Jozef Slovák was born on April 7, 1951 at Plavecký Štvrtok in western Slovakia. Slovak accounts describe a man of well above average intelligence, constantly reading, with a facility for getting into conversation with strangers, and it was the last of these that he used. Court psychiatrists assessed him as a psychopathic personality. He had been before the courts eight times.
In August 1978 he met a twenty-one-year-old Yugoslav woman on a train, offered her somewhere to stay in Bratislava, and took her to Železná studnička, the wooded valley on the edge of the city. He killed her there. In 1982 he was sentenced to fifteen years and sent to Leopoldov.
On March 10, 1990 he was released on licence under the general amnesty that followed the change of government in Czechoslovakia. Without it he would not have been out until 1997. Slovak writing on the amnesty returns to his case more than any other.
He killed again within four months. On July 4, 1990 he met sixteen-year-old Monika Ondíková in Prague and took her out to the Konopiště estate near Benešov. In the park he fired a gas pistol at her eight times with nerve agent rounds, then beat her to death with a stick. He took her money, several currencies of it, along with a ring and her cosmetics, dragged the body into the trees and covered it with branches. Seven days later he came back and put a train ticket from České Budějovice in her pocket to send the police somewhere else.
Seventeen days after that he killed eighteen-year-old Vladislava Maříková, from Cheb, whom he had met on the train from Plzeň to Bratislava. Two more followed, Diana Lopuchovská and Anna Královičová. The last of them was killed in July 1991 and found at Železná studnička, the same wood as his first victim thirteen years earlier.
The four murders of 1990 and 1991 were investigated by Jozef Vachálek of the Slovak police. Vachálek has said publicly that Slovák came to trust him and confessed because, in Slovák's own words, he was the only one who had not questioned him about nonsense, and that he then began to talk about other victims and to show, voluntarily, the places where he had left them. The two have remained in contact for decades.
In August 1993 the Bratislava city court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the four proved murders. He is still serving it. In 1997 he complained to the town authorities at Ilava that he could not work on new inventions in electronics in prison, for want of tools and of a typewriter.
The count here is five: four convictions from 1993 and the 1978 murder for which he had already served. Slovak sources say at least five and are clear that the total is unresolved, and figures from interviews with the investigator about further victims have never been tested in court.