From 1921 until 1923 Moscow police hunted a killer who had made a habit of murdering men and dumping their bodies, enclosed in sacks, in one of the cities poorer neighborhoods. Oddly, the corpses always seemed to turn up the day after horses went to market in the same neighborhood, which led them to horse dealer Vasili Komaroff, a man who seemed a highly unlikely suspect on the surface and was known as a happy family man. To his closest frends, however, Komaroff was a violent fellow who had once tried to kill his own eight-year-old son. When authorities paid Komaroff's stable a visit they discovered his latest victim under a pile of hay bagged and waiting for dumping.

Komaroff confessed to being "The Wolf Of Moscow", claiming to have murdered thirty-three men he lured away from the nearby horse market and leading investigators to five additional bodies that were still enclosed in the trademark sacks, undiscovered. Some victims that the slayer had murdered had been thrown into a river and never found. He claimed he had simply waited until the unfortunate men had turned their backs on him and then had bludgeoned them with a hammer or strangled them to death.

Apparently guilty by association, Komaroff's wife was charged in the homocides as well and both were found guilty of the murders. Both were shot to death by a firing squad on June 18, 1923.