In October 1992 an eighteen-year-old stole a car and drove to a corner near Kolonaki, in central Athens, where women working as prostitutes met their customers. He picked out a woman of about thirty-five, agreed a price and drove her to the area of Karea, and there, as he later confessed, he strangled her. He drove home, collected a knife, a hacksaw and plastic bags, and cut the body into more than thirty pieces. He left the bags in different parts of the city and threw the head into the Kifissos River. Police found some of the remains in a dumpster within days. Her name has not been published in the accessible record, and for more than three years nobody knew who had killed her.
The man was Antonis Daglis. He was born in 1974 in Nikaia, a working-class suburb of Athens near Piraeus, into a family that later accounts describe as violent. By his own account his mother worked as a prostitute, and at his trial he tied what he did to her. He had been in trouble with the law since he was fourteen: in 1988 he was charged with seducing a minor, and in 1989 he was arrested for attacking a group of men with a knife at the Zappeion, the exhibition hall in the National Garden. By the mid-1990s he drove a truck for a company called Perla and lived in Athens.
In the evenings he drove a closed white Volkswagen van with a mattress in the back, looking for women working the streets. He chose them apparently at random and strangled them during or after sex, or before. Most survived. In the autumn of 1995 the women on the corners were frightened, because eight of them had been attacked by a young man in a white van.
Two did not survive. In October 1995 the body of Eleni Panagiotopoulou, twenty-nine, was found on the Athens-Lamia highway, in a condition that shocked the officers who found her; she had been dismembered. Athina Lazarou, twenty-six, was also killed and cut up with a hacksaw, and he scattered the remains of both women around the city.
His arrest came through a survivor. Ann Hamson, an Englishwoman, was abducted and raped, and her testimony joined the accumulating accounts of the women who had got away. On January 21, 1996, police arrested Daglis, then twenty-one, on Poseidon Avenue while he was talking to a woman beside the white van; some accounts put the arrest in 1995. Inside the van officers found a bloodstained mattress and, in a toolkit, a small religious cross that had belonged to Eleni Panagiotopoulou. He confessed to raping, strangling and dismembering Panagiotopoulou and Lazarou, to attacking six more women, and to robbing all eight. He then confessed to the 1992 killing as well.
At his trial in Athens he told the court he hated all prostitutes and still did, and that when he met them for sex other pictures came into his head and he heard voices that ordered him to kill. He also said: "I made mistakes and I regret it. I was going to have sex and the opposite happened. Maybe what I had seen with my mother... I would break out on these women." He said that at the start of the proceedings he had talked of manslaughter because he was not well, that he now confessed his actions, and that he had probably dismembered the body out of hatred. At one point he stood and asked that his mother not continue testifying; she fainted and was taken to the hospital. The prosecutor told the court that Daglis was the perpetrator, that there was no doubt he was not a psychopath, and that he deserved no mitigation.
On January 23, 1997, at twenty-three, he was convicted of the three murders and six attempted murders, with rape and robbery, and sentenced to thirteen terms of life imprisonment plus twenty-five years. The Greek press called him the Athens Ripper.
He was held in the psychiatric wing of Korydallos prison. Early on Saturday, August 2, 1997, the warden checked cell 33 and found him hanged with a sheet from the bars. The medical examiner ruled it suicide. A second prisoner, Giorgos Makridis, twenty-eight, who was serving seven years for attempted murder, was found hanged in the same cell, and later accounts describe the two deaths as a suicide pact.