Andrei Barausov

Andrei Ivanovich Barausov (Андрей Иванович Бараусов; born August 5, 1961), known as The Lensky Maniac (Ленский маньяк), is a Soviet-Russian serial killer and rapist who murdered at least 7 underage girls in Sakha from 1983 to 1997.

Most of these killings remained unsolved until early January 2023, when Barausov, now serving a sentence for serial rape, confessed to them.

Born on August 5, 1961, in the Yakut ASSR, he spent his childhood and youth in the city of Lensk, graduating from a local high school as a professional driver.

From 1978 to 1980, he served in the Soviet Army, and after his demobilization, he returned to Lensk, where he married a local girl and had a daughter with her in 1981.

A few years later, the couple had a son.

From the mid-1980s to 1997, Barausov worked as a driver for the Udachny Mining and Processing Combine, where he was well-regarded by employers and co-workers.

He was not known to drink alcohol, and was noted for acting very politely towards women.

Unbeknownst to many at the time, Barausov sexually abused his daughter, but no charges were ever brought in this case since she has refused to testify against him.

Barausov, who lived in the building where the truck had been parked, was immediately considered a suspect due to a previous arrest for indecent exposure in 1991.

In early 1997, Barausov's wife died of complications from cancer, after which he was left to live in an apartment with his two children.

In early August, he went to the woods in Lensk at the height of the mushroom season, where he met two girls (aged 9 and 12, respectively) who were picking mushrooms.

Brandishing a small-caliber TOZ-16 rifle, Barausov threatened them at gunpoint before eventually shooting one of the girls and stabbing the other to death.

He then had sex with their corpses, and after he was finished, he covered up the bodies with leaves and moss.

As he was leaving the forest, Barausov came across a group of mushroom pickers whose car was stuck in a ditch and offered to help them out.

After doing so, he spent some time in their company, allowing them to remember what he looked like.

After the two girls' bodies were found, local authorities found a witness who identified each of the mushroom pickers from this group, ruling all of them out as suspects after interrogations.

Each member gave a description of the good Samaritan that had helped them out, and after a sketch was drawn of the man, he became the prime suspect in the murders.

At around this time, a young woman went to the police department in Lensk, alleging that she had been raped at a park by an unfamiliar man.

According to her testimony, she feigned loyalty to her attacker by offering to go to her apartment to have sex.

The man accepted, and after spending the night together, he left without causing her any further harm.

An important detail the victim remembered was that while they were still in the park, the rapist had pointed to a GAZ-66 parked near one of the buildings and claimed that it was his.

At the end of August 1997, Barausov was invited over to the police station and interrogated - to the investigators' surprise, he admitted to going to the forest on the day the two girls had been murdered, but claimed that he was not involved.

Under pressure from witness testimony, he first admitted to helping the mushroom pickers and, eventually, to the murders themselves.

On the following day, he was escorted to the crime scene, where he demonstrated how he met the girls, how he had killed them and other details that only the killer could have known.

Among the officers who detained Barausov were Vitaly Yegorov and Vladislav Pshennikov, the latter being the head investigator of the Lensk District Department of Internal Affairs.

According to them, Barausov admitted to at least five additional murders and even indicated where he had buried them on a map, but expressed no remorse for his actions.

In an interview given after his retirement, Pshennikov said that after hearing the confessions, he felt so disgusted that he contemplated shooting Barausov right then and there.

However, as no additional remains were found at the time and he retracted these confessions, Barausov was only charged with the double murder.

In 1998, he was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to death, later reduced to 18 years imprisonment due to the moratorium on capital punishment imposed on the country.

He was detained at the IK-9 colony in Altai Krai, where, despite the gravity of his acts, he was not despised by other convicticts and even got a relatively prestigious position in the prison canteen.

During the late 2010s, he sexually assaulted six underage girls, but did not kill them.

After serving out his sentence in full, Barausov was released in 2015 and moved to the village of Glyadin in Altai Krai, where his daughter was living at the time.

Upon learning that he had decided to stay in Altai Krai, Yegorov began writing letters to the Altai Ministry of Internal Affairs, demanding that Barausov be placed under strict administrative supervision.

Some time later, Barausov moved to Novosibirsk Oblast, where he had found employment.

For his latest crimes, he was sentenced to 21 years imprisonment to be served concurrently with his 2018 conviction, consisting of 18 years.

Little is known about Barausov's early life.

He was arrested for these crimes in 2020, tried in a secret trial, found guilty on all counts and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment.

Due to the closed nature of his trial, much of the information remains undisclosed to the general public and media.

Following this latest conviction and after receiving no response from the Altai Ministry of Internal Affairs, Yegorov wrote two letters addressed to the Children's Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova and the Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia Alexander Bastrykin.

In these letters, Yegorov outlined a basic overview of the case and requested that they contact Barausov and ask him to confess to the murders, saying that his experience as a detective has taught him that life-sentenced prisoners like him have nothing to lose by confessing to unsolved crimes.