In April 1997 the Athens Security Police arrested a 35-year-old taxi driver named Dimitris Vakrinos. They were holding him over a double killing in Menidi more than a year earlier and over a string of shootings and robberies in the western suburbs of Athens. Under questioning he confessed to those crimes and to others police had not connected to him, according to Greek press accounts. By the reports' count, his confession covered five killings, seven attempted killings and five armed robberies between 1987 and 1996.
Greek newspapers and television called him the country's first serial killer. Police and psychologists quoted at the time described a man who answered small slights, real or imagined, with violence. He never came to trial. On May 12, 1997, about a month after his arrest, he died by suicide in Korydallos prison, where he was being held before trial. Because no court heard the case, every killing linked to him rests on his own statements to police and on the police investigation. None of it was tested by a judge, a jury or a defense lawyer.
Vakrinos was born in Pyrri, a farming village in Gortynia, in the mountains of Arcadia in the central Peloponnese. The year is given as 1962 by Athens Voice and as 1963 by Enimerotiko and Reader.gr. His family was very poor. Reader.gr describes him as the second son in a family of four children; Athens Voice speaks of a family of four.
His father drank heavily. The reports agree that he was violent toward his wife and children and that the boy bore much of it. "He was a drunk," Vakrinos told police in 1997, as Enimerotiko later quoted him. Athens Voice writes that the father was mocked in the village and abused his son verbally and physically, and that Dimitris loved his mother and his sister. In later years his parents moved to Athens for a time, where the father tried selling lottery tickets, before the family went back to the village.
He was an average pupil and did not go beyond primary school, and as a boy he worked as a shepherd, Enimerotiko reports. At 13, around 1975, he left the village for Athens; Enimerotiko writes that he went to get away from his father. A relative took him on at a taverna in Chasia, on the northwestern edge of the city, and a family there gave him a home for about three years. He then trained as a welder; Enimerotiko says he spent two years at an institution in Elefsina where he learned the trade. He found work in the shipyards on the Gulf of Elefsina, named as the Skaramangas yards by Enimerotiko and as the Elefsina yards by Athens Voice, and drove a taxi on the side. After he left the yards in 1992 he drove a taxi full time. Reader.gr reports that he received a settlement from the shipyard job of more than one million, without giving the currency.
He was small and slight. Reader.gr gives his height as about 1.65 meters, and in 1997 Athens Voice described him, at 35, as frail in appearance. The reports return again and again to his size. Police and the psychologists who assessed him linked his anger to his childhood and to a sense of physical inferiority, and the press repeated his own words that, in the moment of an attack, he felt himself grow taller.
In 1990 he married. The marriage lasted about 14 months. His first wife later told reporters that they did not get along, that he did not want children, and that he had no friends; she said he had warned her that children only bring trouble. By her account, quoted by Reader.gr, she asked him to move out after he had become hard to talk to and had begun spending time with people she did not know. He went to the police to complain, and was told they could not help him. "He had no temper," she said. "He raised his hand to me and my mother only once." He later claimed that his mother-in-law had hit him, which she denied.
After the separation, in 1992, he set fire to his father-in-law's summer house on the island of Salamis, according to Athens Voice, Enimerotiko and Reader.gr. Enimerotiko adds that in the same period he committed a burglary in Keratsini, and that a court sentenced him in absentia to a two-year suspended term.
In the summer of 1996 he married again. Athens Voice dates the wedding to August 1996. The couple lived in Moschato, on the coast south of central Athens, until his arrest.
Press reports of his confession and of the police inquiry describe five killings. None was proved in court. Little is known of the lives of the five people named in his confession beyond their ages, the places where they died and, in his telling, the slights he held against them.
Panagiotis Gaglias, 43, was the first. He had been staying with Vakrinos in the summer of 1987. Vakrinos told police he had stolen a hunting rifle from Gaglias and feared that Gaglias would report him, as he had threatened to do, according to Athens Voice and toManifesto; Reader.gr describes a drunken quarrel. Gaglias was beaten to death on or about August 6, 1987. His body was found near Argos, in the Peloponnese; Enimerotiko gives the date as August 14, 1987. The killing went unsolved for nearly ten years. "Only the first murder gave me nightmares," Vakrinos told police, as Enimerotiko and Reader.gr quoted him. "For a year and a half."
Anastasia Simitzi was killed in November 1993. Her age is given as 28 by Athens Voice and Reader.gr and as 25 by Enimerotiko and toManifesto. She had been a passenger in his taxi. Vakrinos told police she had laughed at him and called him short. She died of burns near Mandra, in western Attica; Reader.gr and Enimerotiko date her death to November 20, 1993, and toManifesto to the night of November 19 into November 20. Her death was not linked to him until he described it himself.
