Between the end of July and the beginning of December 1992, six elderly people were killed on isolated farmsteads in six districts of western and central Lithuania, from Šakiai on the Neman to Telšiai in Samogitia and Raseiniai in the center of the country. Three more survived with serious injuries. Each case began in a different district police office, and for months no one connected them. They led, in the end, to a 21-year-old named Antanas Varnelis, who had been out of a correctional colony for barely six months when the first of the killings took place.
Varnelis was arrested on December 21, 1992. The Criminal Cases Collegium of the Supreme Court of Lithuania convicted him on February 1, 1994, of six murders, together with attempted murders, robberies, thefts and other charges, and sentenced him to death. President Algirdas Brazauskas rejected his petition for clemency on September 18, 1994, and he was executed ten days later, on September 28, 1994, at the age of 23. He was the fifth of the seven people executed in Lithuania after the restoration of independence, and the first of them convicted of a series of killings rather than one or two. He is remembered in Lithuania as the country's first serial killer.
Antanas Varnelis was born in 1971 in the village of Dadotkai, in Telšiai district in the northwest of Lithuania, one of seven children. His mother left him in early childhood, and he and his brothers and sisters were raised in state institutions. He grew up in the children's home at Viešvilė, in Jurbarkas district, and went to school in Nevarėnai, Viešvilė and Gelgaudiškis, where he attended a special boarding school in Šakiai district. He later enrolled at an agricultural school in Kudirkos Naumiestis and left without finishing.
He was first caught stealing at about the age of ten. At 16, after repeated thefts, he was sent twice for psychiatric examination at a hospital in Kaunas district. The doctors found an inborn mental deficiency and a mild intellectual disability, but judged him responsible for his actions under criminal law.
In 1987 the Šakiai district court gave him a suspended sentence of two years and three months for a theft. In 1988 he was convicted again, this time of theft, open theft and malicious hooliganism, and he served four years in a correctional colony. He was released early, for good behavior, on January 14, 1992.
Those who knew him in the months that followed described a young man of medium build, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with tattoos on his chest and arms, who spoke a mix of Samogitian and Aukštaitian dialects. In one village where he stayed he was known by the nickname Antoška and was remembered as hardworking and willing to help with farm work until he fell out with the man who employed him. He moved on foot through forests and fields, kept away from towns and public transport, and slept in barns and abandoned farmsteads.
In July 1992 he took part in a burglary in Samuolynė, in Šakiai district, with a younger relative who was still a minor. The relative was arrested; Varnelis was not. The killings began within weeks.
The first victim was Antanas Juozapavičius, a 70-year-old man who lived alone in the village of Bernatonys, in the Lukšiai area of Šakiai district. He died on the night of July 28, 1992.
Šakiai police opened a murder inquiry. At least six local men were detained and questioned as suspects, and none of them was charged; all were released, and the file was set aside. The killing was linked to Varnelis only after his arrest, when he described it to investigators himself.
From Šakiai district Varnelis walked north into Telšiai district, the area where he was born. In the town of Telšiai he stayed for a time with two local acquaintances, to whom he said he was an orphan.
In the village of Feliksavas, near Žarėnai, he killed Justinas Rekašius, a 71-year-old farmer, in August 1992. Telšiai criminal police connected the killing to the young stranger who had been staying in the town. His acquaintances told officers they did not know who he was. The police issued a composite sketch and a description of a man of about 30 who called himself Antanas. By then he had moved on.
By the autumn Varnelis was in Jurbarkas district, staying with acquaintances in the village of Šimkaičiai.
Juozas Gudelis, 86, a resident of Šimkaičiai, was fatally injured at the end of October 1992. He died about a week later.
The fourth victim was Genovaitė Jurgilaitienė, 68, who lived in the village of Pluskiai, in the Pakražantis area of Kelmė district. She died in November 1992. Kelmė criminal police took the case. They detained four suspects; none of the four confessed, and none was charged.
By this point newspapers had begun writing of an unknown killer of old people moving through the Lithuanian countryside.
Three people survived encounters with Varnelis in the same months: a 48-year-old man in Šiauliai district, a 69-year-old woman in the village of Šluotiškis, and a third person. In Šiauliai and Raseiniai districts Varnelis also committed several thefts from empty or isolated houses.
