Nicolai Bonner was born in 1972 in a village in Moldova, then part of the Soviet Union, the third of four children. His mother worked in a factory and died when he was a child; his father drank. He was sent to a boarding school after her death, and it was there, by his own account, that he began drinking vodka against the loneliness. At nineteen he was caught stealing and sentenced to community service.
He emigrated to Israel and was living in Haifa. After his wife died he lost his home and drank heavily, and kept company with other homeless men in the city.
His first victim, in February 2005, was Rita Wolman, a resident of Haifa who was not homeless and who knew him already. She had trouble with her leg, and one evening asked him to help her get to her flat. They drank there together and he killed her.
The three who followed were homeless men who had been drinking with him: Alexander Levant, Valeri Sochnov and Alexander Kars. In each case, on the account given at his trial, they drank together to drunkenness and some small provocation set off an outburst in which he beat the man until he lost consciousness or died. Afterwards he set the bodies on fire, to destroy the evidence.
A fifth homeless man was attacked with the same violence and lived. He gave evidence that he had played dead while Bonner tried to set him alight. It was his account that identified Bonner and made the case.
Bonner was arrested on May 29, 2005 and admitted the killings within a few hours. At trial he took it all back, saying that he had been drunk when he confessed, that he had been put under pressure, and that police had threatened to harm his daughter and his girlfriend. The judges rejected those claims. He also acknowledged in evidence that he had been at each of the four scenes with the four dead, while maintaining that he had only learned afterwards that they had been killed.
During the trial the prosecution offered him a plea bargain: two consecutive life sentences and two concurrent. He refused it, and reports of the hearing describe him losing control in court when it was put to him. His counsel said he had refused because he continued to assert his innocence.
In November 2006 the Haifa District Court convicted him of four murders, of aggravated rape, of wounding with intent and of a series of further offences. In May 2007 it imposed four consecutive terms of life imprisonment, together with about seventeen years more: nine for the rape, five for the attempted murder, and three for the rest, which included arson, destroying evidence and obstructing the course of justice.
His appeal went to the Supreme Court and became a case of some importance in Israeli law, because most of the judgment is given over to the rule on excluding evidence obtained by improper means, laid down the year he was convicted. One of the justices used the case to say that criminal proceedings had been drifting away from the question of whether the evidence met the standard of proof and towards arguments about failures in the investigation.
He is known in Israel as the killer of the homeless, from the identity of most of his victims, and as of 2025 he is the only person convicted there who answers the definition of a serial killer.
One point on the record. The victims' ages vary between sources: Wolman is given as 51, 52 and 54, Levant as 34 and 36, Sochnov as 32 and 42. The ages have been left out of the fields rather than picked.