Operating in Pervouralsk over four years, Chigirinsky committed three murders marked by a consistent pattern of sexual violence and deliberate concealment, including returning to an initial burial site years later. His crimes went undetected in part because of their geographic proximity to ordinary public spaces, and his eventual arrest came only after a witness placed him at the scene of his final killing.

Over a three-year period in rural China, he moved through villages at night, targeting sleeping households — a pattern that made him exceptionally difficult to locate and allowed the toll to reach a scale rarely seen in documented serial homicide. The crimes were marked by their deliberate nature and the vulnerability of those targeted, qualities that place this case among the most severe in modern Chinese criminal history.

Arkan's career moved in two registers simultaneously — career criminal and paramilitary commander — and each reinforced the other. His Serb Volunteer Guard operated in Eastern Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars, where it carried out ethnic cleansing, murder, and rape with a discipline that reflected years of organized criminal experience. He had already spent decades on Interpol's wanted list before the wars gave his violence a political framework and a degree of state backing.