The last killings were in the village of Knyvai, in the Ariogala area of Raseiniai district. Angelė Šauklienė, 92, and her daughter-in-law, Janina Šauklienė, 68, lived together in the village. Angelė died in the first days of December 1992. Janina, gravely hurt in the same event, died on December 9, 1992.
They were the fifth and sixth people to die. Varnelis had killed in Šakiai, Telšiai, Jurbarkas, Kelmė and Raseiniai districts and left survivors in Šiauliai and Raseiniai districts, all within about five months.
Until December the killings were worked as separate cases by the police of each district, and no detective linked them, although they had much in common. After the deaths at Knyvai the homicide department of the Criminal Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior took over the whole series. Investigators compared the evidence from the different districts and concluded that a single man was responsible. Accounts from people to whom Varnelis had sold or given property helped them work out who he was.
The ministry named a suspect and asked the public for help, and newspapers and radio carried his description and photograph across the country. Nine operational police groups were sent out from Vilnius to the districts where he was thought to be hiding, under orders not to come back without him. Armed police and soldiers combed the area around Gelgaudiškis, where he had gone to school, without result. Dozens of tips from the public proved false. The coverage of the hunt spread fear among old people living alone on farmsteads.
On the evening of Monday, December 21, 1992, Varnelis turned up in the village of Muniškiai, in the Užliedžiai area of Kaunas district. Local residents recognized him from the photograph in the newspapers. Local men detained him, and Kaunas district criminal police commissioner Juozas Leščiukaitis and his officers took him into custody.
The Ministry of the Interior gave the men of Muniškiai cash rewards and sent their children on free holidays to the Baltic coast.
Varnelis confessed at his first interrogation to the murders, the robberies and the thefts. Asked by investigators why he had taken the lives of the old people he robbed, rather than simply leaving them, he could not answer. Of the first killing, at Bernatonys, he said he had acted out of anger at being turned away.
The investigation lasted a little over a year. Before trial, psychiatric experts at Utena diagnosed inborn mental deficiency and a psychopathic personality, and the experts concluded that he could understand and control his actions. He was therefore fit to stand trial and criminally responsible.
Under the procedure then in force, capital cases in Lithuania were tried at first instance by the Criminal Cases Collegium of the Supreme Court. The Varnelis case came before the collegium with Judge Vytautas Greičius presiding.
The prosecution asked for penalties on the separate counts that together amounted to the death penalty. The defense lawyer, Jonas Jasiulevičius, offered no evidence of innocence. He asked the court to take into account his client's hard childhood and his frank confession and to spare his life. Varnelis was visibly shaken when he gave his final statement to the court.
On February 1, 1994, the collegium found Antanas Varnelis guilty of six murders, attempted murders, robberies and thefts, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. The exact articles of the Criminal Code on which he was convicted are not on record. In June 1994 Amnesty International listed him among the prisoners then under sentence of death in Lithuania and appealed to the authorities to commute the sentence.
A prisoner sentenced to death in Lithuania could petition the president for clemency. Petitions were considered by a clemency commission made up of the ministers of justice and of the interior, the chairman of the Supreme Court and the procurator general, which made a recommendation to the president. Varnelis petitioned President Algirdas Brazauskas. The president rejected the petition on September 18, 1994. Under the law the sentence then had to be carried out within ten days.
Antanas Varnelis was executed in Vilnius on September 28, 1994. He was 23 years old.
Lithuania restored its independence on March 11, 1990, and amended its Criminal Code step by step over the following years. From October 9, 1990, the death penalty could be imposed only for a short list of grave crimes, among them aggravated intentional murder, treason, banditry and large-scale theft of state property. From December 10, 1991, it was limited to genocide and aggravated murder. A 1994 amendment to Article 24 of the Criminal Code restricted it to completed premeditated murder under aggravating circumstances, the offense defined in Article 105. People under 18 at the time of the offense and women who were pregnant could not be sentenced to death, and a prisoner who became insane after sentence could not be executed.
The courts used the sentence sparingly but steadily in the early 1990s. Thirteen people were sentenced to death in 1993 alone, and nine of those sentences were commuted. Before the moratorium of 1996, 16 death sentences were passed in all. Seven were carried out, one condemned man died by suicide, one was acquitted, and the rest were commuted.
