожизненному заключению. После этого показания о новых убийствах он начал давать еще более охотно — чем дольше продолжались следственные действия, тем дольше убийцу не этапировали в колонию.

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10 декабря 2018 года суд признал доказанными еще 57 убийств и повторно приговорил Михаила Попкова к пожизненному заключению — едва ли не впервые в истории российского правосудия. Тогда же его лишили звания младший лейтенант милиции и пенсии. У 18 из этих 57 жертв нет даже имен — следствию не удалось установить, кому принадлежали останки, обнаруженные на месте убийства.

Через полгода после приговора маньяка этапировали в колонию в Мордовии. Около года он провел в двухместной камере: по вечерам читал, а днем работал за швейной машинкой. Сначала пришивал карманы к спецодежде, а во время пандемии коронавируса начал шить маски.

«Иногда я начинаю себя накручивать, что я теперь никогда не выйду отсюда, — признает Попков. — С другой стороны, зачем мне себя накручивать, если есть возможность отключить образы и мысли? Себя ведь можно приучить к определенному распорядку, к определенным мыслям, определенному алгоритму. Себя можно контролировать, собой можно руководить. Я стараюсь не думать».

В июле 2020 года Михаил Попков признался в еще двух убийствах, которые совершил в Ангарске в 1995 и 1998 годах. Из Торбеевского централа в Мордовии его этапировали в Иркутск, где предъявили обвинение. Расследованием убийств занимается Евгений Карчевский.

Перед тем как Попкова этапировали в Мордовию, Карчевский спросил у него, о скольких преступлениях убийца еще не рассказал.

— Терпение, мой друг, — ответил Попков и улыбнулся.

О встрече с Михаилом Попковым, о том, как он много лет совершал убийства и как следователи все-таки смогли вычислить и ангарского маньяка и других серийных убийц, можно прочесть в книге Саши Сулим «Безлюдное место» , вышедшей в издательстве «Альпина Паблишер».