“Today I will kill a huge amount of bio-waste and shoot myself.”

At 8:57 a.m. on May 11, 2021, 19-year-old Ilnaz Rinatovich Galyaviev posted those words on Telegram. Eight minutes later he walked into Gymnasium No. 175 in Kazan — the school he once attended — with a legally purchased shotgun and a homemade bomb. Nine people were killed: two teachers and seven eighth-graders. He surrendered with his hands up.

Host Alexander Lawson traces how a withdrawn former student obtained a gun license, built explosives in his apartment, declared himself God online, and carried out one of Russia’s deadliest school attacks. The episode follows the eight-minute assault, the contested psychiatric findings, the 2023 life sentence, and Galyaviev’s 2026 marriage inside Black Dolphin prison.

A True Crime Podcast. Listener discretion advised.

A late-night ride in St. Petersburg. A polite driver who never haggles. One condition: stop for coffee. Minutes later, the passenger is unconscious. Seven never woke up.

From 2005 to 2008, Aharon Garushovich Galstyan worked the streets of Russia’s second city as an unofficial taxi driver. He targeted people who’d been drinking, offered them a drink, and laced it with a powerful sedative. Then he robbed them, dumped them on the roadside or near water, and drove away.

For years the deaths looked like overdoses and accidents. Then a single phone call and a gas-station camera changed everything.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the man Russian media called the Taxi Driver Poisoner — how he operated, how he was caught, and why he never admitted a thing.

A True Crime Podcast.

In the lawless years between the Chechen wars, families in a small village vanished overnight. Homes were entered. Occupants were never seen again. The victims were almost always ethnic Russians.

This episode of A True Crime Podcast, hosted by Alexander Lawson, examines the 1997–1999 crime spree led by Ramses Lobazanovich Gaichayev and his gang. Prosecutors tried to charge him with genocide — the first such attempt in modern Russian court history. The court rejected that count. Gaichayev’s reported response: he had done nothing wrong. He had simply killed Russians.

He received a death sentence that was commuted to life. He remains in Black Dolphin Prison.

Listener discretion advised.

October 2000. Chelyabinsk police arrest identical twins Farit and Timur Gabidullin for the rape and murder of a young woman on the railway tracks. Then the brothers start talking. They claim thirty killings. Then more. They say their first victim was their own mother. They point investigators to a cemetery pit — and officers dig up more than a hundred skulls.

Only a fraction of those claims ever stood up in court. Farit was convicted of ten murders and sent to Black Dolphin for life. Timur was convicted of four and died by suicide after sentencing. Media reports once put the body count at 173. The proven number is fourteen.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of two brothers from a broken home in the Urals: how they hunted stations and a cemetery, what they admitted, what prosecutors could actually prove, and why the gap between confession and evidence still defines this case.

Contains descriptions of murder, sexual violence, and violence against a child. Listener discretion advised.

By day he was a firefighter with Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations — the man who rushed into burning buildings to save lives. He had a wife, two children, and what neighbors called a kind face. By night, Alexey Sergeevich Falkin hunted women across Yekaterinburg and Verkhnyaya Pyshma.

For thirteen years, from 2004 to 2017, he lived a double life that ended only when a young mother named Irina Vakhrusheva never arrived at her friend’s apartment. What investigators uncovered connected him to three murders, multiple sexual assaults — including attacks on minors — and a trail of victims who had been silenced by fear.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson tells the full story of the man known as the EMERCOM Maniac and the Ural Chikatilo: how a respected rescuer became one of the Urals’ most feared predators, how a short prison sentence failed to stop him, and how one April night in 2017 finally brought him down.

He will never be released.

In Moscow between 2005 and 2007, six people got into an old green Zhiguli and never got out alive. The driver looked like a family man. Neighbors said he was kind. Under the seat he kept a sawn-off shotgun.

Alexander Ivanovich Elistratov worked as an unlicensed cabbie, hunting at night in the city’s eastern districts. He robbed passengers who looked like they had money. Those who resisted were shot and dumped by the roadside. The take was often a few hundred rubles.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Bloody Taxi Driver — the rides that ended in murder, the near-misses that should have stopped him, the arrest after a dying man flagged down police, and the life sentence that ended in the Arctic prison known as Polar Owl.

A True Crime Podcast.

In November 1998, a teenager gathering firewood on the outskirts of Novosibirsk lifted a sheet of metal and found a severed head. Nearby, a woman’s mutilated torso lay inside an abandoned refrigerator. She was never identified.

Over the next seven years, body parts kept appearing across the city—heads in hoods, limbs on dumps, pentagrams carved into skin. Nineteen women, most of them sex workers. At least twelve still unnamed.

The man responsible was a decorated police officer, a husband, and a father of two. Neighbors called him kind.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Yevgeny Alexandrovich Chuplinsky—the Novosibirsk Maniac who hunted along the “Drunken Road,” evaded justice for nearly two decades, and was only stopped when DNA finally caught up with him.

This is A True Crime Podcast.

In a quiet Russian village, a man set a house on fire… then sat down next to his sleeping friend and watched him die.

German Lyubomirovich Christan first killed as a teenager. After prison, he returned to the Leningrad region and began a new series of murders — stabbing, beating, and burning people alive, sometimes staying to watch the flames. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the so-called pyromaniac killer: the elderly woman who took him in, the neighbor who knew too much, the family killed over a few hundred rubles, and the night firefighters found him standing in a burning doorway “to get a better look.”

A True Crime Podcast. Listener discretion advised.

In a quiet Russian town of just 8,000 people, men began vanishing without a trace. Alcoholics. The homeless. A pensioner collecting paperwork. One after another they disappeared… until a 23-year-old was arrested for stealing knives from a hardware store.

Inside his house police found a notebook titled “The Bloody Hunt of a Predator Born in the Year of the Dragon.” The author called himself Rambo. He called himself a lone wolf. And he wrote that after his girlfriend told him he was a wimp, he decided to prove her wrong.

Alexander Vladimirovich Bychkov confessed to murdering nine men between 2009 and 2012. He claimed he cooked and ate their hearts. An innocent man had already been locked away for some of the killings.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the full story of the Belinsky Cannibal — the diary, the dismembered remains buried behind the house, the wrongful conviction, and the life sentence that followed.

This is A True Crime Podcast.

He was a soft-spoken construction worker, a husband, and a father of four. Neighbors trusted him. His family loved him. By night, Pavel Vladimirovich Bondarenko — the Sevastopol Maniac — stalked the quiet streets of Crimea, raping and strangling women for nearly a decade.

Host Alexander Lawson uncovers the double life of a killer who hid in plain sight from 2007 to 2015, the botched early investigations, the DNA breakthrough that finally stopped him, and the chilling truth behind the first life sentence ever handed down in Russian-controlled Sevastopol.