Mikhail Popkov | The Wednesday Killer
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and more.

I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Warburg Thun. Let us take a moment to catch our breath, dear listener, before we continue down Jack the Ripper's bloody path. Instead, let's once again open up one of my favorite mystery boxes, that of the life and crimes of a rather unknown Russian serial killer.

I had only vaguely heard about him before doing research on him for this very episode, and my interest only grew with each paragraph I read. He, as many other Eastern European serial killers, has a very high kill count of at least 81 human beings, before finally being apprehended and put on trial. His name...

is Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov, and he is known as the Wednesday Murderer. This podcast has in excess of 7 million downloads in total, but both my Patreon page and my Facebook page are only visited by a few thousand.

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Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov was born on the 7th of March 1964 in the city of Angarsk in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Soviet Union. Today, the city is part of the Russian Federation in the state of Irkutsk.

I had a hard time finding information about his early life. Information about Popkov online is quite limited. But he was a sporting youth who always dreamed of becoming a policeman. After successfully entering and graduating from the police academy, he married Elena Popkov, a fellow officer.

Together, they would have one daughter, who they named Ekaterina. Later in life, the daughter would become a schoolteacher. Both his wife and daughter thought highly of Mikhail before his crimes were revealed, and he also got good feedback from his bosses for his work in the police service. Popkov has a very distinct physical appearance.

He is somewhat gaunt, but obviously very fit and athletic, with close-cropped hair and what appears to be grey eyes. His nose is flat, and his ears have a sharp curve to them, almost making him look canine, wolfish.

When he was 28 years old, almost a decade after graduating from the police academy, and a year after the fall of the Soviet Union, Popkov was certain his wife was having an affair with one of his co-workers.

Eléne denied it, but Popkov discovered two used condoms thrown in the garbage at his home, which his wife tried to explain belonged to some friends, but stayed over for one night. Popkov didn't show much outward rage towards his wife. He did not beat her, and apparently let the matter drop.

However, inside of him grew a burning rage that was to encompass all women, not just his wife. Some articles online claim that Popkov killed women who reminded him of his mother, but this is not very likely. Popkov never spoke badly about his mother, whom had lovingly called him Misha growing up, and she even testified to his defense in his eventual trial.

In 1992, after discovering what he suspected was his wife having an affair, Popkov took a detour, coming home from his shift at work. As a police officer in a police car, the civilian population instinctively trusted him, and in a poor and desolate place like the far eastern sections of Russia, having a car is seen as somewhat of a luxury.

It was therefore quite common for him to offer people a lift with his car, if they were going the same way as him. On this afternoon, however, he simply felt that he wanted to murder a woman. Popkov's routine, his modus operandi, remained virtually unchanged from 1992 all the way up until his eventual capture.

He would look for women walking along the road alone, sometimes intoxicated women. He would approach them and offer to drive them home, and lace that offer with a threat of arresting them if they didn't go along with him. Other times, he would appeal to their sense of safety by referring to reports of a man attacking women, and that as a cop, he would make sure they got home safely.

Once the women sat down in his car, Popkov would drive his unsuspecting victim to an isolated forest. Once there, he would command the woman to get out of the car and take off all her clothes so that he could see them completely naked. When they did, his anger would explode.

and he attacked the naked, defenseless woman with whatever weapon he had at hand. Sometimes he would strike at the woman with an axe, causing deep gouges into their torsos, and excruciating pain and immediate massive loss of blood. Other times he would stab the woman using a hunting knife, slashing into her again and again,

sometimes as often as 27 times, causing pain, shock, and deadly loss of blood. The few times he did not have an axe, a knife, or a hammer at hand, he would jump on the woman and strangle her to death while looking into her eyes. As I have previously covered in other episodes,

Manual strangulation is often just as painful, if not more so, as being murdered by stab wounds. The trachea is crushed and often the victim experiences internal bleeding in the throat, causing them to drown in their own blood, as well as from constriction of the airways. In at least one case, Popkov cut off one of his victim's head.

In another known case, he would, while the woman was alive, open up her chest using a knife and rip out her beating heart. When the woman he had just murdered was dead, or at least he thought she was, he would proceed to rape her corpse, both vaginally and anally. Popkov was not a very clever serial killer who spent a lot of time concealing his crimes.

