Fifteen minutes before the law said the police had to let him go, Jozef Slovák decided to talk. It was July 20, 1991, and Bratislava detectives had been questioning him for days about Diana Lopuchovská, a seventeen-year-old mother who had vanished at the end of June. He had denied everything. By evening only one detective was still in the room with him, Jozef Vachálek. With the clock nearly out, Slovák told him, by Vachálek's account, that he would show him where she was, but only him, and only for two cartons of cigarettes. That night he rode with the detectives out to Záhorská Bystrica, on the northern edge of the city, and led Vachálek to her body.
Diana had a three-month-old daughter. The baby's father, Eugen, was in prison, and she had not seen him for half a year. On June 25, 1991, a well-dressed man in his forties rang the bell of her flat in a Petržalka high-rise, called himself Captain Jozef Slovák and held up a service card. He said he was with the prison and court guard and that for five hundred crowns he could take her to Eugen, whose unit was working in the vineyards at Záhorská Bystrica. The card was forged. The one true thing he brought to her door, according to the reconstruction of the case that the Czech daily Deník published in 2026, was a grudge: he had come to settle scores with Eugen for what Eugen had done to him in prison. At 8:10 the next morning Diana phoned a friend to ask her to mind the baby, handed her over ten minutes later and went to meet him under the SNP Bridge in her best clothes. They rode the number 102 bus to the end of the line and climbed the hill toward the vineyards. In a clearing he killed her with a single blow to the throat that broke the hyoid bone, went through her things, covered her with branches and took the bus back into town.
Detectives checking on Eugen had found Slovák's trail quickly, and on that suspicion they picked him up at the snack bars under the SNP Bridge in mid-July. His hands were scratched. They did not yet know why. Eighteen-year-old Anna Královičová had left her flat for a walk at two in the afternoon and met him in the woods at Železná studienka, the forest park below Kamzík hill. He went at her with a stick, and she fought him and clawed at him before he strangled her. He robbed her, threw brush over the body and left it to be found by a passer-by near the state sanatorium. The dates in the published accounts do not agree: Slovak sources put her death on July 16 and his arrest on July 18, while the Deník reconstruction has her leaving home on July 7 and the arrest on July 17.
What followed was a negotiation conducted on Slovák's terms. In the cell he would speak only to Vachálek and sat in silence whenever anyone else came in. At one interrogation he offered another body if the head of the criminal police promised to promote the young detective; the chief came down to the cell, and within two weeks Vachálek was promoted. Slovák then confessed to killing Anna Královičová. He went on to confess to two murders from the summer before, of Monika Ondíková and Vladislava Maříková, which no one had connected to him at all. Vachálek has said that Slovák came to trust him because he was the only one who had not asked him about nonsense, and that he is the only person to whom Slovák has ever admitted anything.
The man the detectives were dealing with was forty and had spent much of his adult life in prison. He was born on April 7, 1951, at Plavecký Štvrtok in the Záhorie region of western Slovakia, and his mother and stepfather had put him in a reform school. He dropped out of every course of study he began, yet the patent office in Prague had registered twenty-seven of his inventions, most of them in electronics, including a gas mixture to drive a photochemical pulse pump. He read technical journals by the hour and drank with the petty thieves who drifted around Bratislava's snack bars. He also made forged papers of real quality. The Slovak investigative journalist Ján Petrovič, who followed the case, has described a set of transparent overlays Slovák used to change the rank on his false cards, so that he could present himself one day as a secret service agent, the next as a uniformed officer, then as a vice detective or a prison guard. Court experts assessed him as a narcissistic and psychopathic personality for whom other people were objects.
