Anatoly Yuriyovych Onoprienko was born in the village of Laski, in Zhytomyr oblast, on July 25, 1959. His mother died when he was four and his father placed him in an orphanage while keeping his elder brother at home, a fact he returned to for the rest of his life. He trained as a forestry student, worked as a sailor, and drifted.
He killed first in 1989, with an accomplice named Sergei Rogozin, in a series of robberies that left nine people dead, including a family of ten shot in a house in Bratkovychi. He then stopped, or went abroad, for five years. Ukrainian reporting called him the Beast of Ukraine, and he called himself the Terminator.
From Christmas 1995 to March 1996 he killed forty-three people in ten weeks.
The method did not vary much. He walked into isolated rural houses at night, usually along roads in Lviv and Zhytomyr oblasts, shot every person in the building with a sawn-off hunting shotgun, including the children, took whatever was portable, and set the house on fire. He shot people who came out of neighbouring houses to look at the flames.
Ukraine had come out of the Soviet Union four years earlier and the militia was under-resourced. By February 1996 two thousand police and army personnel were on the case and villages were arming themselves.
He was arrested on April 16, 1996 at a relative's flat in Yavoriv, after his cousin's wife found a bag of women's clothing and a gun. The shotgun matched.
Two thousand officers, and what found him was a woman looking in a bag in her own flat.
He confessed to fifty-two murders and gave the details of each without apparent difficulty, telling investigators he was a machine, that he had been ordered to do it, and that he felt nothing.
He was tried in Zhytomyr from 1998, in a metal cage, and convicted on March 31, 1999 of all fifty-two. He was sentenced to death. Ukraine had already suspended executions as a condition of joining the Council of Europe and abolished the death penalty in 2000, so the sentence became life imprisonment, which he complained about.
He died of heart failure in Zhytomyr prison on August 27, 2013, aged fifty-four.