Hepnarova was born in Prague on June 30, 1951, the daughter of a bank clerk and a paediatrician. She attempted suicide at thirteen and spent a year in a psychiatric institution for children, an experience she described afterwards as the beginning of everything. She left school, worked as a lorry driver, lived alone, and wrote extensively about her isolation and her hatred of a society she said had bullied her from childhood.
On July 10, 1973 she drove a rented flatbed lorry onto the pavement at Strossmayer Square in Prague, into a group of about twenty-five people waiting at a tram stop. Eight died, most of them elderly, and twelve were injured. She did not attempt to leave.
Two days before, she had posted letters to two newspapers describing herself as a victim of the brutality of others and announcing her verdict. At trial she refused to plead insanity and insisted she was sane and had acted deliberately, which she maintained throughout; the psychiatric assessments were contested, one finding a personality disorder rather than psychosis.
She was convicted and sentenced to death, and hanged at Pankrac prison in Prague on March 12, 1975, aged twenty-three. She was the last woman to be executed in Czechoslovakia and one of the last three women executed anywhere in the Eastern Bloc.
She is included in this archive as a mass killer rather than a serial one: one act, one place, one day. The case has been the subject of a substantial Czech literature and a 2016 film, and the reading of her as a product of institutional cruelty as much as of her own intention is contested in that literature and not settled.