Georgy Martirosyan (serial killer)

At his trial, Martirosyan vehemently denied his guilt, and often insulted everybody present in the courtroom, including the judge himself. When interviewed by the press, he claimed that the deaths were accidental overdoses, and that he should be acquitted. As for the interrogations, he claimed that he had been tortured by the police, who had electrocuted him and hadn't allowed him to eat for two days, and additionally alleged that they had planted the drugs in his home. On April 22, 2014, the Moscow City Court found Martirosyan guilty of the three murders, robbery and drug trafficking, and sentenced him to 23 years imprisonment, in addition to paying 23 million rubles in damages to the victims' families. At a later date, his defense managed to lower his sentence by a month. He was sent off to a special regime colony, where he remains to this very day.

Through his contact with models, Martirosyan came across 21-year-old Maria and 38-year-old Natalya Agarkovi, a daughter and mother from Krasnodar. After learning that Maria had dreams of entering the fashion industry and Natalya wanting to work as a fitness instructor and dance show director, and both were significantly wealthy, Gosha volunteered to act as an intermediary and "carry out a ceremony of fortune" for them. He rented a one-room suite in Moscow, and instructed them to come with 5.1 million rubles he knew they had acquired from relatives. On January 14, 2012, the two women entered the rented apartment, but never came out alive. When their bodies were found nearly a week later, the autopsies determined that their blood contained 20 times more heroin than Trapeznikova, which had likely killed them quickly and efficiently.

For his next victim, he chose 23-year-old Natalya Trapeznikova, a beauty queen and aspiring model from Nizhny Novgorod. Due to an injury she had suffered as a teenager while rowing, Trapeznikova suffered from spinal disc herniation, which caused her pain and discomfort while walking in heels on the catwalk. After being taken in by Martirosyan's claims of spiritual healing several years back, he had managed to convince her to cut off contact with her boyfriend and that a friend from her modeling agency had attempted to poison her. Knowing that she fully believed everything he said, Martirosyan asked Trapeznikova to empty her bank accounts and bring the money to Moscow for a healing session. Against her parents' advice, she complied, withdrawing 1.5 million rubles, and on September 21, 2011, she arrived in Moscow and sat waiting for him at her apartment in the Presnensky District. At some during the night, Martirosyan arrived and entered. When he offered for them to have drinks, he went to the kitchen and got a glass of alcohol, which he laced with a mixture of heroin and methadone. Not long after drinking it, Trapeznikova passed out, and Gosha injected her with a syringe containing more heroin, before disposing of it and giving her another, clean one, in an attempt to simulate an overdose.

Aside from the previously mentioned victims, Martirosyan is suspected in the disappearance of Inna Filipova, a 31-year-old businesswoman from Korolyov. She too was a long-time client of his, and on December 29, 2011, she was last seen carrying all her savings with her and was en route to Martirosyan's apartment. Her body has never been found.

Initially, business was relatively slow, but the strange rituals earned him regular clients: using a combination of Wicca and Rasputin-influenced mysticism, he would take girls to an isolated monastery, where he would light candles and sacrific rams in order to cast spells of good fortune. In 2009, a high-class escort named Rimma became his client, and she enjoyed Gosha's services so much that she told her friends about him. His fame spread through word of mouth, and not long after, he amassed enough wealth to afford a two-storey house in an affluent neighborhood in Korolyov, where he lived with his common-law wife and young daughter, and frequently went on vacations to various countries around the world. According to Martirosyan, among his clients, numbering around 40-50, included "some famous singers" and numerous beauty pageants between the ages of 18 and 50. As a rule of thumb, Gosha turned down all men applying for his services and only accepted women, most of were young, rich and gullible, and would even sometimes sleep with him as part of his "rituals".

Born in Tbilisi to an Armenian family in 1970, Martirosyan's family moved to the European part of the Union when he was two years old. Following the USSR's collapse, he ventured out to search and explore the various countries of the post-Soviet era. In Belarus, he was convicted of theft and served a short prison sentence before moving to Russia. In the late 1990s, he joined a gang of robbers who broke into apartments, but they were eventually captured and imprisoned. Fortunately for Martirosyan, he was released under amnesty in 2000 in honor of the 55th anniversary of Victory Day. For the following seven years, he worked in a variety of jobs, including a cook, chauffeur, salesman and logger. In 2007, when he made a profile on the popular Russian dating site Mamba.ru, Martirosyan presented himself as a magician and spiritual healer, allegedly capable of curing ailments and healing bad karma, referring to himself as "Gosha the Magician".

Georgy Tarimanovich Martirosyan (Russian: Георгий Тариманович Мартиросян; born 1969), known as Gosha the Magician (Russian: Гоша-волшебник), is a Georgian-born Russian serial killer. A magician and self-proclaimed "spiritual healer", he would lure young aspiring models to his Korolyov apartment, where he would drug and cause them to overdose, killing three women, possibly a fourth, between 2011 and 2012. He was convicted of the three murders, and sentenced to 23 years imprisonment.

While examining the Agarkovs' apartment, investigators noticed something peculiar: in the ashtray, next to the light cigarettes that Natalya was known to smoke, they found standard ones with teeth imprints of an unidentified male. After investigating their friends and their phones' call histories, they were eventually led to Martirosyan. Coincidentally, he smoked these types of cigarettes, which were also found in Trapeznikova's ashtray, and he had been questioned in the former's death but released due to lack of evidence. On February 22nd, Gosha was arrested and his house searched, with the authorities locating as many as 6.6 kilograms of heroin on the premises.