In May 2005 Sergei Bluestein, a forty-two-year-old homeless man in Haifa, went to an abandoned kindergarten to celebrate his birthday over vodka with a man he had known for two years. In the course of the drinking Bluestein asked his friend whether he had ever stolen anything from the market. The friend flew into a rage, shouting that everybody hated him, and beat Bluestein, strangling him and stomping on him again and again, and left him for dead. The next morning Bluestein dragged himself out onto the street, where passersby found him and took him to the hospital. He spent three days in the emergency room. When he came out he went looking for the man to take revenge, and instead was arrested himself, as a suspect in the killing of a homeless man found dead in that same kindergarten. In the interrogation room he told the police about a violent drinking companion he knew only as Nicolai.
Nicolai Bonner was born in 1972 in a village in Soviet Moldavia, the third of four children. His mother worked in a factory and his father drank and paid his children little attention. When Nicolai was nine his mother died and he was sent to a boarding school, where he began drinking vodka to ease his loneliness. He worked as a shepherd, then took menial jobs in Ukraine and Russia, and a year into his travels he was convicted of theft and served a year in prison. Back in Moldova he married an eighteen-year-old girl, and in 2000 the couple emigrated to Israel; he was not Jewish, but his wife was, and that made him eligible under the Law of Return. They rented an apartment in Haifa, and he worked in construction, including two years at a pipe plant in Acre, where his employer, Yossi Ben-David, found him diligent and respectful.
In January 2003 his wife died suddenly of tuberculosis. His drinking got worse and so did his work, and eventually he quit, drifted around the country looking for labor and came back to Haifa to live on the streets. He befriended an older homeless man, Simon Ariri, drank vodka at his place, and found a new girlfriend. In September 2004 he moved in with his sister in Tel Aviv; after she was deported he worked construction at the moshav Emunim, and in December he was fired and returned to Haifa.
On February 9, 2005, he offered to help Rita Wolman get home to her apartment on Hussein Street. Wolman, fifty-one or fifty-two, a fellow immigrant and former bar singer, had injured her leg in a car crash, and she already knew him. She invited him in for a drink, and they ate, drank and smoked until late, and because of the hour she offered to let him sleep there. He took it as an invitation to sex and asked; she refused. He slapped her twice, she slapped him back, and he struck her on the head and knocked her unconscious, then raped her. When he saw that she had stopped breathing he set her bed on fire with a lighter. The next day a man named Nicolai Bonner came into Rambam Hospital with a severe head injury.
On March 11 he went to the home of Alexander Levant, thirty-four, a Russian immigrant known as "the Chechen," who had fought in the Second Chechen War. They knew each other from the market and drank together. When Levant fell asleep Bonner tried to take a bottle; Levant woke and told him to leave it, and Bonner beat him to death and set the body alight with matches. In late April, in the abandoned kindergarten on Gush Halav Street where addicts and drinkers gathered, he lit a fire for warmth with Valeri Soznov, thirty-two, another drinker. They argued, for reasons never made clear, and Bonner beat Soznov to death, kicked his body into the fire and ran. On May 1 he was squatting in an empty apartment with Alexander Kars, thirty-nine, a homeless immigrant he had met the day before. Kars said something about Bonner's mother. Bonner picked up a heavy stick, beat him to the ground and strangled him with a television cable.
After Bluestein's statement, police officers dressed as vagrants and went among the homeless. Many of the people they spoke to told them about a violent man named Nicolai who set fire to the places where they drank. The hospital record from the day after Wolman's death gave them his full name. They had nothing yet to tie him to the killings, so they watched him. On May 29, 2005, they arrested him at his mother-in-law's home. Within hours he had confessed to all four killings, describing what he could remember and why. Asked if he felt any remorse, he said "No," and burst into tears.
He was tried at the Haifa District Court. A few weeks in, he took the confessions back: he said the police had pressured him into signing while he was drunk and had threatened to kill his daughter and his girlfriend when he refused. His lawyer, Ofer Cohen, argued that he did not read Hebrew well and had signed papers nobody explained to him, and asked for a reduced sentence on the ground that psychiatrists had diagnosed him with paranoid personality disorder and that he had been too drunk to be responsible. In his own testimony Bonner confirmed that he had been at each of the four scenes with each of the four dead, while insisting he learned only later that they had been killed. The prosecution offered a deal of two consecutive life terms and two concurrent ones if he pleaded guilty. He refused, and Cohen said he respected his client's wish, because Bonner still maintained that he was innocent.
The judges rejected his account of the confessions. In November 2006 they convicted him of four murders and of the rape of Rita Wolman, along with arson and further offenses, and acquitted him of sodomy. In May 2007 they sentenced him to four consecutive life terms, and to seventeen more years to run concurrently: five for the attempted murder of Bluestein, nine for aggravated rape, and three for the rest, which included aggravated wounding, destroying evidence and obstructing justice.
His appeal reached the Supreme Court, and by 2013 it had turned into an argument among the justices about Israel's rule on excluding evidence obtained by improper means. One wrote that the investigating authorities had not managed to change their internal rules in a way that would stop the violation of suspects' rights, and that he saw no reason to fear a flood of challenges to the admissibility of evidence, since challenges with nothing in them would not weigh heavily on criminal trials. Israelis know him as the killer of the homeless. As of 2025 he was the only person convicted in Israel who meets the definition of a serial killer.