The truck came down the hill toward Strossmayer Square at about half past one in the afternoon of July 10, 1973. It was a Praga RN flatbed, rented that morning, and at the tram stop at the bottom it left the road, climbed the low curb and drove into a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people waiting for a tram. Three died where they fell, three more in the hospital that day and two in the days after. All eight were between sixty and seventy-nine. Twelve others were injured, six of them seriously, and survived. When passers-by ran to the cab, thinking the brakes had failed, the driver told them she had done it on purpose.
She was Olga Hepnarová, twenty-two, a Prague woman who drove trucks for a living. She had chosen the stop with care: it drew a crowd, it sat at the foot of a slope where a heavy vehicle would gather speed, and the curb was low enough to mount. She made one pass minutes earlier and put it off, because a tram had just pulled in and taken most of the waiting passengers away. She was small, and could barely reach the pedals or see clearly over the dashboard of the truck. She had packed the cab with her clothes, her belongings and her cigarettes, ready for prison.
The preparations went back months. She began planning about six months ahead. She thought about derailing an express train and about setting off a bomb in a crowded room, and then about opening fire on Wenceslas Square with an automatic weapon; she joined the shooting club of Svazarm, the state paramilitary sports organization, before deciding she would be overpowered too quickly and that such a gun would be too hard to get. Since January she had been living in room 502 of a workers' hostel on Plaňanská Street. On July 9 she tried to rent a truck and was told to come back the next day, and that evening she pushed her own car, a Trabant, into a ravine, because she could not stand the thought of it passing to someone else. On the morning of the tenth she passed the test drive the rental office required before handing over a truck of that size.
She had also written it down. Almost identical letters addressed to two Prague papers, Svobodné slovo and Mladý svět, laid out what she meant to do and why, and they reached the papers after the attack. Czech accounts say she mailed them around noon that day; one dates the posting to early June. "I am a loner," one letter began, "a destroyed woman." It ended with the sentence the case is remembered by: "My verdict is: I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to death." In custody she told interrogators that she had wanted revenge on society, her family included, because they were her enemy.
Her grievances ran back to childhood. Born in Prague on June 30, 1951, the daughter of a bank clerk and a dentist, she was mocked at school and, by some accounts, bullied smaller children herself. In 1964, at thirteen, she overdosed on her medication and was sent to the children's psychiatric institution at Opařany, where she spent about a year, was beaten after trying to escape, and finished her schooling; she later called the stay the start of everything that followed. She trained as a bookbinder, worked briefly in Cheb, and came back to Prague, where her family found her a job driving trucks for the city and helped her buy a cabin in the village of Oleško, from which she commuted. She was a capable driver and a difficult employee: she skipped shifts, once crashed a truck on purpose during a test drive, was tried in February 1972 for taking a company vehicle without permission, and was dismissed that June. In March 1973 she sold the cabin and bought the Trabant. She said she had been attacked in the street with nobody coming to help her, and she wrote that she had a choice: to kill herself or to kill others.
There had been an earlier act that nobody connected to her. Before dawn on August 7, 1970, she set fire with a bottle of gasoline to the door of a farmhouse her father had inherited at Zábrodí, hoping the fire would reach the hayloft and destroy the property her parents quarreled over. Her sister and two elderly tenants were asleep inside; they woke and put it out, and the damage was trivial. She admitted it only during a psychiatric examination in 1973.
She never denied the attack and spoke of it with pride; she said she regretted only that she had not killed more people and that her parents had not been among them. Her lawyer built a defense on incipient schizophrenia, and she refused to cooperate with it, rejecting every suggestion that she was ill. The expert report the court accepted found no mental disorder and concluded that she had understood fully what she was doing and what would follow. She told the court she had no objection to the death penalty, and on April 6, 1974 the Prague Municipal Court convicted her of murder and sentenced her to death. Aleš Kýr, who heads the history and documentation office of the Czech Prison Service, has said her troubled life played a part but did not absolve her.
She was hanged at Pankrác Prison in Prague early on the morning of March 12, 1975, at twenty-three. She was the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia. Her belongings went to the state notary's office a week later and then to her family, and the cremation record carried her prison number instead of her name.
The question the case still raises in Czech writing is how much of her act belongs to her and how much to the institutions that handled her as a child. Roman Cílek's books, the first published in 2014 and drawing on the trial record, treat her as a rational actor inside a distorted view of the world. The 2016 film I, Olga Hepnarová, shown at the Berlin festival, returned her to public attention. The eight people at the tram stop, most of them pensioners on an ordinary summer afternoon, are rarely named in either.