As a difficult teenager, he was known to police, as he engaged in petty theft, also torturing and killing domestic animals.
Once, the killer attacked a woman who turned out to be a decoy, a law enforcement officer, but Storozhenko was then frightened off by one of the policemen in the ambush.
Four innocent people were arrested for Storozhenko's crimes: the first was an employee of the prosecutor's office, and before his innocence was proven, he spent 9 months in jail, after his release he had to resign from the prosecutor's office and leave the city; as an accomplice of the previous one, a traffic policeman was arrested; in the murder of a woman in the recreation area of the Smolensk Aviation Plant, the authorities accused a local guard who had previously been convicted of collaborationism during the Second World War, who, under the pressure of investigators, incriminated himself; and the final being a person caught for stealing, and under the threat of execution, was forced to confess to killing his wife and sentenced to 9 years imprisonment.
Storozhenko was arrested in 1981: the last victim survived and remembered a tattoo on his chest, and then identified him from the presented photo.
Storozhenko was then questioned about his carpool travel sheets - their data matched up with the time and place of the crime.
In addition, during the search, a cache of pistols and explosives was found: Sergei confessed that he and his brother had planned a series of attacks on state-owned enterprises on the days when they would issue wages there.