That was how he had killed the first time. In August 1978, on a train from Poland, he met Blažica P., a twenty-one-year-old tourist from Yugoslavia on her first visit to Czechoslovakia, and offered her a place to sleep in Bratislava and a view of the city from Kamzík. On Tuesday, August 22, they walked hand in hand from Železná studienka up the wooded hill toward the television tower. When he grabbed at her and pulled up her shirt she screamed, and he strangled her with his bare hands. He dragged her off the path, hid her under fallen branches, burned her clothes on the spot and kept her jewelry and some of her belongings, which he gave to his girlfriend. Two hikers found her in the undergrowth two weeks later. A television appeal for witnesses brought nobody forward.
On April 5, 1979, Slovák walked into the city police headquarters on Špitálska Street and told the man at the desk that he knew about the murder of the Yugoslav woman. The doorman took him for a drunk and nearly threw him out. It then took four years to bring him to sentence, because he gave the detectives a new version almost every time they spoke: that she had gone off to Vienna alone and he knew nothing of her death; that a taxi driver had fought with her and killed her and paid him to help get rid of the body; that she had tried to recruit him to gather information on strategic sites, blackmailed him with a photograph, and that he had shot her in the quarrel that followed. Years later, in one of the few interviews he gave, he said she had known the people he forged documents with and wanted him to smuggle a wanted Pole into the country. The investigators settled on a simpler account, that he had started to kiss and undress her, she had fought and screamed, and he had choked her to stop the noise. He has never accepted a sexual motive. "I could have and did have as many women as I wanted," he has said. "I never raped anyone." In 1982 the Bratislava city court sentenced him to fifteen years, most of which he served at Leopoldov.
On March 10, 1990, he walked out of Leopoldov on parole, having served about eleven years counting his time in custody. In Slovakia his release became the case most often cited against the sweeping amnesty President Václav Havel declared on January 1, 1990, which emptied much of the country's prisons at once. The Deník reconstruction puts the mechanics more precisely: for murderers the amnesty cut sentences by no more than a year, and Slovák applied for early release on reaching two thirds of his term under the ordinary law, at a moment when the courts, swept along by the revolution and anxious to show a more humane face, put nothing in his way. Either way, he had been free for less than four months when he killed again.
In Prague he met Monika Ondíková, sixteen, from Moldava nad Bodvou in eastern Slovakia, a girl young enough to be his daughter. They took a cabin at the Nová Myslivna campsite near Konopiště, the château outside Benešov, and he suggested a walk in the château's game park, telling her that the heir to the throne whose murder in Sarajevo started the First World War had lived there. In the empty park he drew a gas pistol and fired at her repeatedly, eight times with nerve-agent cartridges according to Slovak accounts, and when she fell he beat her to death with a stick. He hid her under branches and took what she carried, which was a great deal: 2,400 US dollars, 800 German marks and about 16,000 Austrian schillings. Then he went to the campsite reception, introduced himself as a detective, asked for the guest book and tore out the page that recorded his own stay. A few days later he went back to the body and slipped into her pocket a train ticket for České Budějovice dated after her death, for a time when he had arranged an alibi. Slovak sources date the killing to July 4, 1990; the Deník reconstruction places the couple at the campsite at the end of June and records a forestry worker finding the badly decomposed body of an unknown woman in the Velká obora woods at Konopiště on July 2.
Seventeen days later he was on the train from Plzeň to Bratislava when eighteen-year-old Vladislava Maříková, from Cheb, sat down in his compartment. She told him she was going to Trnava to tell her boyfriend it was over. He bought drinks along the way and talked her into stopping in Bratislava first, and on the evening of July 21, 1990, they walked through the forest park on Kamzík to a gazebo near the television tower, where he strangled her. He robbed her and buried her under the roots of a fallen tree near the Strmá ski meadow.
For a while the law caught up with him on a lesser charge. On October 14, 1990, he was taken into custody after police found unregistered guns at his home, and he was sentenced to eight months for illegal possession of arms. He was released on June 14, 1991. Eleven days later he rang Diana Lopuchovská's doorbell.