He was arrogant, and was sure that considering he was a police officer, he did not need to worry too much about being caught. Since the murders occurred in isolated, deserted areas, often in dense forests, several meters from a simple dirt road, he would simply leave the bodies where he had killed them.

Other times, he murdered the women nearby cemeteries and left the bodies there to be discovered during the following day by people visiting the graves of their loved ones. Unlike many serial killers, Popkov was not merely motivated by sexual deviancy.

He shared the motivation with the American serial killer Gary Ridgway, in that he hated what he called loose women, and he wanted to both annihilate all of them, as well as humiliate them as much as possible. Just as he felt he had been humiliated by his cheating wife, he knew very well what he was doing, and felt he was in control of his actions.

He even gave himself a nickname, The Cleaner, to signify to the world that his murders was all part of his mission to clean the world of immoral women. In 1998, Popkov attacked a woman simply known as Svetlana M. She was only 15 years old, but she looked somewhat older. She told investigators that a police car had pulled up next to her and offered her a ride.

Unsuspecting, she got into the vehicle, and she subsequently was driven to a nearby isolated forest. Following his M.O., Popkov ordered the girl to strip naked. He then grabbed her and smashed her head hard against a tree, causing her to pass out. He thought he had killed her, so he proceeded to rape her vaginally, before simply leaving her there.

Luckily for her, she was found the next morning, barely alive, considering the extreme cold of the Siberian night. After several complaints made by her mother, police finally took a detailed statement from her. But police did not believe her story. She even identified Popkov as her attacker from a photograph of him in a police car.

Popkov was questioned by his colleagues, but he just laughed the whole thing off, as she was just a crazy girl, in his view. His colleagues believed him. After all, he was a respected police officer, and his wife even gave him an alibi. Young women turning up dead in the area grew even more numerous, and police finally understood they had a serial killer on the loose.

Since many of the victims were found near or inside cemeteries, they suspected the killer was a mortuary worker. Other occupations they suspected was metal worker, bus driver, railroad worker, or for some reason, a heating station engineer. Considering this was the 90s, police were not very efficient since the fall of the Soviet Union had left the country in quite a bit of chaos.

The failure of the police to suspect Popkov, coupled with his wife covering for him, allowed him to kill dozens of women in the years following 1992. One of those victims was Tanya Chagaeva, a 29-year-old housewife with a daughter at home. She had received an invitation to go to a nearby concert.

And despite her husband urging her to stay home, she wanted to go and together with her friend Yulia, she left. Neither women would ever be seen alive again. Her husband, Igor, called Tanya's sister, Victoria, the next morning, asking if his wife had decided to spend the night at her place. When she was neither at home nor at her sister's, they both realized she was actually missing.

There were no mobile phones at the time, so they called Tanya's parents, asking if perhaps she had spent a night at their place, but she had not. Police was of little help. They told the families of the missing women that they had to wait at least three days before a formal missing persons report could be filed. The families would not need to wait that long.

Later, the very same night, a farmer would find the naked and mutilated bodies of both Tanya and Yulia, close to a village near Angarsk. Both women had been stabbed and chopped up, with deep gashes in their bodies. After they had died, both women had been raped.

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. In August of 1999, Popkov would offer a medical student a ride. As so many times before, he would take her into the forest and force her to strip naked before him. Then he attacked her with a knife.

stabbing her six times. As she was dying, he started to cut off her head. Finished with that, he proceeded to orally rape said head, before finally raping the headless body afterwards. He would bring the body and head with him, and stuff both down a garbage chute. Later, in the same month, he approached Maria Molotkva,

Like the others, he would take her to the forest, attack her, mutilate her, and rape her. Less than a year later, in June of 2000, he would claim two of his oldest victims, 35-year-old Marina Legina and 37-year-old Lilia Pashovkoskaya. The two women worked in the same shop and had left to see Marina's sister late at night.

Neither had a car, and they briefly considered calling a cab. However, it was summer, and the night was warm, so they decided to simply walk. Around midnight, Popkov showed up in his police car and offered them a ride. Using his tried and tested M.O., he killed and raped both women and simply drove off afterwards. This time, however, he made a mistake.

He realized that he had left his police badge behind at the crime scene, and he had to return. Coming back to the site, he was surprised to see that one of the women was still breathing. According to an interview given in custody, he finished the woman off by using a shovel. Both women were buried in closed coffins.

