The roster carries him as Papaxronis, a direct transliteration of the Greek. He is usually written in English as Kyriakos Papachronis.
He was born in 1960 at Xanthi, where his family kept a cafe he worked in as a boy. He was a competitive boxer and karateka. At nineteen he was serving as a reserve officer with a special forces unit at Drama, and moved between Thessaloniki, Kavala, Drama and Xanthi.
Between 1981 and 1982 he attacked women working as prostitutes at night, raping and stabbing them. Three were killed: Theocharidou, Papadopoulou and Anastasia Alexandridou. Five more women survived attempted rapes. The Greek press called him the Ogre of Drama.
The uniform is the fact the case turns on. Every surviving victim and every witness described a heavily built man in army uniform, and he used it as cover: a soldier in uniform at night, in a garrison town, had a reason to be anywhere. It was the survivors' evidence that identified him, and he was arrested on December 13, 1982.
Because he was a serving soldier he was tried by court martial rather than in the civil courts. He was sentenced twice over; the accounts differ as to whether those were two death sentences or two terms of life imprisonment, and the point is not trivial, because Greece had abolished capital punishment for ordinary crimes in 1975 but retained it under military law until 1993, so a death sentence was available to a military court in 1983 and would not have been available to a civil one. Either way the sentence became a single term of life imprisonment.
He was violent and undisciplined in his early years inside and by the late 1990s was being described as a model prisoner. He received letters from women who wanted to meet him. He applied for release in December 2004 and was let out that month, aged forty-four, having served about twenty-one and a half years, subject to conditions.
He has not been in trouble since. He married, and reporting in 2024 placed him living out of the public eye with his wife, in poor health, saying he regretted what he had done. He said at his trial that if he had not been caught he would have gone on.
The entry that stood here said nothing was recorded about him after the release. What is recorded is that a man who killed three women and attempted to rape five more was at liberty at forty-four and has now been free for longer than he was imprisoned.