The Velsk Chikatilo: Russian Serial Killer

By Ivar Kelly

The Velsk Chikatilo: Russian Serial Killer

In 1999, a man serving a prison sentence for multiple rapes was handed the keys to a municipal sewage truck and sent, unsupervised, into the town of Velsk in Russia's Arkhangelsk Oblast. Within months, ten women were dead. Sergey Aleksandrovich Shipilov, the "Velsk Chikatilo", had already murdered four women in 1996 before his arrest. The investigation had missed the pattern. The trial had charged only the rapes. The penal system had classified him as a manageable offender and placed him, through the beskonvoyny work-release programme, directly into a new hunting ground.

This is the story of fifteen murders across four years, told in full for the first time in English. It is the story of a childhood shattered by maternal loss, of a psychology that developed behind the perfect mask of the reliable professional and devoted family man, and of a post-Soviet institutional landscape so overwhelmed by crisis that it handed a serial killer the tools of a second campaign and called it rehabilitation.

Drawing on the established forensic psychology of sexual serial homicide and the documented record of one of Russia's most consequential cases of penal failure, this book is both a biography of a predator and an anatomy of the state negligence that made him far more deadly than he needed to be.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVW691S4
• ISBN13: 9798233380075
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Silverback Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"