 
 
 (Photo courtesy Siberian Times) 
 
 Former Siberian policeman Mikhail Popkov, who is already serving a life sentence for the murders of 22 women, has confessed to killing 59 more, police told the Siberian Times. The true total of women victims - believed to be aged 17 to 38 - is far higher than previously reported. The sensational new findings follow intensive detective work over two years since father-of-one Popkov - who was married when he committed his offences and is nicknamed 'The Werewolf' - was convicted in January 2015 of an initial 22 murders of mostly young women. “That means, if we add them to the earlier 22, it will be 81 murders in total.” Of the 59 cases, 47 have produced charges. But as police investigated, and as he began talking, the number rose to the 22 for which he was convicted and sentenced in January 2015. Further analysis of the evidence is underway and 'in the nearest future we can bring charges in these 12 cases' which Popkov has already admitted. If authorities ultimately confirm 81 as the number of Popkov’s victims, that would make him one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, behind Colombia’s Luis Garavito, a child-killer nicknamed “The Beast” who claimed at least 138 lives in the 1990s, and Pedro López (“The Monster of the Andes”) with 110 proven victims in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru between 1969 and 1980. One theory is that he is deliberately rationing his confessions to delay the moment when he is sent from his current detention prison to a harsh penal colony to serve his life sentence. When he was first detained in 2012, the Siberian Times said, he told police his goal was to “cleanse” the streets of prostitutes. Pictures: The Siberian Times 
 
 He often offered victims nighttime lifts in his police car before taking them to remote locations where he raped and killed them, leaving their naked bodies in woods on roadsides. After laborious probes, police have found body after body in the places where Popkov told them they were hidden. Yet a painstaking search has not found evidence of crimes in other regions - so far.
– An ex-cop already serving life for 22 murders has been charged with 47 more killings and another 12 are under investigation, which would make Mikhail Popkov the worst serial killer in Russian history and the third-worst in world history. Law enforcement sources tell the Siberian Times that Popkov, who targeted women he thought were immoral because they were out late at night, has been providing investigators with information including the locations of bodies. He claims to have started his killing spree, which stretched across a large area of Siberia, after he began suspecting that his wife had cheated on him. Popkov, who resigned from the force in Angarsk in 1998, per the Washington Post, was arrested in 2012 after investigators got a tip-off and checked the DNA of thousands of current and former police officers, the Times of London reports. Police sources say he has claimed to have killed at least 81 women with axes, knives, and screwdrivers, a total that exceeds the 52 killed by "Butcher of Rostov" Andrei Chikatilo between 1978 and 1990 and the 48 murdered by "Chessboard Killer" Alexander Pichushkin between 1992 and 2006. (Here's why he was called the "Chessboard Killer.")