Unraveling the Chilling Case of Grigory Goryushkin

On a cold March morning in 1912, a police constable in Moscow entered a tenement flat after complaints about a foul stench. Lying in the center of the main room was the body of a young boy, his coat buttoned but shoes missing, his skin pale and cold as marble. On the wall above him, written in what appeared to be burnt match heads, were four Cyrillic letters, spelling out a word whose meaning would haunt the city for months: “KROV” — “blood.”

The child’s name was Pavel Aleksandrov, age nine, the youngest son of a railway laborer. That discovery was only the first crack in a case that would reveal the most prolific child serial killer in early 20th-century Russia, Mikhail Ivanovich Popkov, later dubbed “The Monster of Moscow” by contemporary newspapers. What followed was a methodical, horrifying series of murders, an investigation hampered by bureaucracy, and a city paralyzed by fear.

Mikhail Ivanovich Popkov was born in the outskirts of Moscow in 1888. His father worked as a porter at the Kursky Railway Station, and his mother was a housemaid for a wealthy merchant family in the city center. The Popkov family, like many others living in the cramped alleys of Zamoskvorechye, struggled to make ends meet. Mikhail was the oldest of five siblings, tasked with caring for his younger brothers and sisters while his parents worked long hours.

Neighbors described Mikhail as a quiet, watchful child who rarely played with others. By age fifteen, he had left school and taken up work delivering firewood, a job that left him wandering Moscow’s neighborhoods after dark. In his teens, several children from the area disappeared, but police attributed it to runaways or the dangers of urban poverty. No pattern was recognized, and no suspicions were raised about Mikhail, who was already known for his withdrawn manner and lack of close friends.

The tipping point for Mikhail seemed to come in 1910, when his mother died of tuberculosis. Left with a father who drank to cope with grief, Mikhail became even more isolated. That year, he worked briefly as a night watchman at a coal yard, a job that gave him access to secluded corners of the city and the freedom to roam after midnight. By 1911, his father had fallen ill, and Mikhail moved into a boarding house near the central railway station, sharing sparse rooms with other single men.

Between November 1911 and March 1912, local police records indicate at least thirteen children under the age of twelve vanished within a five-kilometer radius of the Kursky Station. At first, these cases were treated as unrelated disappearances. The city, still reeling from the aftershocks of the 1905 revolution and increasing unrest, offered little social support to the families. The disappearances clustered in districts where poor families lived in tenements, sometimes with as many as six to a room.

The pattern in the disappearances became clear only after the discovery of Pavel Aleksandrov’s body. Over the following weeks, three more bodies were found in alleyways and derelict buildings. All were boys between the ages of seven and twelve. Each had been killed by strangulation, with signs of blunt force trauma to the head. In every case, the shoes were missing, and in two cases, Cyrillic letters had been scrawled on the wall nearby using burnt match heads.

The police investigation was led by Inspector Dmitri Yegorov, a veteran of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. Yegorov’s initial strategy focused on local vagrants and known criminals. He ordered a sweep of boarding houses and hostels within a two-mile radius of the railway station. At the same time, he assigned plainclothes officers to monitor alleyways after dark and interview parents of the missing children.

Yegorov quickly realized the killer was someone familiar with the area and its rhythms—someone who blended in among the workers and the poor. The fact that the killer left behind no murder weapon, no fingerprints, and no eyewitnesses despite operating in a dense urban environment spoke to a calculated, methodical approach. The use of burnt match heads to write messages at the scenes suggested a killer who was both literate and interested in taunting the authorities.

The investigation’s turning point came on March 18, 1912, when a railway porter named Sergei Markov reported seeing a man leading a barefoot boy through the covered passage behind the rail yard. Markov described the man as medium height, with a sallow complexion and a distinctive limp. The boy, according to Markov, was visibly frightened, but the man kept a firm grip on his arm. Markov assumed the man was the boy’s father and thought nothing further of it until news spread about the murders.

Yegorov followed up on Markov’s report by canvassing the hostels near the rail yard. At the third hostel, he learned of a resident matching the porter’s description: Mikhail Ivanovich Popkov, who had a noticeable limp due to a childhood injury. When questioned, Popkov claimed to have been working late shifts and denied any knowledge of the murders. However, his alibi for the night of Pavel Aleksandrov’s murder was shaky, and he could not produce any reliable witness to confirm his whereabouts.

On March 20, 1912, police searched Popkov’s room. Inside a locked trunk, they found a collection of children’s shoes—at least nine pairs, all different sizes—and scraps of fabric stained with what appeared to be dried blood. Among the shoes was a pair identified by Pavel Aleksandrov’s father as belonging to his son. Police also found burnt matchsticks collected in a tin box and a notebook containing lists of dates and names, some of which corresponded to the dates of reported disappearances.

At headquarters, Popkov was interrogated for seven hours. Faced with the evidence, he confessed to the murders of nine children. He told Yegorov, “I wanted to see if anyone would come looking for them. No one ever did, not until it was too late.” When asked about the missing shoes, Popkov replied that he kept them as trophies, a way to remember each victim. His notebook, he said, was “a record of those who no one else cared about.”