Their bodies had been so mutilated that the Russian tradition of having open coffins had to be disregarded. Marina left behind a 14-year-old daughter. Lilia left behind two children, a 12-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. As my dear listener might notice, the women Popkov killed doesn't exactly stand out as loose.

They were regular upstanding citizens with steady jobs, and often families of their own. After murdering Marina and Lilia, he targeted a music teacher at his daughter's school. He never gave a reason why she had to die either. When his daughter later approached him about the school collecting money to organize the music teacher's funeral, he gave her some money for it.

In the early 2000s, Popkov claimed he stopped his murderous campaign. According to him, he did so because one of the women he had killed and raped had given him syphilis, causing him to become impotent. However, as with so many other sexual psychopaths, Popkov is a master liar. According to Russian authorities, Popkov did not stop killing until he got caught.

On the 23rd of June 2012, Popkov was arrested in Vladivostok while he was in the process of buying a car. Many years before, his DNA had been taken along with 3,500 other police officers. And now the authorities had finally compared his sample with the semen left behind on one of his victims.

When he first got caught, his only daughter, Ekaterina, refused to believe that her father was the Wednesday Killer, nicknamed so due to his victims often being found on a Wednesday. She states, and I quote, I do not believe any of this. I always felt myself as daddy's girl. For 25 years we were together, hand in hand.

We walked, rode bikes, went to the shops, and he met me after school. We both collected model cars, so we have the same hobby. I wanted to be a criminologist, so I read a book with tips on how investigators catch serial killers, and there were also basic classifications about murderers. Daddy doesn't fit any of these classifications. He doesn't look like some maniac."

But Ekaterina recently changed her tone, not having seen her father for over two years. She expressed a desire to, and again I quote, look into his eyes and understand if he really could be that killer, end quote. Russian authorities originally suspected Popkov of killing 29 women.

25 of the women were aged 19 to 28, while 4 were between the ages of 35 to 40. All of those victims had lived in the city of Angarsk, a region of Irkutsk. Following interrogations with Popkov, however, the authorities admitted that the numbers were considerably higher.

Irkutsk investigative committee spokeswoman Karina Golovacheva said, and I quote, To clarify the numbers, Popkov has confessed to 59 new murders. We are not counting in this total those 22 for which he was already sentenced. These cases are already closed.

So there are 59 new murders. That means, if we add them to the earlier 22, it will be 81 murders in total." Based on his own confession, Popkov appears to be the most prolific serial killer in Russian history.

He has a higher kill count than Andrei Chikatilo, a.k.a. the Butcher of Rostov, who was convicted of over 53 murders. Alexander Pishushkin and the Terminator Anatoly Onoprienko were respectively convicted of 52 and 49 murders. And it doesn't end there either.

Russian authorities believe that Popkov is rationing out his confessions to delay the time it takes for him to receive a final sentence than being transported to some brutal penal camp where he will be forced into hard labor.

The second trial of convicted serial killer Mikhail Popkov, now 53 years old, began at the Irkutsk Regional Court in southeastern Siberia on the 10th of January 2018. A final judgment is expected to be handed down later this September.

There is a video of him of this year where you can see him discussing his crimes in some detail. During the whole video he is smiling, talking about the murders as if it was the most normal thing to do. The only time he stopped smiling was when the interviewer informed him that his wife was now seeing another man.

one of the officers involved in finally catching Popkov and bringing him to trial. He closes the interview by saying the following, and I quote, I could not anticipate the examination of DNA. I was born in another century. Now there are such modern technologies, methods, but not earlier. If we have not got to that level of genetic examination, then...

i would not be sitting in front of you if i could go back in time and do anything differently all initially should have been changed straight from school since childhood

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Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. No problem, sweetie. I can't believe you were able to fit everything in that little sedan. Bye! Bye!

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And then we'll return once more to Victorian-era London and follow Jack further down his bloody path. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, and I couldn't have done it without my loyal listeners.

This podcast has been able to bring serial killer stories to life, especially thanks to those of you that support me via Patreon. You can do so at theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time. Amber, Anne, Charlotte, Kristina...

Jason, Lexi, Lisbeth, Maud, Mickey, Sarah, Tommy, Thomas, and Troy. Your monthly contributions really help keep this podcast thriving. You have my deepest gratitude. As always, thank you, dear listener, for listening.

And feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app, Facebook or website. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you. Good night and good luck.