On December 8, 1982, Vasiliki Lazaridou, a thirty-year-old cleaner and mother of four in Drama, was stabbed in the face and in the carotid artery by a man who had been following her for days. She survived, and five days later, on December 13, the Drama security police arrested Kyriakos Papachronis, twenty-two, a heavily built young man doing his military service with a special forces unit at Drama. For fifteen months the towns of eastern Macedonia and Thrace had been hunting the man the press called the Ogre of Drama, and what the survivors remembered was that he wore an army uniform.
He was born in 1960 in Xanthi, where his family kept a cafe, and was a competitive boxer and karate fighter. His attacks began in September 1981, when he raped and killed a woman working as a prostitute, and they ran across Drama, Xanthi, Kavala and Thessaloniki. Most of his victims were prostitutes. On September 21, 1982, he attacked a twenty-three-year-old who got away. On October 1 he stalked and badly wounded an eighteen-year-old a few yards from her home in Drama, and on October 25 he seriously wounded a thirty-two-year-old prostitute in Xanthi. He also planted bombs: one in Xanthi on March 12, 1982, two in Kavala, and one at the gate of the army camp where he served. He kept the cigarette lighter of Anastasia Alexandridou, one of the women he killed, as a souvenir, and it helped tie him to her death. He said later that the sound of women's heels aroused him.
Greek accounts of the toll differ. He is often described as having killed three women, but the convictions recorded against him were for two intentional homicides, one rape, two attempted rapes, three attempted homicides, five bombings, a train derailment and an arson. The court sentenced him twice to death and to twenty-three years in prison. When he heard the sentence, he told the court to send him to the firing squad, because if he got out he would do the same things again. The death sentences were converted to life imprisonment.
In his first years inside he was undisciplined and violent; from the 1990s he was described as a model prisoner, and he received letters from women who admired him. By 2004 he had served twenty-one years, five months and five days, which with credit for prison work counted as more than twenty-five years. Judges had earlier refused to release him over his disciplinary record, but the Council of Appeals of Larissa granted his application, and he walked out of Larissa prison on December 8, 2004, at forty-four. He was ordered to report to the police every fifteen days and barred from living in Xanthi, Drama or Thessaloniki. On his release he handed reporters a statement in which he said he had sold himself to Lucifer and asked publicly for forgiveness.
He married and settled with his wife in Larissa. Reports in recent years have described him living in isolation and using a wheelchair.