Theodoros Andreadis, 35, was a taxi driver who worked from the rank at Elefsina. Months earlier, the two had argued at the rank over who had the right to a fare. Andreadis was shot dead on January 9, 1994, near the Isthmus of Corinth, according to To Vima, Reader.gr and toManifesto. To Vima reported in 2017 that police at first attributed the killing to nightclub bouncers. The case nonetheless made investigators ask whether a taxi driver might be behind two shootings in Kifisia, To Vima wrote. According to Enimerotiko and Reader.gr, Vakrinos attended Andreadis's funeral. Reader.gr adds that Andreadis did not appear to remember the earlier quarrel.
Kostas and Antonis Spyropoulos were brothers from Menidi, north of Athens. Their ages are given as 21 and 20 by Athens Voice, Reader.gr and toManifesto; Enimerotiko gives 23 and 35. Kostas had bought a used car from Vakrinos. The agreed price was 700,000 drachmas, but the reports say the brothers paid 600,000, and Vakrinos felt cheated. On December 21, 1995, someone tried to take the car in Menidi with a key; the brothers gave chase and confronted him. Both were shot dead in Menidi. Athens Voice writes that the killing was reported in the media at once. Police, according to the reports, quickly settled on the car as the motive. Because a spare key had been used, they suspected the previous owner, and the name Vakrinos entered their files. They could not prove it.
The attempted killings he confessed to took place in the western and northern suburbs of Athens over three years. Accounts list them as follows.
On March 14, 1993, in Votanikos, two young men were shot and seriously wounded after a dispute over teasing, according to Enimerotiko.
On December 10, 1995, in Sepolia, two young men tried to stop a man who was breaking into a parked car. Both were shot. One was left permanently disabled. Enimerotiko reports that the Ministry of Public Order later gave both men a medal and 1.5 million drachmas for their courage. "He shot me as if I were a thing," the more seriously wounded man said after the arrest. "He deserves the ultimate punishment."
On May 30 or 31, 1996, in Peristeri, a gunman came looking for a young man against whom Vakrinos held a grudge. Vakrinos later told police that this man had spoiled his courtship of a young woman. The family called the police. When officers of the Rapid Response unit arrived, shots were fired at them and at the young man's father. Two officers were wounded, according to toManifesto and Enimerotiko. The young woman's father told reporters that his daughter barely knew Vakrinos. Enimerotiko reports that Vakrinos told police he had planned to harm her as well.
The robberies followed a pattern that gave the press a nickname, the man in the helmet. In late 1995 two supermarkets in Nikaia and Aigaleo were held up by a gunman in a motorcycle helmet who took the cash from the registers and was gone before anyone could describe him, Athens Voice reported. Two more supermarket robberies in the same suburbs followed in March and June 1996, with shots fired into the air. Enimerotiko describes an earlier attempt to rob a petrol station that failed when the cash register would not open.
The investigation was run by the Athens Security Police, through the department for crimes against life, Athens Voice reported. Enimerotiko describes a 14-month inquiry, and cites the newspaper Eleftherotypia as reporting more than 1,500 people taken in for questioning, a figure Enimerotiko itself treats with caution.
Several threads came together. A neighbor in Peristeri told police that the gunman had left in a taxi, which turned the inquiry toward taxi drivers, according to Enimerotiko. Officers went from rank to rank asking drivers whether any had carried a short, slight man as a fare, toManifesto and Reader.gr report. For a long time that led nowhere, until an officer suggested that the man they wanted might be a driver rather than a passenger. Ballistic tests linked the gun fired at the officers in Peristeri to the robberies, Enimerotiko reports. Athens Voice writes that detectives reasoned the robber lived near the supermarkets and moved on foot, and searched the neighborhood until the name they already had from the Menidi case turned up again.
On April 9, 1997, police arrested Vakrinos at a taverna in Nikaia where his second wife worked. He was eating with the best man from his wedding, Enimerotiko reports. toManifesto, in a 2025 anniversary piece, gives April 10, 1997, as the day the arrest became news, and writes that officers spoke of the case as a matter of honor.
He was taken to the Security Police headquarters. Enimerotiko reports that officers asked him where the gun was, and that he began to talk. He confessed to the crimes he was being questioned about and then described others the police had not tied to him: the deaths of Gaglias, Simitzi and Andreadis. Investigators were struck by how much he remembered of each crime, down to license plates and addresses. Reader.gr adds that police found a list of other people he meant to harm.
Some of his words reached the public. "What can I say? I am a beast. I have to pay," he said, as Enimerotiko quoted him. Athens Voice gives a slightly different version: "I am a beast, I deserve to be executed." He also said he would have shot even an ant if it had wronged him, according to Enimerotiko. Privately, Athens Voice reported, he said that carrying a gun made him feel like a god.
toManifesto writes that he described the killings calmly and without remorse, and that the crimes had been committed over trivial pretexts. Private television stations covered the case at length in April 1997, Athens Voice reported, and public anger ran so high that there was talk of lynching.
The formal charges brought against him have not been reported, and no prosecutor or investigating magistrate was named. After his statement he was remanded in custody and sent to Korydallos prison, west of Piraeus, to await trial. Athens Voice reports that he refused to have a lawyer appointed for his trial.
