Between April 1970 and May 1971 a man attacked more than fourteen women at night in Bucharest. He struck them with an axe or a hammer, stabbed them, bit their breasts and thighs and raped them, some of them after they were dead, and four died. The authorities mobilized some six thousand people and made more than 2,500 arrests before they found him. Bucharest in Ceaușescu's Romania was officially a city where such things did not happen, and the fear spread by rumor. People called the killer the Vampire of Bucharest, the Wolf-Man and the killer of blondes.
He was Ion Râmaru, whose name is also written Rîmaru, born on October 12, 1946, in Corabia. He was a student at the veterinary faculty in Bucharest, where his behavior had struck classmates and teachers as disturbed; he did badly, repeated his second year and was repeating his third when he was arrested on May 27, 1971. The women he killed were Elena Oprea, Fănică Ilie, Gheorghița Popa and, on the night of May 4 to 5, 1971, Mihaela Ursu, a university assistant; a passerby interrupted him before he could rape her. Among those who survived was Florica Marcu, knocked unconscious outside her house in June 1970, carried to the Sfânta Vineri cemetery, raped and stabbed, and saved by a truck driver.
At first he admitted the killings. During the investigation he tried to implicate his father, Florea Râmaru, a tram driver at a Bucharest depot. At trial he was tried for all of it, four aggravated murders, six attempted murders, five rapes, an attempted rape, a robbery and three thefts, and he argued that he had not been responsible for his actions. The court was not persuaded and sentenced him to death. Nicolae Ceaușescu refused clemency.
He was executed by firing squad in the courtyard of Jilava prison on October 23, 1971, five months after his arrest. Tied to a post, he struggled and shouted that his father was the only guilty one, and he was buried in an unmarked grave behind Fort 13 of the old prison. Florea Râmaru was never charged. He died on October 23, 1972, a year to the day after his son, after falling from a train; some accounts claim he was pushed. Decades later the criminalist Constantin Turai identified him as the killer of four women in Bucharest in 1944, a conclusion that has never been tested in any court.