Adnan Colak was born in 1952 in the Artvin province of Turkey, on the Black Sea coast near the Georgian border. The Turkish press called him the Artvin Monster, after the province.
Between 1992 and 1995 he killed eleven women in villages across the district, shooting them, and raping a number of them. The victims were mostly women alone in isolated houses or working in the tea and hazelnut fields. The Turkish press called him the Black Sea Monster.
The victims named in the record are Hacer Kars, Ziver and Hayriye Bildirici, Kevser and Osman Aksoy, Huseyin and Asiye Korkmaz, Ayse and Ahmet Bayram, and Ahmet and Abuhayat Gumus.
Artvin is mountainous and thinly populated, with villages connected by single roads, and the killings produced a level of fear that emptied the fields.
He was arrested in 1995 and convicted, receiving six death sentences and forty years' imprisonment. Turkey had carried out no execution since 1984 and abolished the death penalty for peacetime offences in 2002 and entirely in 2004, so the sentences became aggravated life imprisonment.
He has periodically given interviews from prison. He remains in custody.