In October 2007 a jury at the Moscow City Court convicted a food store worker named Alexander Pichushkin of 48 murders and three attempted murders. He told investigators he had meant to kill one person for every square on a chessboard, and a board in his apartment carried numbers on 61 of its 64 squares. He was identified, the reports said, because his last victim had left her son a note with his name and telephone number.
The ten cases come from Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and cover killings from 1989 to 2012 and court proceedings that run into 2026. Two of them straddle 1991. Anatoly Onoprienko killed nine people in 1989, in the last years of the Soviet Union, and forty-three more in 1995 and 1996, in an independent Ukraine. Ondrej Rigo’s killings ran from June 1990 to March 1992.
Pichushkin was born in Mytishchi, near Moscow, and most accounts give 1974. Lenta.ru and 360.ru say he confused certain letters when he spoke and wrote, and that for a time he was sent to a boarding school for children with speech disorders. The Associated Press reported in 2007 that he grew up without a father, was placed in a children’s institution and later lived with his grandfather. He trained as a carpenter at a vocational school and did not serve in the army. According to Lenta.ru he began working at a food store in 1989 and in 1992 failed a medical examination for police service. By 2006 he was a loader at a small food store in Moscow.
The record begins on July 27, 1992, with the killing of Mikhail Odiychuk. The Associated Press reported that no charges were brought at the time. The case was proven at trial in 2007 on Pichushkin’s own identification of Odiychuk from a photograph, a 1992 Moskovsky Komsomolets notice about the young man, and a school certificate showing the two had studied together, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported. Odiychuk’s relatives had never met Pichushkin. 360.ru reported that Pichushkin began after following the trial of Andrei Chikatilo, convicted in 1992 of killing 52 people, and that he later described the first killing as being like first love, which one never forgets.
Nine years passed before the next killing in the court record. The main series began on May 17, 2001. By the end of that year he had killed 11 people, six of them in a single month, prosecutors said at the trial. The Moscow City Court counted 47 men and four women among the 51 people he was convicted of killing or trying to kill, Vesti reported; three of the four women died. Pichushkin was identified in June 2006, after a co-worker, Marina Moskaleva, 36, died on June 14; accounts give two different days for his arrest, June 16 by 360.ru and June 18 by Lenta.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe. The Radio Svoboda report of June 24, 2006, headlined the arrest of the man who had planned 64 killings.
The trial was held before a jury, with Judge Vladimir Usov presiding. After the verdict of October 24, 2007, he was sentenced on October 29 to life imprisonment in a special-regime colony, with compulsory psychiatric treatment at the place of confinement. About a dozen relatives of the dead were in court for the verdict, the Associated Press reported, and many had attended the whole trial. Two of the legal victims who came to a preliminary hearing told Kommersant they wanted a life sentence. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence on February 14, 2008, and in September 2025 a request to replace life with 25 years was unsuccessful, Vesti reported.
Two threads from the case reach into the police and the courts. On October 31, 2007, Vesti reported, a criminal case was started over inaction linked to Pichushkin’s crimes. In November 2010, Vesti reported, the police officer who had concealed the first crime was sentenced to three years. The other thread is the count. He has claimed between 60 and 63 killings. Investigators looked at 11 of the claims he made in 2007 and said in February 2008 that he was not linked to them. In April 2025 the penal service said he was ready to confess to 11 more unsolved killings; no new charge was reported as of October 2026, and none of the killings beyond the 48 has led to a conviction.
Pichushkin serves his sentence at IK-18, known as Polar Owl, a colony at Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. His lawsuits seeking a transfer closer to Moscow were rejected in 2025, when RBC reported the first refusal in June and Vesti the court’s refusal in December, and a complaint to the Supreme Court was reported in August 2026 with no hearing date. His mother cannot visit him, Vesti reported in 2025, because the colony is so remote.
Mikhail Popkov was a police officer in Angarsk, an industrial city of about 260,000 people some 40 kilometers from Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. Angarsk was built after the Second World War, partly by prisoners from the Angarlag camp complex, Meduza reported in its 2017 account of the investigation. In the 1990s the city was ringed by prisons: four correctional colonies, a remand prison and a juvenile colony. After the Soviet Union collapsed, about ten criminal groups operated there. Many gang killings and armed robberies were never solved, and violent deaths were common enough that the early killings of young women did not stand out. The first cases were put down to the gangs, and nobody linked them.
