On 21 July 1997, a young woman walked into a police station in provincial Russia and said there was a factory under an ordinary garage: captives sewing for sixteen hours a day, an electrified ladder, the word “slave” tattooed on a forehead, and four people who never came back up.

Alexander Lawson tells the case of Aleksandr Nikolayevich Komin — the “Slaveholder” of Vyatskiye Polyany — who, with accomplice Aleksandr Mikheyev, spent years digging a bunker nine metres beneath a garage cooperative and turned it into a private colony of forced labour, rape, and murder between 1995 and 1997.

This episode covers how the bunker was built, who was taken and who was killed, how the clothes made underground were sold in town, and how one woman walking aboveground ended the colony. Content warning: kidnapping, sexual violence, torture, and murder.

November 1998. A teenager lifts a sheet of iron on a dump outside Novosibirsk and finds a human head. Nearby, a headless body is stuffed into an old refrigerator. The victim is never identified.

Over seven years, nineteen women—most of them sex workers—are killed, dismembered, and scattered across the city. Hearts are cut out. Pentagrams are carved into skin. The man doing it is not a stranger in the dark. He is a policeman, a husband, a father. His colleagues call him Chupa-Chups. The city will call him the Novosibirsk Maniac.

Host Alexander Lawson tells how a killer in uniform evaded his own force for nearly twenty years—until DNA finally named him.

Listen now on A True Crime Podcast.

July 2015. Saint Petersburg CCTV catches a 68-year-old woman dragging heavy bags from her apartment. Inside one of them, police say, is a cooking pot—and a human head.

Hours earlier, Tamara Samsonova had laced her friend’s Olivier salad with fifty sleeping pills. Then she took a saw. They called her the Granny Ripper. Baba Yaga. In her kitchen sat a diary, written in Russian, English and German, calmly listing how she had cut tenants to pieces and scattered them across the city.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the hotel worker, the vanished husband, the two proven murders, and the notebook that suggested there were many more.

Listen now on A True Crime Podcast.

In a quiet Russian town, men began vanishing — alcoholics, the homeless, the forgotten. Then a soft-spoken 23-year-old was arrested for a petty theft… and police found his diary.

Inside it, Alexander Bychkov called himself a lone wolf and a predator. He detailed nine confirmed murders (and possibly more), the knives, the hammers, the dismemberment — and claimed he had eaten the hearts of his victims.

Host Alexander Lawson unpacks the chilling case of the Belinsky Cannibal: the girlfriend who called him a wimp, the “crimson hunt,” the wrongfully convicted man, and the life sentence that followed.

A true crime story of invisibility, obsession, and the notebook that finally stopped a killer.

A polite knock at the door. A doctor with a medical bag. A routine check-up that ends in murder.

Between 1997 and 2000 in St. Petersburg, emergency physician Maxim Petrov exploited the trust of elderly patients, injecting them with lethal drugs before robbing their homes. Nicknamed “Doctor Death,” he carried out dozens of calculated attacks that left at least eleven dead.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson examines how a practicing doctor turned the white coat into a weapon—and how police finally stopped him.

Christmas Eve 1995. A quiet Ukrainian village. An entire family is slaughtered and their house set ablaze. It was only the beginning.

Over the next three months, Anatoly Onoprienko — known as the Beast of Ukraine, the Terminator, and Citizen O — would kill more than forty people, wiping out whole families with a sawed-off shotgun, axes, and knives. Fifty-two victims in total. No remorse. Just cold indifference.

Host Alexander Lawson traces the rise of one of Europe’s deadliest serial killers, the massive manhunt that nearly failed, and the chilling confession that still haunts Ukraine.

Listen now on A True Crime Podcast.

In a quiet Nizhny Novgorod supermarket, a security guard spots two ordinary-looking shoppers… and realises he’s staring at Russia’s most wanted killers.

Inside the woman’s bag: a revolver, two axes, a stun gun and rope. Over nine months, Elvira Egorycheva and her partner Vladimir Guryanov murdered at least thirteen people. They called themselves Princess Elena and Prince Mikhail. They claimed God had ordered them to “cleanse the world of sinners.”

Host Alexander Lawson unravels the chilling true story of the mother of three who became one half of the so-called Russian Bonnie and Clyde — a religiously motivated rampage of rape, robbery and murder that left even hardened investigators shaken.

Listen now to a true crime podcast.

In the frozen streets of Nizhny Novgorod, a man and a woman answered newspaper ads for fortune-tellers, waited in dark courtyards, and carried two revolvers, three knives, and a stun gun. They believed God had chosen them to cleanse the world of sinners. Between December 2007 and September 2008, Vladimir Guryanov and Elvira Egorycheva murdered at least thirteen people. Eleven of the victims were women. Some were raped first. All, according to the killers, were destined to become Guryanov’s wives in the afterlife.

Known as the Bloody Sectarians and the Russian Bonnie and Clyde, the pair turned religious delusion into a nine-month killing spree. Host Alexander Lawson traces their path from petty thieves and self-proclaimed divine messengers to life in Russia’s most notorious prison.

A story of faith twisted into violence, and the thirteen lives that never came home.

In the forests outside Rostov-on-Don, the bodies kept appearing—children, teenagers, and young women, mutilated beyond recognition. For more than a decade the Soviet Union insisted a monster like this could not exist in their society. They were wrong.

This episode tells the story of Andrei Chikatilo, the man who became known as the Butcher of Rostov and the Red Ripper. Between 1978 and 1990 he murdered at least fifty-two people, exploiting the silence and denial of a closed system that refused to admit a serial killer was hunting near its railway stations.

Host Alexander Lawson traces the crimes, the catastrophic investigative failures, the false confessions, and the long road to Chikatilo’s capture and execution. A dark chapter of late Soviet history that still haunts Russia today.

Between 1988 and 1993, a giant stalked the forests and parks outside Moscow. Standing nearly 6’6” and weighing almost 300 pounds, Sergei Ryakhovsky — known as the Balashikha Ripper and the Hippopotamus — left at least 19 bodies in his wake. Elderly women walking home, men lured into the woods, teenagers who never returned. He strangled, stabbed, mutilated, and desecrated his victims.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson examines the five-year killing spree that terrorized the Moscow region during the collapse of the Soviet Union, the capture of one of Russia’s most disturbing serial killers, and the darkness he left behind.

Listener discretion is strongly advised.