Shavkat Shayakhmedov

Shavkat Galievich Shayakhmedov (Шавкат Галиевич Шаяхмедов; 1960 – May 23, 2023), known as The Zalegoshchensky Maniac (Russian: Залегощенский маньяк), was an Uzbekistani-Russian serial killer and rapist who committed at least five murders in Tajikistan and Russia from 1994 to 2021, four of which were children.

Convicted for his four known murders in the latter country, he was given a life term and died behind bars in 2023.

Little is known about Shayakhmedov's early life, aside from the fact that he was born in 1960 and hails from Uygur, a village in the Uzbek SSR's Andijan Region.

He would later claim that he was sexually abused by one of his relatives, but this was never corroborated.

After graduating from a vocational school, Shayakhmedov was drafted into the Soviet Army in the early 1980s.

Upon completing his service in the mid-1980s, he moved to Istiqlol in the Tajik SSR, where he soon married a local woman who would give birth to twins - a son named Roman and a daughter named Ruzilya - on September 29, 1988.

Shayakhmedov would claim later on that he had to move away from his native village after ethnic Uzbeks demanded that he learn their language or be forced out.

In the mid-1990s, Shayakhmedov and his family left Tajikistan and headed for Russia, where he found accommodation in Kazar, Oryol Oblast.

Soon afterwards, he found a job as a mechanic for local enterprises, due to which he gained a reputation as a hard worker.

Since the work was difficult but well paid, Shayakhmedov eventually gathered enough money to buy his own house in the village sometime in the mid-2000s.

In contrast to his financial success, Shayakhmedov's reputation as a person was met with mixed feelings from locals.

On one hand, he was noted for never having a criminal record, but on the other, he was known to frequently drink alcohol and smoke weed, which eventually led to his own children developing the same addiction as him.

The first murder that has been conclusively linked to Shayakhmedov that was committed in Russia occurred in April 2000, when he raped and strangled a 6-year-old boy in Zalegoshch.

After killing him, he dumped the boy's body in a nearby ravine.

In September 2003, Shayakhmedov went out fishing and came across a 32-year-old woman who was visiting acquaintances in Kazar.

Taking advantage of the fact that she was asleep and drunk, he attacked and subsequently raped her.

Fearing that she would somehow remember his face if left alive, he then strangled her and dumped the body on the outskirts of the village near a railroad bridge, where it was discovered a few days later.

On July 27, 2005, 11-year-old Konstantin Bolotov left his grandmother's house in Kazar to go for a bike ride, but failed to return home.

A few days later, his bike was found by a local residet named Anatoly Abashin, who for some time was considered the prime suspect in the boy's disappearance, but no charges were ever brought against him.

Aside from Abashin, several other suspects were considered, including some workers from the Rostov Oblast who working on a road surface in the area.

Local police theorized that Bolotov was killed on accident and then the workers rolled his corpse in asphalt, but no evidence corroborated this theory.

On the day Bolotov disappeared, Shayakhmedov - his neighbor - invited the young boy to help pick mushrooms.

After luring Bolotov to a forest outside the village of Orekhovka, Shayakhmedov proceeded to attack and rape him, ultimately strangling the boy to death after he threatened to tell his grandmother.

In order to hide the body, he dug up a shallow grave and buried it there.

It was found only after Shayakhmedov's arrest, and only after the investigation unit had to dig up almost 3 hectares, that his skeletonized remains and decaying clothing were located.

On June 18, 2021, Shayakhmedov committed his last murder, with the victim being another neighbor - 9-year-old Viktoria Gnedova.

On the day of the murder, she went to his basement and demanded that Shayakhmedov buy a motorcycle that he had promised to give her, but he refused - instead, he grabbed a nearby hammer and hit her several times on the head, killing her.

Investigators suspected that this occurred after Gnedova threatened to tell her parents about the sexual abuse she had experienced at Shayakhmedov's hands on previous occasions - he initially denied this, but later on admitted that it was exactly the case.

Shortly after Gnedova's disappearance, Governor Andrey Klychkov launched a campaign to locate the young girl, appealing to residents across Oryol Oblast, the neighboring regions and to social media to help in the search.

Thousands of concerned citizens from Kursk, Tambov, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Tula and Moscow Oblasts volunteered for the campaign, in addition to local and regional security personnel.

During the search, wells, landfills, basements, outhouses, forest belts and a number of industrial enterprises were inspected, with a sugar factory near Kazar pumping out its tanks full of raw material to rule out an accident.

Most alarmingly, he was suspected of physically and sexually abusing his daughter, as she was never allowed to leave the house after graduating school and was forbidden to going to university, leading to several suicide attempts in the early 2010s.

Despite these claims, his wife claimed that Shayakhmedov had no negative influence on his children and constantly made excuses about his questionable behavior and actions.

In the late 2010s, he was accused of sexual harassment by several female students, one of whom claimed that he had taken her behind a wooden toilet on the school grounds and started touching her intimate parts, but she managed to break free and inform her classmates and acquaintances.

Despite the gravity of the accusations, the students' claims were largely ignored.

On June 1, 2013, Shayakhmedov's son Roman died of a heart attack at age 25, having drunk a large quantity of alcohol mixed with coffee on the day of his death.

Three months later in September, Ruzilya died from complications brought on from cirrhosis.

Shayakhmedov would claim in a later interview that he would frequently experience nightmares in which his deceased children would call out to him.

Shortly after their deaths, Shayakhmedov quit his high-paying job and instead began working as a plumber at the Zalegoshchenskaya Secondary General Education School No. 2, where he was regarded positively by school administration.

During his stay there, he also gained popularity with the students, as he often treated them with cigarettes and sweets.