At Least Six Victims: Saratov Region Maniac Case Goes to Court

The Orenburg Region Investigative Committee has sent the case materials of 59-year-old Sergey Karpuk, a resident of the Saratov Region, to court — he faces life imprisonment. Law enforcement believes he is a serial killer, responsible for at least six women«s deaths in the Orenburg Region near Buguruslan. We tell the details.

Did a Maniac Emerge in Buguruslan?

On 14 August 2008, in the Buguruslan District, in a forest belt near the Buguruslan — Starokutlumbetievo highway, shocked local residents found two female corpses at once. They were lying 30 meters apart. The deceased residents of the district center and district were 30 and 41 years old, and the nature of death clearly indicated that they were murdered. Moreover, biological material was found on the clothing of one of the victims, but at that time, it did not help the investigators.

A year earlier, another 28-year-old resident of the Buguruslan District went missing (still at large), and two months after the women«s bodies were discovered, another 31-year-old man from Buguruslan vanished without a trace, leading locals and law enforcement to think a maniac might be operating in the region.

Even to this day, according to police databases, more than a dozen men and women went missing specifically in the Buguruslan District at that time. Bulletin boards, store walls, and poles in those years were plastered with the names of village women who had disappeared into thin air — Olga Danilova, Galina Ignatieva, Diana Galieva, Marina Vaskina, Albina Galimova, Elvira Gabdrakhmanova — all these women were missing. And all were last seen near the road — they needed to go somewhere.

At one point, even a version was considered that the women might have been killed by the infamous serial killer Valery Andreev, but after all, the modus operandi of the Orsk maniac was different. And the district wasn«t his.

For a long time, law enforcement put forward various versions of who could have killed the women: they selected and checked over 2,000 biological samples, conducted genetic examinations, interrogated more than 200 people, but failed to track down the killer. They mainly focused on residents of Buguruslan and the Buguruslan District, but as it turned out, the criminal was no longer in the Orenburg Region.

He Drove a Taxi, Raped, and Killed

Only 17 years later, investigators and criminologists from the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of Internal Affairs found a match between the genotype extracted from the victims« clothing and the analyses of 59-year-old Sergey Karpuk — a resident of the Saratov Region, who previously lived right in Buguruslan. The detention came as a complete surprise to the man — in the summer of 2025, he was literally taken from the handlebars of a scooter right near his home.

The suspect was taken to Buguruslan, where, under the weight of evidence, he fully confessed to everything. The man said he committed the first murder in June 2008, when he was 42 years old. He was driving his car when he noticed a woman «hitching» and offered her a ride.

The trusting village woman got into the car, but the ride became her last: the man took her to a forest belt, brutally raped her, and beat her to death with a hammer. Sensing impunity, Karpuk committed a second murder two months later under absolutely the same circumstances.

The investigation charged him with the murder of two or more persons coupled with rape. The Buguruslan District Court placed the man in custody. Realizing that he faced long-term imprisonment, up to life, Karpuk started talking.

And he confessed to four more murders of women, which he committed under absolutely similar circumstances, and he began doing this as early as 2005. The maniac buried three more corpses in a forest belt, and dumped the fourth in the Mochegay River.

And that«s not all: one of the maniac»s victims managed to survive: he raped her, but then she somehow misled him and was able to escape. But she didn«t go to the authorities, fearing that Karpuk would still track her down.

Now the criminal case with the indictment has been sent to court. The charge now reads — murder of six persons coupled with rape (points «a» and «k» of part 2 of Article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code).

As we already said, with a high degree of probability, Sergey Karpuk will go to a colony for the rest of his days.