NOVOSIBIRSK, March 6. /TASS/. A district court in Siberian city of Novosibirsk has sentenced a 52-year-old former police officer, Yevgeny Chuplinsky, to life imprisonment for murdering 19 women and robbery, a TASS correspondent reported from the courtroom.

"Chuplinsky is hereby sentenced to a life term in a maximum security correctional facility," Judge Lyudmila Bilyukova said.

She also ruled that the convict would have to pay one million rubles ($17,700) to each of the four plaintiffs in the case that had filed lawsuits in that regard.

After the verdict was announced, Chuplinsky told reporters that he would definitely file an appeal. Family members of the victims, who were present in court, said they had been anticipating precisely this type of sentence.

According to earlier reports, on February 28, a jury delivered a guilty verdict against Chuplinsky, saying that he did not deserve leniency.

Chuplinsky’s crimes

According to investigators, the murder spree began in the autumn of 1998 and carried on until July 2005. Chuplinsky had intimate relations with the women, ranging in age from 18 to 31, and killed them afterwards. In order to cover up his crimes, he dismembered the bodies and left the remains in different parts of Novosibirsk and its suburbs. The body of one woman, whom he had drowned, was never found.

According to the regional branch of the Russian Investigative Committee, the opportunity to track down the murderer arose only ten years after his last crime by using modern molecular-genetic technology. Detectives checked more 5,000 men suspected of committing these crimes, questioned thousands of witnesses and carried out more than 300 tests. The use of modern forensic equipment eventually allowed them to figure out the criminal’s DNA, which matched the DNA of one of the suspects.

Chuplinsky was arrested on April 23, 2016. Initially, he cooperated with investigators and even confessed to two more similar crimes that law enforcement officials knew nothing about, but later he withdrew his confession and pleaded not guilty. Experts found him to be mentally competent but prone to sexual dysfunction and sadism.