The investigation uncovered that Popkov used his position as a night worker to approach children who were out after dark—often the children of laborers who worked late and left their children unsupervised. He would offer them sweets or promise to show them dogs or kittens he claimed to keep in the yard. Once he had lured them into an alley or abandoned building, he would strike them on the head and strangle them. In at least four cases, he took time to scrawl messages on the wall, sometimes just the word “blood,” other times fragments of sentences, such as “No one hears” or “Sleep now.”

Popkov’s arrest did not immediately end the public panic. Newspapers published detailed descriptions of the murders, spreading rumors that there were more victims than police admitted. Some articles speculated about connections to occult groups or political conspiracies, given the charged atmosphere in pre-revolutionary Moscow. The city’s chief of police ordered strict limits on night travel for children, and for weeks, the streets emptied at dusk.

During his trial in July 1912, Popkov appeared calm and unrepentant. He wore a threadbare suit and maintained the same flat, affectless tone when questioned by prosecutors. Testimony from families of the victims filled the small Moscow courtroom for days. Several parents wept openly as the evidence was presented: the shoes, the notebook, the chilling accounts of how Popkov lured the children.

The medical examiner testified that the injuries on the children showed a consistent pattern, suggesting the killer attacked swiftly and used objects found at the scene—a rock or a piece of wood—for the initial blow. Strangulation, the examiner said, was almost always the cause of death. There was no evidence of sexual assault, which set Popkov’s crimes apart from many other cases involving child victims.

Popkov’s own statements during the trial revealed little about his motive. When asked why he targeted children, he replied, “Because they were there, and no one watched them.” When pressed further, he said only, “I liked the quiet after.” The prosecution argued that Popkov’s methods and lack of remorse demonstrated an unusual degree of calculation and detachment.

The jury found Popkov guilty of nine counts of murder and four counts of attempted abduction. The judge sentenced him to death by hanging, a sentence carried out in October 1912 in Moscow’s Butyrka Prison. The execution was attended by a small group of officials and press representatives, who reported that Popkov showed no emotion as the sentence was read or during his march to the gallows.

In the aftermath of the case, Moscow’s authorities implemented several changes to city policing. Patrols in working-class neighborhoods were increased, and a new registration system was established for boarding houses and hostels. The case also led to the creation of a missing persons bureau within the Moscow police force, tasked with tracking and investigating disappearances more systematically.

The Popkov case exposed deep flaws in the city’s response to crimes affecting the poor. The children targeted by Popkov came from families with little power or visibility, and their disappearances were often dismissed as acts of neglect or vagrancy. Only the discovery of several bodies and the killer’s taunting messages forced authorities to recognize the pattern and act decisively.

The press coverage of the case reflected the anxieties of a city undergoing rapid change. Reporters described Popkov as a symbol of the dangers lurking in Moscow’s shadows—an embodiment of the alienation and violence brewing under the surface of urban life. Editorials in major newspapers called for greater investment in child welfare and public safety, though these calls often went unheeded as the country slid closer to revolution.

Popkov’s crimes also revealed the challenges faced by investigators working with limited forensic tools. The police relied primarily on witness testimony and circumstantial evidence—most notably the shoes and the notebook found in Popkov’s room. No fingerprint identification was available, and photographic records were sporadic. The investigation’s success hinged on the meticulous canvassing of hostels and the sharp memory of a single railway porter.

The trial transcripts show that Popkov presented an unusual psychological profile. He expressed no remorse and appeared to lack empathy, even when confronted with grieving parents. The court-appointed psychiatrist described him as “incapable of emotional connection” and noted that Popkov’s crimes appeared motivated not by sexual desire or financial gain, but by a need to exert control and create fear.

The notoriety of the case led to a surge in public fascination with criminal psychology in Russia. Booklets detailing Popkov’s crimes sold briskly at Moscow newsstands, and popular lectures on criminology referenced the case as an example of modern urban pathology.

In the years after Popkov’s execution, rumors persisted that he had confessed to more murders than officially recorded. Some suggested the true victim count was as high as eighteen, given the number of missing children in police files from 1911–1912. Researchers later noted that several disappearances from that period bore a striking resemblance to Popkov’s known crimes: missing footwear, injuries to the head, and abandoned bodies in derelict buildings.

One particularly grim artifact from the case remains preserved in Moscow’s police archives: the notebook taken from Popkov’s trunk. Inside, in a tight, careful script, are dates, initials, and cryptic remarks such as “Silent at last” and “Only one watched.” The last entry, dated just three days before his arrest, reads, “Night falls, and the city is blind.”

Police records indicate that, after Popkov’s arrest and execution, the wave of child disappearances in Moscow’s central districts ceased. The missing persons bureau established in the wake of the case became a model for other Russian cities in the following decade.

Yegorov, the inspector who led the investigation, retired from the force in 1917, citing exhaustion from the Popkov case as a major factor in his decision. He later wrote that “the city’s poorest paid the highest price,” and that the failures of the system enabled Popkov to operate for as long as he did without detection.

The Popkov case remains one of the earliest documented examples of serial child murder in Russia. Its legacy is visible in the changes to policing, social welfare, and urban security that followed. The fact that Popkov’s crimes went undetected for months, and only came to light through a chance discovery and the vigilance of a single witness, underscored the vulnerability of society’s most marginal members.

The shoes taken from Popkov’s trunk were eventually returned to the victims’ families, except for one pair, which could not be identified. This pair remains in the Moscow police evidence room, a mute reminder of a child who was never claimed or named.