Nikolai Dzhumagaliev

In January 2016, there were rumors in WhatsApp and Facebook about his possible escape. However, this was never confirmed. The police tracked down the author of the false report, who turned out to be a 21-year-old female resident from Dzhumagaliev's native village. She was subsequently arrested and confessed.

I always loved to hunt, and often went hunting, but this was my first time hunting a woman. When I went out on the Uzun-agach-Maibulak track, I saw some young peasant woman. She was alone. I felt my heart pound within me and I ran after her. Hearing my footsteps, she turned around, but I caught up with her and put my arm around her neck, and dragged her to the side of the landfill. She resisted, but I cut her throat with a knife. Then I drank her blood. At this point, from the village appeared a Factory Bus. I lay down on the ground and crouched next to the body. While I was lying there, my hands grew cold. After the bus drove past, I warmed my hands on the woman's body, then stripped her naked. I cut the corpse's breast into strips, removed the ovaries, and separated the pelvis and hips; I then put these pieces into a backpack and carried them home. I melted the fat to fry with, and some parts I pickled. Once, I put the parts through a meat grinder and made dumplings. I saved the meat for myself; I never served it to anyone else. Twice, I grilled parts—the heart and the kidneys. Grilled meat, too. But it was tough, and I had to cook it for a long time in its own fat. The meat of this woman took me a month to eat. The first time I ate human flesh, I had to force myself, but then I got used to it.

In September 2014, Dzhumagaliev was charged with and convicted of his tenth murder, which he had committed in 1990 in Aktobe.

Dzhumagaliev decided to end his adventures by staging a theft, intending to return to Tashkent and go to prison for a minor crime. His plan was successful, and in April 1991, Dzhumagaliev was arrested for stealing sheep in Fergana. He claimed to be Chinese and, accordingly, was placed in the general cell of the SIZO. During interrogations, he willingly confessed to the theft, but could not explain how he had made his way to the Soviet Union. Because of this discrepancy, a request was sent to Moscow for assistance. Colonel Yury Dubyagin, who had participated in the effort to capture Dzhumagaliev, arrived in Fergana from the capital. The sheep thief was revealed as the cannibal, was taken into custody, and returned to a psychiatric hospital in Kazakhstan.

Dzhumagaliev killed and cannibalized at least nine people, targeting mainly women in the Almaty area, and is believed to have killed more until his arrest. He was declared insane and imprisoned in a mental hospital until escaping in 1989, but was recaptured two years later, and is currently serving his sentence.

On August 29, 1989, while being transferred to an ordinary mental hospital, Dzhumagaliev managed to escape, using the car in which he was being transported. He wandered for a long time around the USSR, and according to some reports, committed a series of murders in Moscow and Kazakhstan. In the past, Dzhumagaliev had previously been pronounced "cured" several times and released, returning to his native village, where he was not well received. Knowing that the villagers would likely turn him in, he did not return there.

Less than a year later, December 3, 1981, Dzhumagaliev went on trial. Since he had a previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was again declared insane and remanded to a special treatment center, where he spent the next eight years.

Dzhumagaliev's ninth murder was the fatal one for him. He invited some friends and their girlfriends to his home. He killed one of them and began to dismember him in the next room. When the other guests came looking for them and saw what was happening, they fled in horror from the house and reported it to the police. The arriving policemen caught the cannibal on his knees, smeared with blood. The police were so shocked at what they found that Dzhumagaliev was able to escape. He fled to the mountains naked, with a hatchet in his hands. He was tracked down and taken into custody the next day, on December 19, 1980. A relative of his was also arrested.

Shortly after Dzhumagaliev's 1980 crimes had gained wide attention, another maniac by the name of Alexander Skrynnik was operating in Chișinău. He killed women and dismembered their bodies, after which he brought the body parts to his friend. The head of one of Skrynnik's victims was shown on television. In Chișinău, rumors spread that the man-eating maniac Dzhumagaliev had escaped and reached the Moldovan capital. The rumors were put to rest when Skrynnik was convicted of the crimes, sentenced to death, and executed.

Dzhumagaliev planned his first murder very carefully. In January 1979, he killed a woman travelling along a rural path outside of Uzynagash. During the investigation, Dzhumagaliev described his first murder:

On January 25, 1979, the body of the woman was discovered. A criminal case was opened, but the investigation did not lead to the killer's capture.

In 1979, Dzhumagaliev committed five more murders. On August 21, in a drunken stupor, he accidentally shot a fellow fireman, for which he was arrested. At the Serbsky Center, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In less than a year, he was released and returned to Uzynagash. Upon his return, he committed three more murders.

Nikolai Espolovich Dzhumagaliev (Kazakh: Николай Жұмағалиев , Nıkolaı Jumaǵalıev; Russian: Николай Есполович Джумагалиев; born November 15, 1952) is a Soviet serial killer, also known as Metal Fang, convicted of the murders of seven people in the Kazakh SSR (now Kazakhstan) between 1979 and 1980.

Nikolai Dzhumagaliev was born on 15 November 1952, in Uzynagash, Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union, to a Kazakh father and Belarusian mother, the third of four children and only son of his family. After completing the ninth grade of school, Dzhumagaliev entered a railway school; following his graduation, he was assigned to work in Atyrau. In 1970, at age 18, he was conscripted into the Soviet Army, serving in chemical defense in Samarkand, Uzbek SSR. After completing his service, Dzhumagaliev tried to become a driver and to enter university, but achieved neither goal. As an alternative, he travelled the Soviet Union, visiting the Ural Mountains, Siberia, and Murmansk, where he tried a number of professions, including sailor, forwarder, electrician, and bulldozer operator. In 1977, he returned to Uzynagash in Kazakhstan to take a job as a firefighter, contracting both syphilis and trichomoniasis that same year.