Serial Killer Irina Viktorovna Gaidamachuk
Krasno-Yufimsk is a city in the southwestern part of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. Located on the banks of Ufa River, 224 km from the state capital Yekaterinburg, the city has a population of approximately 37,500 as of 2021. The residents lived a peaceful and stable life until a murder in 2002 shattered the tranquility of the area.
One day in June 2002, the local police received a complaint from a resident. The complainant was a young woman. She was visiting her grandmother’s house as usual. But unexpectedly her grandmother was found murdered in that apartment. The police rushed to the crime scene.
Upon entering the crime scene, the house was found in disarray, with clothes in closets and drawers thrown to the floor. An elderly woman Soznik who was over 80 years old, was sitting dead on the side of the cupboard with her face bowed to the ground. Blood pooled under her body was starting to dry.
The murderer was extremely cruel. He must have fatally struck the victim on the head several times with a sharp instrument, as the victim’s skull was fractured. According to the complainant, her grandmother retired from all work many years ago and was living a leisurely life. No one has enmity against them. The old woman did not have much savings. Due to old age, there is little contact with the outside world. Because of this, the grandson cannot even guess who has done this to them.
Police collected several suspicious fingerprints from the scene. When compared to the fingerprint database, there was no match to any fingerprint in their database. When the police get stuck in this case, the next murder comes!
An elderly woman named Petrovna, who lives alone in the same area, was found dead at home. The cause of death was the same as the previous victim. A blow to the head from behind with a sharp object. But nothing seemed lost. So when victim’s family was cross-checked about this, they informed that maybe the deceased old lady kept her valuables secretly and so nothing valuable was lost.
Police found suspicious fingerprints at the scene. When compared with the fingerprints of the accused in the first murder case, it could be assumed that it was done by the same person.
But the police were just beginning to realize that this was just the beginning of a serial killer.
Three more murders occurred in the same area over the next few months. All the victims are women in their 70s and 80s. The killer’s modus operandi was similar to the previous two cases. The modus operandi was to brutally beat every victim with a sharp weapon. In all cases, the killer stole valuables from the home.
The police were puzzled as to why the killer had committed all these murders in broad daylight and what could have motivated him. Police began to sort out the similarities in these murders. The police realized that this would enable them to find similarities in the murderer’s crime and thus bring him to justice as soon as possible. Their conclusions were as follows.
First, all five of these murders took place in the former regional communities of Krasno-Yufimsk. The murderer entered the victim’s house through the front door. All the victims were elderly women living alone. All of these elderly victims generally have little knowledge of outside information other than interacting with relatives and neighbors. So what is the logic behind the murderer? Why does he choose such a person? Is the killing for money or some other reason? Maybe a serial killer who only hates old people?
Investigators initially speculated that the killer was a 30-year-old man. The killer was probably a local and familiar with the area. Unfortunately, the police searched in this way but they could not find any suspect.
The continuation of the killings scared the locals. That created all kinds of gossip about the case. And people spread their views on the case so that others could be theirs. Elderly people living alone started spending money to reinforce their doors and windows. Children have started taking elderly parents to live with them. Kattayam appealed to those who were not ready to open their doors to strangers. “The Texakiana Moonlight Murders”The situation here was similar to what happened there when the famous series of murders took place in America.
There was enormous pressure on the police. A case like this was unprecedented in this region. But despite all this, the murderer remained invisible. After some time no similar murders were reported. As the police took a deep breath, the killer resumed his attack in 2005.
This time the murderer chose an old woman named Morshayeva. But this time the killer got it slightly wrong. They screamed as the old woman was hit twice on the head with a hammer. Fortunately, they were wearing a thick leather hat and the blow was not fatal. The old woman’s screams startled the killer. He ran out the front door. The neighbors had heard the screams; They looked through the small cat’s eye of their door and saw the back of a woman. It was a woman!!
The police could not believe the statement of the neighbours. Murders like this are usually done by men. Therefore, the police thought that the person who had given the statement was wrong, or the murderer himself had disguised himself to elude the police.
But Morshayeva remained firm in her argument. They were sure that it was a beautiful woman in her 30s who hit her on the head. To make matters worse, she told the police that the killer had posted a notice outside her house identifying herself as a community service worker, and that it said she “must be home that day to check the gas”.
