Vakrinos was born in 1961 and drove a taxi in Athens. He was short, and the Greek press made much of his account of himself as a man who had been mocked all his life and who killed people who slighted him.
Between 1987 and 1995 he killed five people: Panayiotis Gaglias, fifty-three, his room-mate; Anastasia Simitzi, twenty-six; Theodoros Andreadis, thirty-nine; and the brothers Costas and Antonis Spyropoulos, thirty-three and thirty-five. He beat one victim with an iron bar, burned another alive, and shot others. The killings arose out of arguments, debts and grudges rather than from any pattern of victim selection.
He was arrested on April 9, 1997 and confessed to the killings and to a series of armed robberies.
On May 12, 1997, about a month after his arrest, he hanged himself in Korydallos prison. There was no trial and no judgment.
The accessible record is Athens News Agency reporting from April and May 1997. The count of five rests on his confession and on the investigation, and it was never tested.