Through the late summer of 1991 the detectives documented the crimes with Slovák as their guide, and he enjoyed it. He took them back and forth across Czechoslovakia in search of real or supposed evidence and insisted on being flown by helicopter to Cheb. Excavators were brought in and the police dug in place after place, but he never showed them another body. In custody he boasted to other prisoners that if he had wanted to he could have pulled Vachálek's pistol and hijacked the helicopter, police and all, to Germany. He expressed no regret for any of the women.
At trial before the Bratislava city court he changed his story again and again, a process the families of the dead had to sit through. He spoke of secret codes, ciphers and bank accounts lost by the secret service that had fallen into his hands, written in invisible ink on a paper a cellmate had stolen, and of a videotape that would compromise the federal interior minister, Ján Langoš, over a prison riot at Leopoldov. The claims were strange enough that investigators checked whether he had ever worked for, or with, the secret police. Each one was disproved. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murders of Monika Ondíková, Vladislava Maříková, Diana Lopuchovská and Anna Královičová. The Deník reconstruction dates the verdict to September 13, 1991, and its confirmation by the Supreme Court to November 29, 1991, with the sentence becoming final on August 20, 1993, after every appeal was exhausted; Slovak accounts give August 20, 1993, as the date of the sentence itself.
Five women aged sixteen to twenty-one are proved against him. The police long suspected there were more, and the suspicion surfaces from time to time, but he has admitted no other killing and none has been tied to him.
He served the life term for many years at Ilava, where in 1997 he complained to town officials that he could not work on new inventions in electronics for lack of tools and a typewriter. He painted for a long time, and license fees from his patents still reach him in prison. He became eligible to ask for conditional release about ten years ago and has not done so. In the summer of 2026, at seventy-five and in a wheelchair, he was moved from Ilava to a special unit of the prison at Trenčín. He still telephones Jozef Vachálek, the one man he has ever confided in. "What would I do out there?" he asked the detective in a recent call. "I'm in a wheelchair. I have everything I need here, care, food. I don't miss anything or anyone. And there is nothing waiting for me outside." Nothing he has said in thirty-five years, by the accounts of the people who have dealt with him, has expressed sorrow for the women or their families.
April 7, 1951: Jozef Slovák is born at Plavecký Štvrtok in western Slovakia.
August 22, 1978: he strangles Blažica P., a twenty-one-year-old tourist from Yugoslavia, on the wooded hill below Kamzík in Bratislava.
April 5, 1979: he walks into the city police headquarters on Špitálska Street and says he knows about the murder.
1982: the Bratislava city court sentences him to fifteen years.
March 10, 1990: he is released from Leopoldov on parole.
1990: Monika Ondíková, sixteen, is shot with a gas pistol and beaten to death in the game park at Konopiště (dated July 4 in Slovak accounts; a body is found there on July 2 in another reconstruction).
July 21, 1990: he strangles Vladislava Maříková, eighteen, from Cheb, near the television tower on Kamzík.
October 14, 1990: he is taken into custody over unregistered guns and later sentenced to eight months.
June 14, 1991: he is released.
June 25, 1991: posing as a prison guard, he calls at Diana Lopuchovská's flat in Petržalka; the next day he kills her near Záhorská Bystrica.
July 1991: Anna Královičová, eighteen, is strangled at Železná studienka (July 16 or July 7 by differing accounts), and he is picked up in mid-July (July 18 or July 17).
July 20, 1991: he confesses and leads detective Jozef Vachálek to Diana Lopuchovská's body.
September 13, 1991: the Bratislava city court sentences him to life for the murders of Ondíková, Maříková, Lopuchovská and Královičová, by the Deník reconstruction's dating.
November 29, 1991: the Supreme Court confirms the verdict, by the same reconstruction.
August 20, 1993: the life sentence becomes final (Slovak accounts give this as the date of the sentence itself).
1997: at Ilava prison he complains to town officials that he cannot work on new inventions.
Summer 2026: at seventy-five and in a wheelchair, he is moved from Ilava to a special unit of the prison at Trenčín.