The police found the note and to top it all off, a few of the killer’s hairs were found in the old woman’s hand during the robbery, lending credence to her statement. With that, all preconceived notions of the police were shattered.
The people who heard the news were shocked and found it highly implausible that the killer disguised himself as a community worker to gain the victim’s trust. Whoever she was, people considered her extremely brave. With this the case reached a frenzy. Beautiful young woman, impersonation, murder – people started waiting for new updates day by day with a mixture of fear and wonder.
Soon the police drew up a sketch of the woman killer based on the testimonies. It was posted everywhere. According to the testimony, the murderer is a beautiful woman of about 30 years of age, 160-165 cm tall, medium build! All over the country, people started looking at the beauties. A situation where beautiful people can’t go out. Fear of people questioning.
Police formed a special task force. They also went in search of that young woman. Hundreds of homes and community service stations in the area were swept through. Even women from far away were summoned and their statements were taken. Some mentally ill women and their relatives were interrogated. But no trace of the killer was found.
People are very interested in gossip and they spread many stories. All of that did no good except that it led to misdirection in the investigation. The killer also knew all the stories. So she made her next attack elsewhere.
This time, an 80-year-old woman named Bratukhina was found dead in a house in Ufa, 200 kilometers from Krasno-Ufimsk. Police rushed to the crime scene and started investigation. The modus operandi was consistent with previous cases. On that day, police received a note from the scene stating that she was an employee of the District Office of Housing and Human Services. From there it was learned that no one had visited the house. Then this note was used by the killer to mislead the old woman. Apart from this, in order to taunt the police, she had put numbers in the house where the murder took place in the order in which she committed the murders. Police had found similar numbers on the walls of houses where previous murders had taken place. They fingerprinted the scene and questioned all employees of the local housing and human services office; Background information of all employees was checked one by one. They also interacted with tens of thousands of local residents. But to no avail – none of them could be seen to be related to the crime.
After this victory, she seemed to lose confidence. Because in the same pattern she committed several murders in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Tagil, pretending to be an employee of the Power Supply Bureau and the Gas Company. In some of these cases, to hinder the police’s collection of evidence, she left after the murder by turning on the iron on the table and placing it on top of the cloth, lighting a candle, turning on the gas, and rushing out. But fortunately there was no fire in both these cases. With each crime she seemed to spend more and more time resting at the scene. In one case, she stayed in the house after the murder, and to top it all off, she wrote Bob Dylan lyrics on a piece of paper in her handwriting. The police suspected that she might have done many of these things to mislead the case.
The victim of one of the cases was the mother of a police chief in Nizhny Tag. This infuriated the investigators. Almost all the police officers of the city were therefore involved in proving the case.
The investigation focused on a young woman named Larisa Mikhailova, who had previously lived in Kara Snow Yufimsk and, according to the witness statement, had a suspicious lookalike. But she was cleared after a handwriting and polygraph test. When the pressure was on, the police found another suspect.
It was Irina Valayeva (Irina Valayeva – 29), who was addicted to drugs in her youth, had no job, and hated old people. After several days of police interrogation, she confessed to all the crimes. Soon the news spread. The media rushed to report the news that the serial killer had been caught and brought to justice. But when everyone thought that the case was over, the unexpected happened!!
One case was reported to the police by a neighbor of 81-year-old Povarnicina, who lives alone in Ufa. She told the police that Poornitina used to go with her to buy vegetables every day, but she had not seen them for the past two days, there was no response to knocks on the door, and the cat in Poornitina’s house was always crying restlessly.
The neighbor’s Utkhanda was correct. Police broke down the door and found Poornitina face down in a bloody bathtub. The killer hit her on the back of the head with a heavy object. The dying victim was then dragged into the bathtub to drown.
With the murder of Poornitina, it was voluntarily established that the accused was not Valaeva. The interrogating police officers tortured her to make her confess. It was revealed that she was covered with a plastic bag over her head, severely beaten and threatened with food if she did not confess. She was subsequently released and charged with abuse of power; Several police officers were arrested and jailed for tampering with evidence.
“The She-Wolf of Krasno-Ufimsk” is the nickname given by the Russian people to the killer who killed 17 innocent people in a row in 8 years. She was like a ghost lurking in the dark, seemingly constantly stalking her prey. Shortly after Poornitina was killed, the neighbor who reported the case gave the police an important clue!