His mother told reporters she could not believe that her son had done such things, Enimerotiko reported.
The psychiatrist Markos Skondras examined Vakrinos twice in custody, according to Enimerotiko. The press accounts, without always naming the experts, summed up the assessments in similar terms: a man of very low self-esteem, hypersensitive to insult, with a deep sense of inferiority about his body, whose anger could be traced to his father's abuse. Athens Voice also reports that the psychologists pointed to sexual repression.
Police and psychologists called him a maniacal killer, though his conduct, the press noted, did not fully match the foreign cases he was compared with. He did not choose strangers by type. By his own account, each person he attacked had, as he saw it, done him some wrong: a quarrel over a rifle, a remark about his height, a fare taken at a rank, a car sold below the agreed price, a courtship spoiled.
The label of Greece's first serial killer stuck. When a man was killing taxi drivers in Athens in 2017, iefimerida reported that a senior police officer had pointed to the Vakrinos case and to the same profile of low self-esteem and grievance. iefimerida, like several other outlets, put his toll at five killings and six people seriously wounded.
In Korydallos, other prisoners threatened him, and guards moved him into isolation, Enimerotiko reports. On May 12, 1997, about a month after his arrest, he was found dead there. He had taken his own life. He left no note. "He never told us anything about suicide," one of his sisters said.
His funeral was delayed. According to Enimerotiko, priests at first refused to hold the service because he had died by suicide. The Metropolis of Piraeus later allowed it after relatives argued that the cause of death had not been officially established. The service began an hour late. His father, three sisters, his widow and a few relatives from the village attended, and his widow paid for the funeral. She did not speak to his relatives, Enimerotiko reported.
With his death the case never reached a courtroom. No court ever weighed his confession against the evidence, and the families of the dead heard no verdict.
Every killing linked to Vakrinos rests on his confession and on the police account given to the press in April 1997. He was never tried, so none of the five killings, the seven attempted killings or the robberies was proved in court.
The number of dead differs between retellings. Most accounts, including Athens Voice, Reader.gr, Enimerotiko and iefimerida, give five killings. Some later online retellings, and toManifesto, also count a young man in Peristeri as killed in May 1996, bringing the total to six; Reader.gr, Enimerotiko and Athens Voice describe the Peristeri shooting as one in which people were wounded or fired upon, not killed.
The dates of his arrest and death also vary. Athens Voice and Enimerotiko date the arrest to April 9, 1997, and toManifesto puts the news on April 10. Some later retellings give May 12, 1997, as the arrest date and May 25 as the date of death; Athens Voice, Reader.gr, Enimerotiko and toManifesto all give May 12, 1997, as the date he died.
Ages differ: Gaglias is 43 in the reports; Simitzi is 28 or 25; the Spyropoulos brothers are 21 and 20, or 23 and 35. His own year of birth is given as 1962 or 1963. To Vima's 2017 article calls him Theodoros rather than Dimitris, which appears to confuse him with the victim Andreadis.
The motives come from him. What he said about why he attacked each person was reported from his statements to police, and some of it was disputed: the father of the young woman in the Peristeri case said she barely knew him, and his first mother-in-law denied his claim that she had hit him.
1962 or 1963: Born in Pyrri, Gortynia, Arcadia.
About 1975: Leaves the village at 13 to work at a taverna in Chasia, Athens.
Later 1970s to 1992: Trains as a welder; works in the shipyards on the Gulf of Elefsina and drives a taxi on the side.
About August 6, 1987: Panagiotis Gaglias, 43, is beaten to death; his body is found near Argos on August 14 (confessed in 1997).
1990: First marriage; it lasts about 14 months.
1992: Leaves the shipyards and drives a taxi full time; sets fire to his father-in-law's summer house on Salamis, according to press reports.
March 14, 1993: Two young men shot and wounded in Votanikos (confessed).
November 20, 1993: Anastasia Simitzi dies of burns near Mandra, western Attica (confessed).
January 9, 1994: Taxi driver Theodoros Andreadis, 35, shot dead near the Isthmus of Corinth (confessed).
Late 1995: Supermarket robberies in Nikaia and Aigaleo by a gunman in a motorcycle helmet (confessed).
December 10, 1995: Two young men shot in Sepolia; one is left permanently disabled (confessed).
December 21, 1995: Brothers Kostas and Antonis Spyropoulos shot dead in Menidi (confessed).
March and June 1996: Further supermarket robberies in Nikaia and Aigaleo (confessed).
May 30 or 31, 1996: Two police officers and a civilian wounded or fired upon in Peristeri (confessed).
August 1996: Second marriage; lives in Moschato.
April 9, 1997: Arrested at a taverna in Nikaia; confesses to five killings, seven attempted killings and five robberies, according to press reports.
May 12, 1997: Dies by suicide in Korydallos prison while awaiting trial.