In the spring of 1985, Prague was preparing for the Spartakiáda, the mass gymnastics display that Czechoslovakia staged at the Strahov stadium every five years. That year the events at Strahov ran from June 27 to 30, and the city expected large crowds. Over the preceding months, women who walked alone in the city at night were being attacked, and by May the police believed that the attacks were connected. The press later gave the offender the name "spartakiádní vrah", the Spartakiáda killer, after the festival that framed the case.
The man behind the attacks was a school apprentice. Czech Television reported that he was a 16-year-old training as a machinist and living in a dormitory in Stochov, a mining town near Kladno, who came into Prague at weekends. Seznam Zprávy, drawing on statements in the case file, gave a slightly different picture of his age: he was 15 when the first attack took place in February 1985 and turned 16 in April. Most reports that give a single age put him at 16 at the time of the killings and at sentencing. Under either account he was a juvenile, which governed the sentence he received.
The killings and attacks were committed between February 17 and May 16, 1985. Police arrested him on May 22. Prague City Court sentenced him on December 17, 1985, as a juvenile, to ten years in prison.
Seznam Zprávy described Jiří Straka as coming from an intact family. His mother worked in a warehouse at a transport company, and his father was a bricklayer who sometimes took work abroad. He had a younger brother, then in primary school, and an older sister who was finishing a teacher-training school. The family lived in the Krč district of Prague.
The same article traced several earlier episodes from the file. When he was in the second grade, in 1977, a school doctor referred him to a psychiatric clinic in Krč because of restlessness and inattention. Doctors recommended that he be admitted to hospital that June, but his mother declined and did not bring him back for follow-up appointments. At twelve he was questioned about a barn fire; he said that a cigarette had been put out carelessly by one of four boys, but because he was the oldest, the blame fell on him. In October 1983 he repeatedly emptied the coin box of a nearby telephone booth. In 1984, with two other boys, he broke into railway wagons at the Praha-Krč yard and took chocolates and sweets from the Orion factory; criminal proceedings were dropped because the boys were under fifteen.
He went on to a mining vocational school in Stochov, which he had entered in 1983 according to Blesk, and was in his second year when the attacks began. Blesk reported that he had a tested intelligence quotient of 125, higher than average, but was not a good pupil, and that he began stealing at the school. During the week he lived in the dormitory; on weekends and at other times he told his parents he was going back to it, and instead stayed in Prague.
The sequence ran from a first attack in mid-February, further attacks in March and the first death in April, then a sharp acceleration in May.
Seznam Zprávy placed the first attack on Sunday, February 17, 1985, in the southern district of Braník, where a 19-year-old woman escaped after speaking to him. Other reports gave her age as 20 and described the same escape. In March, a young woman in Prague 6 was injured and robbed, according to Czech Television and Blesk.
The first death was on April 8, 1985. The victim was a 23-year-old woman in Prague 4, according to Czech Television and Blesk. On May 4, a 30-year-old woman was killed in the early hours; on the same night another woman, aged 53, was attacked and survived (Seznam Zprávy). The third death came in the early hours of May 16, 1985, in Prague 6; Seznam Zprávy and Eurozpravy.cz placed it in the Dejvice district. Czech Television gave the victim's age as 29. An 18-year-old woman survived that night, and her statement would lead police to him.
By the end of the series, he had attacked 11 women between February 17 and May 16, according to Blesk and Eurozpravy.cz. Three had died and two others had survived attacks the court treated as attempts to kill. The court's findings also included robberies and thefts; the money from small thefts on the metro and on buses went on food and cinema tickets for himself and friends, Seznam Zprávy wrote.
The three women who died have never been publicly named, and neither have the women who survived.
The investigation was led by a team around Major Jiří Markovič, one of the best-known criminal investigators of the period, with Captain Josef Doucha and Lieutenant Eduard Kropáček, according to Seznam Zprávy. Markovič later said that more than 200 police officers worked on the case. He told Blesk that early on police detained the wrong man, a victim's partner, until forensic traces excluded him. He then asked for the files on all women attacked in Prague and found that an earlier attack had taken place at the same location; one of the surviving women, 20 years old, had spoken to her attacker, who told her he was 16 and lived in a school dormitory outside Prague.
