Sergey Yarovoy

Sergey Yarovoy was born in 1963, with different sources giving his birthplace either as Kaskelen or Balkhash. He was raised in a seemingly normal family, and after finishing the 8th grade, he moved to Almaty in the late 1970s and enrolled into medical school. In 1981, he was drafted into the Soviet Army, and after demobilization, he resumed his studies and graduated with the certification of a paramedic. Soon after this, Yarovoy started working at a hospital in Almaty, where he was regarded positively by co-workers and his direct supervisors alike. He also married to a woman named Elena and had two children with her sometime in the mid-1980s. By the end of the decade, however, Yarovoy's personality underwent a drastic shift and he developed an addiction to collecting and watching pornographic content. According to his wife's testimony, in 1989, he developed various sexual perversions and demanded that she engage in unconventional types of sex with him – his wife refused, subsequently divorced him and took the children with her. ==Murders==

Initial crimes Following the divorce, Yarovoy resigned from his workplace and started living on the streets. In 1990, he was found guilty of raping a woman in Boralday, for which he was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. Yarovoy was quickly arrested, tried and convicted for this, receiving a 15-year sentence. He was then transferred to serve it in a penal colony near Ust-Kamenogorsk, in East Kazakhstan. Serial murders Between August 2006 and 2008, Yarovoy committed a series of at least 9 rapes and 6 murders against children and women in Ust-Kamenogorsk and Opytnoye Pole. His modus operandi consisted of attacking victims in deserted areas such as vacant lots or near railroad tracks, sneaking up on them and hitting them on the back of the head with a blunt object such as a steel pipe. If the victim was knocked out successfully, he would then rape and sometimes beat them to death. He had no definitive victim type, as he killed both children, teenagers and women with age ranges from 8 to 50, with differing physical features and ethnicities. According to Yarovoy, they only thing that mattered was if there were no possible witnesses to an attack. A few months later, he came across a woman late at night who was in a hurry to catch a train on the "Zashchita" railway station. Yarovoy caught up with her and threw her to the ground, but the victim fiercely resisted him, causing them both to roll down an embankment. Once they reached the bottom, Yarovoy managed to put his hand over her mouth, get on top of her and hit her with a rock. He then raped the woman and subsequently killed her before fleeing the area. In the summer of 2008, Yarovoy killed a 16-year-old teenage girl and a 30-year-old woman near Opytnoye Pole, both of which occurred within a short time frame of one another. ==Arrest and confessions==

On 24 July 2009, Yarovoy was arrested on Seyfullina Street in Almaty while attempting to attack another girl. In subsequent interrogations, Yarovoy stated that he only killed victims who resisted his rapes, leaving the compliant ones alive. He was additionally questioned about a similar rape-murder that occurred over the border in Novosibirsk, as a watchman of a local cooperative described seeing a man believed to be the killer that greatly resembled Sergey Yarovoy. While he never admitted involvement and was never charged in this case, Yarovoy claimed that he was indeed in the city at the time the crime was committed to do missionary work. ==Trial, sentence and imprisonment==

Despite pointing out the crime scenes and recalling almost every detail about each murder, Yarovoy suddenly recanted his confession in the fall of 2009 and began to feign insanity. At his lawyer's request, he was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. While he was initially ruled sane, he was soon after interned at a mental institution after experiences symptoms of psychosis. Supposedly, the real killer was an Asian man wearing a medical mask and a black cap that was the true culprit, with Yarovoy claiming that the police falsely charged him and put him in prison, where he was beaten and raped by other inmates. His claims were disregarded due to the amount of exhaustive evidence that indicated his guilt. As a result, on 4 April 2011, Sergey Yarovoy was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was then transferred to serve out his sentence at the Black Berkut Prison in Jitiqara, where he remains to this day. ==See also==