Igor Suprunyuck was born in 1988 in Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, the son of a taxi driver. He, Viktor Sayenko and Alexander Hanzha had grown up together in the same middle-class district and were nineteen in the summer of 2007.
Between June 25 and July 16, 2007, Suprunyuck and Sayenko killed twenty-one people. They walked and drove around the city and its outskirts and attacked whoever they met: pregnant women, elderly people, children, homeless men, people on their way home. They used hammers and steel construction bars, and they took photographs of the bodies and, in at least one case, recorded video. Ukrainian reporting called the pair the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs.
There was no motive of any conventional kind. Nothing was taken in most cases. The Ukrainian prosecution said at trial that they had done it for the recordings and to become famous, and Suprunyuck's own account varied.
They were arrested on July 23, 2007, after trying to sell a stolen mobile telephone. One of the videos was leaked from the case file onto the internet in 2008 and circulated internationally, which is how most people outside Ukraine have heard of it; it is genuine, and its circulation caused real distress to the family of the man in it.
Suprunyuck and Sayenko were convicted of twenty-one murders on February 11, 2009 and sentenced to life. Hanzha, who had taken part in earlier robberies but not the killings, received nine years.