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Ukrainian Police Arrest Serhiy Tkach in Polohy, Ending a Series of Killings of Girls That Lasted 25 Years

"I've been waiting for you for 25 years," the former police criminalist reportedly told the officers. At least ten other men had been jailed for his crimes.

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Illustration of two men at the gate of a whitewashed rural house beside a sunflower field in a small Ukrainian town. Not an actual scene from the case.

For 25 years, other men went to prison for killings Serhiy Tkach committed. In August 2005, police in the Ukrainian town of Polohy came to his house, and he reportedly told them he had been waiting for them all that time.

Tkach was detained at his home on the edge of Polohy, in the Zaporizhzhia region, on August 5, 2005, after the killing of a local girl. Born in Russia's Kemerovo region in 1952, he had trained at a police school and worked as a criminalist before being dismissed for falsifying the results of an expert examination, after which he moved to Ukraine. During the investigation he drew detailed diagrams of places where he had waited for women years earlier.

Tkach's killings stretched across Crimea and the Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. Police had extracted confessions under torture from at least ten other men, who were convicted of individual killings he had committed, and some of them stayed in prison for years after his arrest. One victim's father took his own life in his cell after being arrested.

In December 2008 a court in Dnipropetrovsk convicted Tkach and sentenced him to life in prison, and a year later he received a second life sentence for 10 more killings and rapes. He claimed to have killed more than 100 girls and women. He died in prison in 2018.

Lenta.ru reported that Tkach was convicted in December 2008 of 37 proven murders, while Pravo.ru said the 2008 verdict covered 36 murders and attempted murders, with 10 more cases added at a second trial a year later.

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