His crimes unfolded over three years in the mid-1990s, targeting young children in a pattern that drew comparisons to one of the Soviet Union's most notorious killers. The victims — six in total, most of them girls — were raped and strangled, crimes that remained a defining mark of violence against the vulnerable in post-Soviet Russia.

His role in the Gunpowder Plot was operational rather than ideological — he was entrusted with the stockpiled explosives beneath the House of Lords precisely because of his military experience and nerve, not because he had conceived the plan. The conspiracy aimed at nothing less than decapitating the English Protestant government by destroying Parliament during the State Opening, with the king inside. Caught before the fuse was lit, Fawkes was tortured into naming his co-conspirators, and his execution followed. The date of his arrest, November 5th, has been marked in Britain ever since — giving him a strange, enduring visibility that most failed conspirators never achieve.