Doucha told Blesk that the pressure before the Spartakiáda was extreme. Officers from outside the patrol branches were sent onto the streets, and investigators slept two or three hours a day. In an interview Markovič recalled that parents were afraid to send their daughters to Prague and that, because of the case, there was talk of cancelling the Spartakiáda. Blesk quoted him as saying he had never before or after worked under such terrible political pressure. The offender's youth made him hard to suspect: Seznam Zprávy wrote that his childlike appearance and his age meant the early attacks did not look like the work of one person.
Two items of evidence are reported to have led to him. Czech Television and Seznam Zprávy reported that the 18-year-old woman who escaped told police who he was and where he went to school; he had met her earlier and given her his name and the name of the school. Police found her identity card, together with other stolen items, in his locker in the Stochov dormitory. Blesk and Eurozpravy.cz added a second line of inquiry: a gold chain taken from one victim had been given by him to a girlfriend, she recognized it when police showed it in a television appeal, and she called the police, who had him in custody within about two hours.
Police went to the dormitory in Stochov and arrested him on May 22, 1985, six days after the last attack, Czech Television and Blesk reported. He was 16.
Blesk, in an article published after Markovič's death on October 20, 2022, set out the first day of questioning. It began in the afternoon and ran until late at night. From 17:30 to 21:00, he talked mainly about himself, his family, friends, school results and hobbies. At 22:55 he was given tea. From 23:15 until 01:30, the questions turned to the first killing. His defense lawyer objected that he was a minor and could not be questioned after midnight; Markovič answered by asking the young man directly how he wanted to proceed. According to Blesk, the confession took shape over that whole night. Doucha said later that there was no need to build a case beyond the statements he gave, and that he described the offences in detail and without remorse.
Seznam Zprávy added that he told investigators he would have continued, and that the number of further victims could have been 10 to 20. Blesk gave a similar remark, that he would have killed at least ten. Blesk reported that he cooperated in the questioning and in the reconstructions, and that he expressed regret only at having been caught. During one reconstruction, according to Radio Prague, onlookers demanded that he be handed over to them, and police reinforcements were needed to protect him.
Psychiatric experts examined him. Blesk reported that psychologists described him as asocial and aggressive, and that psychiatrists found him without empathy. Czech Television wrote that the court's experts described him as aggressive. He was later examined in Bohnice, the large Prague psychiatric hospital, Seznam Zprávy reported.
The trial was held at the Prague City Court (Městský soud v Praze), and the verdict was delivered on December 17, 1985, according to Czech Television, Blesk and the other outlets that give a date. By the court's findings, as the reports state them, he was guilty of three murders and two attempted murders, together with further offences, among them three robberies and five thefts.
Because he was a juvenile, the sentence was the maximum the law allowed for his age: ten years' imprisonment, to be followed by institutional treatment (ústavní léčba), Czech Television reported. The reports return again and again to the comparison with an adult. Czech Television wrote that, had he been an adult, the offences would probably have meant the death penalty; Radio Prague wrote that he would likely have faced the death penalty had he been two years older; and Deník, in an article built around a photograph caption, said that his age was the one thing that saved him from the gallows.
Seznam Zprávy summarized the trial in one line: because he was a juvenile, the maximum sentence was ten years, and as an adult he could have faced execution. Blesk's later retrospective, marking forty years since the verdict, reported that he was 16 when he was sentenced. His defense lawyer, Blesk wrote, was reportedly very nervous during the proceedings because the accused had admitted everything in such detail that the defense had little to contest.
The reports say he served his sentence in the prisons at Ruzyně, Valdice and Bělušice. Experts recommended a neurosurgical operation intended to reduce his aggression; Czech Television and Seznam Zprávy both reported that he refused it.
After the prison term he was placed in institutional treatment in a closed department of the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, in Prague, where, according to Czech Television, he married during treatment; the marriage later broke down. Altogether he spent about 19 years in prisons and clinics, Czech Television and Blesk reported. Blesk's 2008 article put the total at about 21 years, ten of them in prison and the remainder in psychiatric institutions in Prague and Opava.
Czech Television, Blesk and Seznam Zprávy all place his release from prison in 1994, and Blesk gives May 1994. Czech Television and Blesk attribute it to an amnesty by President Václav Havel. The accounts are not consistent on the details. Blesk dated the amnesty to 1993 in one article and said in another that it was granted "a year earlier"; Seznam Zprávy called it a broad presidential amnesty; Noviny.sk wrote in 2015 that he served the full ten years. Czech Television's own history of Havel's amnesty, the one of January 1990, states that it did not apply to people convicted of murder, rape or robbery, and that longer sentences were shortened by between a third and a half; that article does not mention Straka. The legal basis of the release has never been publicly documented.