The seven executions came in a short span. Aleksandras Novatkis was executed in August 1992, Vladimiras Ivanovas and Valentinas Laskys in December 1993, Vidmantas Žibaitis on January 27, 1994, Antanas Varnelis on September 28, 1994, Aleksandras Gudkovas on May 18, 1995, and Boris Dekanidze, the leader of a Vilnius gang convicted on November 10, 1994, of ordering the murder of the journalist Vitas Lingys, on July 12, 1995. Four of the first five executions were carried out after December 1993, and Amnesty International, which appealed for clemency in each case, protested that the time between sentence and the rejection of clemency was growing shorter while parliament was still debating whether a new Criminal Code should keep the death penalty at all. The organization urged a moratorium on death sentences and executions pending that review. In January 1994 the minister of justice stated that the working group drafting the new code had no common opinion on the question.
Dekanidze was the last person executed in Lithuania. In 1996 President Brazauskas signed a decree suspending executions, and the moratorium took effect in the second half of that year. The death penalty stayed in the code, but no further sentences were carried out. On December 9, 1998, acting on a petition by a group of members of the Seimas, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania ruled that the death penalty provided for in Article 105 was incompatible with the Constitution, holding that human life and dignity are values that the Constitution places above ordinary law. On December 21, 1998, the Seimas amended the Criminal Code to abolish the death penalty, with effect from December 31, 1998, and life imprisonment became the most severe punishment. The remaining condemned prisoners had their sentences commuted to life terms. Lithuania signed Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights, on the abolition of the death penalty, on January 18, 1999, and ratified it on June 22, 1999.
Varnelis is remembered in Lithuania as the first serial killer of the independent state. In 2010 the LNK documentary series Events That Shook Lithuania, written and presented by Egidijus Knispelis, devoted an episode to the five months of 1992 in which he moved through the farm districts and to the hunt that ended at Muniškiai. Knispelis recalled the panic that the newspaper and radio coverage of the search had caused in the countryside. The court proved six murders, three cases of serious bodily injury and a series of robberies.
The exact day of the Feliksavas killing in August 1992 is not on record with certainty. It is not on record with certainty whether a second psychiatric examination took place after the case reached court, or whether Varnelis refused one; the pre-trial examination at Utena found him criminally responsible. The exact wording of the charges and the articles of the Criminal Code applied in the verdict are not on record.
1971: Antanas Varnelis is born in Dadotkai, Telšiai district.
1987: Šakiai district court gives him a suspended sentence of two years and three months for theft.
1988: Convicted of theft, open theft and malicious hooliganism; serves four years.
January 14, 1992: Released early from a correctional colony.
July 28, 1992: Antanas Juozapavičius, 70, dies at Bernatonys, Šakiai district.
August 1992: Justinas Rekašius, 71, dies at Feliksavas, Telšiai district.
Late October 1992: Juozas Gudelis, 86, of Šimkaičiai, Jurbarkas district, is fatally injured; he dies about a week later.
November 1992: Genovaitė Jurgilaitienė, 68, dies at Pluskiai, Kelmė district.
Early December 1992: Angelė Šauklienė, 92, dies at Knyvai, Raseiniai district; her daughter-in-law Janina Šauklienė, 68, dies on December 9.
December 1992: The Interior Ministry's homicide department takes over the series; a national appeal is made.
December 21, 1992: Varnelis is detained by residents of Muniškiai, Kaunas district, and taken into police custody; he confesses at his first interrogation.
February 1, 1994: The Criminal Cases Collegium of the Supreme Court convicts him of six murders, with other charges, and sentences him to death.
June 28, 1994: Amnesty International appeals for commutation of his sentence.
September 18, 1994: President Algirdas Brazauskas rejects his clemency petition.
September 28, 1994: Antanas Varnelis is executed in Vilnius.
July 12, 1995: Boris Dekanidze becomes the last person executed in Lithuania.
1996: Presidential decree suspends executions.
December 9, 1998: The Constitutional Court rules the death penalty unconstitutional.
December 21, 1998: The Seimas abolishes the death penalty.