It was that Poornitina had met a painter from the nearby railway locomotive depot to paint the walls a few days earlier. The neighbor had seen this painter. She resembled the woman in the sketch released by the police. The researchers felt that point might be correct.
The police investigation led to that. As expected, in early June 2010, an in-depth investigation by the police at a nearby railway locomotive depot revealed a name. It was 38-year-old Irina Gaidamachuk.
Further investigation revealed a bloodied hammer. The notes and fingerprints were accurate. DNA analysis proved that the hair plucked out by the elderly survivor was hers in absentia. There is no doubt that she is the real murderer who committed 17 consecutive murders! She was arrested by the police on June 7, 2010.
Gaidamarchuk was born on September 26, 1972, in Karpinsk, Sverdlovsk region, into a working-class family. Soon she moved with her family to Nayagan, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region. It is also the birthplace of Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova.
In the early 1990s, while attending college, Gaidamarchuk met Peter Gaidamarchuk, who was 20 years her senior. They soon got married. She also adopted her husband’s surname. But soon after her marriage, she became addicted to alcohol and neglected her children. Although neither of them filed for divorce, he threw her out of the house. She had already been thrown out of her own home by her parents. It was also due to alcoholism. Gaidamchuk was addicted to vodka since she was a teenager.
In the late 1990s, she came to Krasno-Yufimsk alone. There she met the car driver Yuri Kuznetsov. Both had an affair and she gave birth to a baby girl. Still she suffered from alcoholism without change. Without a stable job, Kuznetsov wanted to control her drinking. So he strictly controlled her expenses. But for alcoholic Gaidamachuk, giving up alcohol was unthinkable. It was the greatest joy of her life. So she found other ways to earn money.
Gaidamarchuk had an unspeakable hatred for old people who had retired from work. Because she believed that these people were useless to society. Society has to provide pension for them unnecessarily. She believed this is a waste of social resources. She had heard that many old people had saved up a lot of money for their own things. So she decided to start with these elderly people living alone.
Her modus operandi was always almost the same. Studying the place first. After some time of observation, an old woman is selected who has no relatives or children and no one rushes to seek her. Then she starts talking to them on the pretense of being a representative of some office and gains their trust. Sometimes they enter the house with the basic need to use the toilet, or for drinking water. Regardless of the method of entry, first make sure that no one is inside the house. Then the situation to attack is looked at next. Weapons were sometimes chosen from the same house. But most of the time a hammer was carried in a hand bag. When the old woman is distracted, she will continuously attack from behind with her weapon. This continues until the victim dies. She was unable to control her urge to continue committing crimes, and in a sense, she seemed to enjoy the process.
After killing people, she would rummage through boxes and cupboards to find money. After the first few crimes she stopped taking the victim’s valuables except money. Because she learned that selling them is not so easy and the police will catch up with her if they find the husks. The door was locked from the outside when she left to prevent the discovery of the crime.
After the murder, she will drink enough for the money she got. She was double-faced and tried her best to maintain a good image in front of her boyfriend, daughter and neighbors. No one suspected her as she sent her daughter to school and helped her with her homework like any other mother. So when she was arrested, the neighbors were hesitant to believe her.
Although Gaidamchuk did not fit all the stereotypes of a serial killer, she was brave and highly intelligent. A neighbor once saw a portrait of the suspect released by police and joked that she bore a striking resemblance to the suspect. She just smiled, showing no fear or embarrassment. Another time she had just killed someone inside the room when a police officer on patrol knocked on the victim’s door. She saw the police through the cat’s eye on the door but didn’t make a sound. She stood motionless inside. When the policeman left, she escaped from there as the door could not be broken down without a warrant or without a complaint.
The Yekaterinburg City Court heard the case on February 13, 2012. Gaidamarchuk was charged with 17 murders, 1 attempted murder, and 18 counts of robbery. There were 443 chapters in the case file alone.
She asked the court that all the media should leave the courtroom. She also said that she killed because she had no money to buy vodka. After a professional psychiatric evaluation, Gaidamarchuk was diagnosed with personality disorders but no mental illness.
On June 4, 2012, the Sverdlovsk District Court found that the facts of Gaydamachuk’s crime were clear and sentenced her to 25 years in prison. She was given a 5-year reprieve because she had a daughter, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
