On December 24, 1995, in the village of Garmarnia in central Ukraine, a man with a sawn-off double-barreled shotgun broke into the home of the Zaichenko family. He killed the father, a forestry teacher, then his wife and their two young sons (one published list names them as Nikolai, twenty-seven, Julia, twenty-five, Boris, three, and Oleg, three months), took jewelry and clothing, and set the house on fire. A few days later a family of four was shot in their home in the Lviv region and the house burned, and a man who saw the killer leaving was shot too. Over the next three months the same thing happened again and again across western and central Ukraine. By the spring of 1996 villagers were sleeping with weapons and the state had put some two thousand police officers and soldiers on the hunt. The killer was Anatoly Onoprienko, and he had killed before.
He was born on July 25, 1959, in Laski, a village in the Zhytomyr region, the younger of two sons of a father decorated for bravery in the Second World War. His mother died when he was four. After a time with his grandparents and an aunt, his father placed him in an orphanage in the village of Privitnoe while his brother, thirteen years older, stayed at home. He spoke of that for the rest of his life, and in interviews he blamed it for what he became. He later studied forestry, worked for a time as a sailor, and drifted.
The first killings came in 1989. With an accomplice, Sergei Rogozin, a man he had met at a gym and with whom he committed burglaries, Onoprienko broke into a house to rob it and killed the family inside. Most accounts, based on his confession, say the dead were two adults and eight children; at least one places the house at Bratkovychi and gives the family as two adults and five children. He said the two men had used weapons they carried for self-defense and that he cut off contact with Rogozin afterward. Later that year he shot five people, among them an eleven-year-old child, as they slept in a car he meant to rob, and burned the bodies. He then left Ukraine and spent several years in central and western Europe, and little is known of that time.
When he began again at the end of 1995, the killings followed a pattern. He chose isolated houses near main roads, usually at night, broke in, shot the man of the house first, then his wife, then the children, took whatever he could carry, and set the building alight. Anyone who came out to look at the flames, or crossed his path, was killed as a witness. On January 6, 1996, he stopped his car beside a highway near Berdyansk and flagged down drivers as if he needed help, killing three people that day: Kasai, a navy ensign; Savitsky, a taxi driver; and Kochergina, a cook.
On January 17 he went to Bratkovychi, near Lviv, and killed the Pilat family, two adults and three children, and two neighbors who came out: Kondzela, twenty-seven, and Zakharko, fifty-six. On January 30, at Fastiv in the Kyiv region, he killed a woman named Marusina, twenty-eight, her two young sons, and a man named Zagranichniy, thirty-two. On February 19 it was the Dubchak family, two adults and two children, at Olevsk in the Zhytomyr region. On February 27 it was the Bodnarchuk family, two adults and their children, aged seven and eight, and a neighbor named Tsalk. On March 22, at Busk, not far from Bratkovychi, he killed the Novosad family, two adults and two children.
The investigation was run by a police force still adjusting to the collapse of the Soviet Union four years earlier. As the killings spread across several regions and the fear spread faster, the government sent army units to support the police, and whole villages organized their own patrols. None of that found him. Around midday on April 7, 1996, Easter Sunday, an army captain named Pyotr Onoprienko, who lived with his wife and two children in Yavoriv, the former military town west of Lviv, telephoned a local officer, Igor Khuney. He had found a cache of weapons in his home, he said, and believed they belonged to his cousin Anatoly, who had been staying with him and whom he had ordered out. It took nine days to find him. He was arrested in Yavoriv on April 16, 1996, and the search of the apartment where he was living turned up the shotgun and a mass of property taken from the dead. The shotgun was matched to the killings.
At first he would not talk. "I'll talk to a general, but not to you," he told the officer in charge of the arrest. That night the local lead investigator, Bogdan Teslya, known for his calm with suspects, was called in from home to take over. Onoprienko admitted first that he had stolen the shotgun, then that he had used it in a recent killing, and then went back to 1989. He confessed in the end to fifty-two murders and described them without visible feeling. He said he had killed in response to commands from voices he had been hearing since childhood, and he called himself a robot, a machine.
His trial opened in Zhytomyr on November 23, 1998, before Judge Dmytro Lypsky, more than two years after the arrest, in part because the law required him to review all ninety-nine volumes of the case himself; more than four hundred witnesses were called. He sat in an iron cage while crowds in the courtroom spat and shouted at him, and police had to keep order. Asked whether he wished to make a statement, he shrugged and said, "No, nothing." The prosecutor, Yury Ignatenko, rejected the defense argument that he was not responsible, pointing out that he had been found fit to stand trial, and asked for death; his lawyer asked for leniency on account of his childhood. Sergei Rogozin, thirty-six, sat beside him, charged as his accomplice in the 1989 killings; he protested his innocence, was convicted and received thirteen years. On March 31, 1999, the court convicted Onoprienko of all fifty-two murders and sentenced him to death by shooting. Ukraine was by then under pressure from the Council of Europe, which it had joined, to end executions, and the death penalty was abolished; his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
He died of heart failure in the prison at Zhytomyr on August 27, 2013, at the age of fifty-four. The families he killed were ordinary rural households, a forestry teacher and his sons, a navy ensign, a cook, children of seven and eight, chosen because their houses stood alone near a road.