The Killer Hitchhiker. Russian True Crime Stories, #7

December 2018. A young woman vanishes on the highway between Moscow and Tula. Irina Akhmatova - a restaurant manager, a wife, a mother - had arranged a ride through BlaBlaCar with a stranger named "Sergey." Her phone goes dead at 9:15 PM. It never comes back on. Veteran investigator Colonel Volkov - "the Wolfhound" - launches a digital manhunt through server logs, cell tower data, and fake accounts, unraveling a web of fictitious identities created from a single IP address.
The trail leads to Vitaly Chikirev, a violent ex-convict who used rideshare platforms not for travel but as a hunting ground. What was supposed to be a routine pre-holiday drive became a premeditated ambush - and the digital footprints the killer thought he'd erased became the evidence that buried him.