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The Almaty Jane Does were three women who were murdered and eaten by a gang of serial cannibals based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Due to the modus operandi, it is believed that the three women were sex workers.
In 2003, Sergei Kopai, Evgeny Turochkin, and Mikhail Vershinin were tried and convicted of their murders, alongside the murders of four other women who were identified. A fourth accomplice, Roman Ledyaev, was also convicted but was given a lesser sentence due to his lack of participation in the killings.
Case[]
Starting from 30 April 1998 to their detainment in late 1999, a gang comprised of Sergei Kopai, Evgeny Turochkin, and Mikhail Vershinin murdered seven sex workers in the Almaty area, specifically from Seifullin Avenue. Various body parts would be found in garbage bins on the avenue they frequented, manholes, garbage bins on different streets, Lake Sayran, and the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. The men employed a system in which they would pick up a sex worker, heavily drug her, rape her, and then kill and dismember her before using her remains to make foods such as pelmeni that they ate. At least four of the victims were able to be identified out of the seven confirmed dead, with an eighth victim managing to escape and aid in the arrest of the trio. At least one of the identified victims was an acquaintance who was killed accidentally.
Due to Kopai's past as a police patrolman and his then career as an orderly in a psychiatric clinic, past incidents that almost resulted in his arrest were initially disregarded by police until the eighth victim escaped the trio. Additionally, a fourth man named Roman Ledyaev was aware of the murders but refrained from informing police due to his crime of assaulting a guard during a robbery. Nonetheless, all four men were detained in late 1999 after the escape of the eighth victim. Kopai, Turochkin, and Vershinin were initially sentenced to death in 2003, but their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Kopai was moved to a psychiatric facility where he served his sentence until his death from an illness in 2008. Ledyaev is known to have received a more minor sentence than the trio, though its details are not publicly known.
Three of the seven deceased victims remain unidentified.
Characteristics[]
- Due to the modus operandi of the cannibalistic trio, the women may have had blonde hair and green eyes.