In 1995 a fifty-eight-year-old woman in the village of Salkımlı, in the province of Artvin in northeastern Turkey, was knocked unconscious in her house, strangled with a headscarf and raped, and left for dead. She came to, reached her neighbors for help with the last of her strength before she fainted, and was taken to the hospital. There she named the man who had attacked her, her neighbor Adnan Çolak, and described the attack in detail. The security forces arrested him the same day. For three years Artvin had been living with a killer of old people who left nothing behind.
The first killings were at Seyitler. At about eleven o'clock on the night of October 6, 1992, an elderly couple was killed with an axe. The killer raped the family's fifteen-year-old daughter twice in the barn, then took her to a cave a few kilometers away and raped her there again. A year later, in the morning, an old man and his daughter-in-law were found in the village of Soğanlı, a few kilometers from the first scene, killed with blows of an adze to the head. The woman had been raped.
The attacks came about every four months. A sixty-two-year-old woman who lived alone in Salkımlı was attacked at night on her way to her barn. She tried to defend herself with a sickle-shaped knife; he took it from her, struck her in the head with it, raped her and left her for dead, but she survived the wound. Four months later an elderly couple in the village of Gümüşhane was killed and their house burned, the bodies almost beyond recognition. Four months after that another elderly couple died, and then an elderly woman. There were no witnesses, no weapons and no fingerprints. Examining the last woman, investigators found tissue under her fingernails for the first time, but DNA analysis at the biology laboratory of the Forensic Medicine Institute showed that it, and the hair samples, were her own. The people of Artvin grew furious with the security forces who could not solve the killings.
Çolak, a father of three who lived in Salkımlı, was born on September 5, 1952. His victims were eleven people between sixty-eight and ninety-five years old, and he raped the six women among them before he killed them. The trial was held in Zonguldak, in northwestern Turkey. He described the murders calmly, and explained that he had killed old people to stop them from eating the livelihood of the young. The press called him the Beast of Artvin and, after the weapon, the Axe Killer.
The trial lasted more than five years. He was found guilty and sentenced to death six times and to forty years in prison. When Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 the sentences became life imprisonment. On May 28, 2005, about ten years after his arrest, he was freed under the Conditional Release and Postponement Act of December 21, 2000, popularly called the Rahşan pardon.