In April 1997 Athens police arrested a taxi driver at a taverna in Nikaia over a stolen car and a pair of shootings, and within days he had confessed to five killings, seven attempted murders and five armed robberies stretching back a decade. The Greek press, which had no domestic precedent for the term, called Dimitris Vakrinos the country's first serial killer. He never came to trial. On the morning of May 12, 1997, he asked to shower while the other prisoners at Korydallos were in the yard, knotted his shoelaces into a noose around a pipe in the washroom, and hanged himself, leaving no note.
Vakrinos was born in 1961 in Pyri, a village in central Greece, the second son of poor farmers; his father, an alcoholic, beat him. At thirteen he was sent to Athens, lodged with a family friend and worked in a taverna. He trained as a welder and worked at the Elefsis shipyards until 1992, then drove a taxi. He married in 1990 and was divorced fourteen months later. He was short, and the account he gave police, which the press repeated, was that he had been mocked about it all his life and killed people who slighted him.
By his confession the first victim, in 1987, was his roommate, Panagiotis Gaglias, fifty-three, an ex-convict, whom he beat to death with an iron bar as he slept after a drunken quarrel over a hunting rifle he believed Gaglias had stolen, and whose body he dumped in a remote spot. Anastasia Simitzi, twenty-six, got into his taxi for a ride and, he said, called him short; she did not survive the journey. Theodoros Andreadis, thirty-nine, a fellow taxi driver, had refused to let him take a fare; near the Corinth isthmus Vakrinos asked him to pull over and shot him with a .45. Two brothers, Costas and Antonis Spyropoulos, tried to take shelter in a gas station; he followed them in and shot each of them. Accounts of the brothers' ages vary. Two other people he attacked were left permanently disabled.
The dates in the press run from 1987 to 1995 or 1996. Two of the killings and the shooting of the brothers were already known to police when he was arrested; the other three were his own admissions. What ties the cases together is the motive he gave, a grievance over a slight, a debt or an insult, rather than any choice of victim. Because he died a month after his arrest, none of it was tested in court, and the count of five rests on his confession and the police investigation.