What the reports agree on is that his release from prison did not end the state's custody. He went from prison into protective psychiatric care, and he remained there for roughly ten years.
In January 2004 he was moved to the psychiatric hospital in Opava, Blesk reported, and he left it in December 2004. Radio Prague, reporting on December 22, 2004, wrote that a court in Opava had changed his status from inpatient to outpatient treatment, that he had already been allowed home at weekends, and that doctors said they had no further treatment to offer. The release came 19 years after the offences. A commentary in Novinky on the same day said the judge had acted on the opinions of doctors, sexologists and psychiatrists, which the columnist described as the only thing that could persuade a court that a man was no longer dangerous.
He was required to continue outpatient treatment. Blesk reported in 2008 that he attended outpatient treatment, that the head of the Opava department, Milan Vilč, confirmed this and said Straka followed a special regime, and that Vilč declined to say whether he could still be dangerous. The same article reported that he had repeatedly asked to be released from the obligations of his treatment, that a court had once rejected a request, and that he later withdrew another after the press attention.
In 2007 the psychologist Daniel Štrobl cited him in Deník as an example of the principle that a person who has served a sentence should be treated as innocent, while warning that, if he were ever to reoffend, the person might be someone driven into a corner by constant media interest. Blesk reported in 2008 that he had changed his surname and had married in December 2006. The same reports describe him as living quietly and refusing interviews and photographs. Press accounts since then have described him as living in the Czech Republic under a changed surname.
Jiří Markovič, who died on October 20, 2022, remained associated with the case until his death. In 2016 he told the Czech News Agency that for Straka, killing a person was like squashing a fly, a remark that Deník reprinted. Blesk, marking forty years since the verdict, quoted Doucha, by then a lawyer, on the weeks before the Spartakiáda, and quoted his reaction to the confession: that he had not believed his eyes, and that Straka had done their work for them.
In January 2026 Oneplay released Metoda Markovič: Straka, a drama series that follows Markovič's investigation. Seznam Zprávy reviewed it and listed Maxmilián Kocek in the title role of Straka and Petr Lněnička as Markovič. The series is a fictional account and its scenes are not treated as fact.
The press accounts conflict in several places.
The number of women he attacked is generally given as 11, including three who died and two who survived attempts to kill them. The reports list the same convictions, but the descriptions of individual incidents differ in dates, districts and the ages of women. Seznam Zprávy and Eurozpravy.cz, for example, place one killing in the Dejvice district; Czech Television places it in Prague 6 and gives the victim's age as 29, while another account describes a victim of 22.
The 1994 release is reported as the result of an amnesty by President Václav Havel, but the dates and details given for the amnesty differ between reports and do not match the January 1990 amnesty that Czech Television describes.
Statements that he said he would have killed 10 to 20 more women were attributed to him by Seznam Zprávy and, as at least ten, by Blesk. They are his reported remarks to police, not findings of the court, and the reports mention no charge in connection with any other killing.
1977: Jiří Straka, in the second grade, is referred by a school doctor to a psychiatric clinic; hospital admission is recommended and declined.
1983: He enters a mining vocational school in Stochov, near Kladno.
February 17, 1985: The first attack in Prague takes place; the woman escapes.
March 1985: A young woman in Prague 6 is attacked and robbed.
April 1985: He turns 16.
April 8, 1985: The first woman dies.
May 4, 1985: A second woman dies; another woman is attacked the same night and survives.
May 16, 1985: The third woman dies; this is the last attack.
May 22, 1985: He is arrested at the school dormitory in Stochov and questioned through the night.
June 27 to 30, 1985: The Spartakiáda takes place at Strahov.
December 17, 1985: The Prague City Court sentences him as a juvenile to ten years' imprisonment followed by institutional treatment.
May 1994: He is released from prison, reportedly under a presidential amnesty, and enters closed psychiatric care.
January 2004: He is moved to the psychiatric hospital in Opava.
December 2004: A court in Opava changes his status to outpatient treatment and he leaves the hospital.
2006: He marries, according to Blesk's 2008 report.
October 20, 2022: Jiří Markovič dies.
January 2026: The series Metoda Markovič: Straka is released.