Russia’s Investigative Committee said this week it had completed the criminal investigation against 51-year-old Alexey Gaskov, known as the “Novosibirsk maniac.” Investigators say it took two decades to prove his involvement in a series of murders of young women in Moscow and the surrounding region. The case is to be heard by the Moscow Regional Court, and he faces a possible life sentence.
Gaskov is from Berdsk. Tabloids reported that he had been interested in theater from an early age, entered the Novosibirsk Theater Institute after military service, and was later expelled for absenteeism and alcohol abuse. In the late 1990s he became close to Mikhail Yudin, who was later given a life sentence for the rape and murder of five women in Berdsk between 1999 and 2002.
In 2002, Gaskov moved to Moscow and enrolled at VGIK in Emmanuil Vitorgan’s acting course, but studied there for only six months before being expelled. After returning to Berdsk, he was detained on suspicion of killing a young woman. At that time he also claimed responsibility for other crimes and said he was the so-called “denim maniac,” but an investigative reenactment showed those confessions were false.
One of the operatives later said Gaskov “started showing his acting abilities” during questioning, but became confused during the reenactment and could not demonstrate the circumstances of the crime.
Biological evidence and other materials later confirmed that Yudin was the real “denim maniac.” In 2006, Gaskov was imprisoned again after investigators found that he had drugged and raped the 11-year-old daughter of a woman he was dating. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for that crime.
The investigation returned to him in 2024, when detectives came to suspect him in an unsolved series of killings from twenty years earlier. According to the Investigative Committee, between March and November 2002 he raped and murdered nine young women and also stabbed a man to death. Among the victims was 23-year-old Agnes Carolina Santisteban, a foreign student and niece of an adviser to Peru’s president. Her body was found near a dormitory in Khimki. Investigators say DNA testing confirmed Gaskov’s involvement. He also faces a separate charge of raping his stepdaughter and inducing her to drink alcohol in the Novosibirsk region from 2020 onward.