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Serhiy Tkach, Serving Life for the Murders of Women and Girls in Ukraine, Dies in Prison

The former police investigator known in the press as the "Pologi maniac" died of heart failure in a Zhytomyr prison. No relatives came for his body.

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Illustration of a concrete prison wall topped with barbed wire beside a muddy road and birch trees in late autumn. Not the actual prison.

When Serhiy Tkach died, nobody came for him. The man the Ukrainian press called the "Pologi maniac," serving life for a series of rapes and murders of women and girls across two regions of the country, died in Zhytomyr Penal Institution No. 8 in early November 2018. Ukrainian media first reported the death on Wednesday, November 7, and said the cause was heart failure.

The head of the prison, Kostiantyn Shelovsky, gave the details the next day. Tkach had fallen ill in the afternoon, and at 3 p.m. the staff called an ambulance. His blood pressure was very low, but the crew did not take him away, and by 7 p.m. he was dead. Shelovsky put the date at November 4; the first reports had said he died on Monday, November 5. He had complained of heart trouble and shortness of breath, the warden said, and had caused no trouble in prison, sharing a cell with one other inmate and committing no violations. He was buried on November 7. No relatives came to claim the body. Tkach had married in prison, and his wife had once visited, but staff who tried to reach her after his death could not find her.

His conviction was a decade old. On December 23, 2008, the Dnipropetrovsk regional appeal court sentenced him to life after finding him guilty of 36 murders and attempted murders of women, among them underage girls, in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions between 1984 and 2005. The court also convicted him of robbing his victims, and the presiding judge, Serhiy Voloshko, told reporters that his guilt in four of the murders had not been proven. Tkach said in court that he would appeal.

He was born in Russia's Kemerovo region in 1952 and trained as a police investigator, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, but was dismissed for falsifying an expert assessment and moved to Ukraine in the late 1970s. He was arrested in August 2005 in Polohy, in the Zaporizhzhia region, where he was living. He claimed far more killings than were ever proven, and at the time of his death reports said he had admitted to more than 100.

The longest shadow of the case fell on other men. At least ten were jailed for crimes attributed to Tkach, according to the rights group, most of them after confessing under torture. Some spent up to ten years in prison. Volodymyr Svitlychny, the father of one of the victims, was arrested and hanged himself in his cell. Maxim Dmytrenko was freed in 2012 after eight years behind bars. Yakiv Popovych was 14 when police arrested him for the rape and murder of his cousin; he was released in 2008, three years after Tkach's arrest. In November 2008, a month before the verdict, Ukraine's Prosecutor General opened a criminal case against three Polohy police officers accused of using physical and psychological violence to force a man into confessing to the rape of a young girl. His conviction was overturned and he was freed.

What the reports of November 2018 established. The prison's own account of the death came through the warden's interview with a Ukrainian newspaper, which UNIAN carried; no statement from Ukraine's prison service was found. The date of death is given as November 4 by the warden and November 5 in the first report. Published counts of the murders proven against Tkach differ: the 2008 report of the verdict gives 36 murders and attempted murders, while later accounts say his guilt was established in 37 cases. His claims of more than 100 killings were never proven.

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