Irina Viktorovna Gaidamachuk was born on May 22, 1972, in Nyagan, Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, which was part of the Soviet Union at that time. She had a difficult childhood and became addicted to alcohol when she was young. Because of her addiction, her parents lost their parental rights and could no longer take care of her.

In the early 1990s, Irina moved to the town of Krasnoufimsk, located in Sverdlovsk Oblast. There, she met a man named Yuri, and they eventually got married. Irina and Yuri had two children together. However, Irina's alcoholism caused problems in their marriage. Her drinking was so severe that Yuri became afraid to give her money, worrying that she would spend it all on alcohol.

In 2002, Irina Gaidamachuk started her series of murders in Sverdlovsk Oblast. She pretended to be a social worker to enter the homes of elderly women. Once inside, she brutally killed them using an axe or hammer. After the murders, she would steal whatever money she could find. In some cases, she set fire to the victims' homes to cover her tracks. She sometimes tried to make it look like the fires were accidents.

Most of Gaidamachuk's crimes took place in her hometown of Krasnoufimsk, but she also committed murders in Yekaterinburg, Serov, Achit, and Druzhinino. The police connected the cases but struggled with the investigation due to a lack of leads and slow progress.

In 2010, she tried to kill another elderly woman, but the victim escaped and reported the attack. This information was crucial because the police had assumed the killer was male. Gaidamachuk's final victim was Alexandra Povaritsyna. A neighbor saw Gaidamachuk leave Povaritsyna's home around the time of the murder. This tip led to Gaidamachuk's arrest, and she quickly confessed to the killings.

At one point, another woman had confessed to the murders under pressure from law enforcement. Gaidamachuk stated that she killed the women to get money for vodka, as her husband refused to give her any. In February 2012, her trial began in Yekaterinburg. Despite initially confessing, she contested this throughout the trial. A psychiatric evaluation found that although Gaidamachuk had some mental illness, she was legally sane during the murders.

In June 2012, she was charged with 17 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The court sentenced her to 20 years in prison, which was the maximum sentence for women under Russian law. Many relatives of the victims were upset, believing that the sentence was too short for the number of lives she took.