On December 7, 1994, Ondrej Rigo, thirty-nine, stood before a panel of the Bratislava City Court and listened without moving as he was sentenced to life imprisonment for nine murders. He had denied all of them. He had been convicted eleven times before, for lesser crimes, and he became the first murderer in Slovakia convicted on DNA evidence. The only woman who survived his attacks, identified in the Slovak press as Jana B., gave the evidence that helped bring him to trial. Psychiatrists described him as an emotional cripple with no prospect of reform, and diagnosed schizoid and antisocial personality disorders and necrophilia.
He was born on December 17, 1955, in Modra, near Bratislava, into a Roma family. At fourteen he was sent to a correctional institution and later to an orphanage, and he grew up largely in institutions. After the borders of Czechoslovakia opened in 1989 he traveled to Germany and the Netherlands.
His killings began in Munich. His first victim, Helena S., forty, was killed in a ground-floor apartment there in June 1990, and at the turn of July and August he got into the apartment of Ilke Z., twenty-eight, through a balcony door left ajar and killed her. Two months later he killed Maria van der W., who lived alone, in Amsterdam, where he had gone to stay with his sister. He then returned to Bratislava. His victims there were Terézia R., eighty-eight; Anna P., forty, and her son Juraj, whose age at death is given as fourteen to sixteen; Helena N., seventy-nine; Henrieta O., twenty-two; and Matilda U., sixty-seven. He chose women living on the ground floor, waited until they were asleep, came in through a window or door and beat them about the head with a metal bar, a stick or a stone, and then violated the bodies. At one scene he used a sock as a glove to avoid leaving fingerprints, which gave him one of his nicknames; the other, the International Killer, came from the countries he moved through.
He was arrested in Bratislava in March 1992. He was convicted of nine murders and an attempted murder and sentenced to life. He served it at Leopoldov prison and later sought release without success. He died in the hospital for prisoners in Trenčín on June 14, 2022, at sixty-six. He remains the Slovak killer with the most victims.