Popkov was born in 1964. He told the Meduza journalist Sasha Sulim, in an interview published in December 2017, that his father was a worker and his mother an office employee. He trained as a mechanic at a vocational school, served in the army and joined the Angarsk police, working at the Central District police department as an assistant duty officer and later as a duty officer. Colleagues called him "Misha the Smile." He left the police in 1998, as a junior lieutenant, and the killings did not stop.
His later confessions put the start in 1992. The first victim died in the summer of that year, investigators said at his second trial, and her death was not linked to the others. Only in the late 1990s did people in Angarsk begin to say a serial killer was at work, the news magazine Profile reported in 2018. Investigators said at least three of the crimes were committed while he was on duty. Reports give the victims' ages as 16 to 40 (Mediazona and Snob), 17 to 38 (Interfax and The Moscow Times), with an average age of 24, Meduza reported in January 2017.
The solution took twenty years. Investigators worked for years through a list of more than 30,000 men, alphabetically, and reached the letter P in March 2012, when Popkov gave a DNA sample. It matched evidence from victims. He was arrested on June 23, 2012, near Vladivostok. Six verdicts followed. On January 14, 2015, the Irkutsk Regional Court convicted him of 22 murders of women and attempted murders and sentenced him to life; the Investigative Committee, RAPSI, The Moscow Times and Mediazona give two attempts, and Interfax one. After that verdict he confessed to dozens more. On December 10, 2018, the same court convicted him of 56 murders, 55 of women and one of a man in 1999, and gave him a second life sentence with the loss of his rank; Interfax reported, citing the court, that three confessed killings were not proven. The Supreme Court of Russia rejected his appeal, as Interfax reported on April 11, 2019. The Angarsk City Court added 9 years and 8 months in June 2021 for two murders in 1995. A court in Irkutsk gave him 10 years in November 2023 for three murders between 1997 and 2003. The Angarsk City Court sentenced him on August 28, 2025, to 9.5 years for the May 2011 murder of a woman, and on December 1, 2025, to 10 years for two murders in August 2008. Each term was combined with the earlier verdicts into a single life term. The Irkutsk court upheld the last verdict on March 4, 2026, and in April 2026 he was moved from Irkutsk to a special-regime colony in Mordovia.
The totals are stated by investigators and prosecutors, not by the verdict counts. RTVI, citing the Investigative Committee, wrote of 89 victims in December 2025; the Investigative Committee in October 2025, and the Irkutsk regional prosecutor’s office in April 2026, gave 91 murders and three attempted murders. The verdict counts as reported add up to 86.
Popkov’s own explanations are claims, and no court has made a finding on motive. Colleagues told Meduza that he linked the killings to suspicions about his wife. At his first sentencing he said he had meant to "clean" Angarsk, The Moscow Times reported. The lead investigator in the later cases, Yevgeny Karchevsky of the Investigative Committee, rejected that. "He wasn’t cleaning up the town from sin; that was made up by the media," he told Meduza. Most of the victims, Karchevsky said, were ordinary women with families.
The Russian press called Maxim Vladimirovich Petrov "Doctor Death." He was an emergency ambulance medic in St. Petersburg, born in 1965, according to the European Court of Human Rights, and by 2003 Rossiyskaya Gazeta described him as a medic at one of the city’s ambulance substations with no connection to the clinic whose patients he visited. The robberies began in the summer of 1997 and, over about two years, reached more than two dozen elderly people in the city, the paper reported. His victims were chosen, 360 reported, from addresses of elderly people who had been through chest X-ray screening at a district clinic, taken from blank test-result forms and receipts. From 1999 some of the people he robbed died. The European Court noted that eleven of the victims died or could have died.
He took money, jewelry, household appliances and food, Life.ru said, and some thefts brought him about 50 rubles, according to 360. The investigators, among them Nikita Timofeev of the prosecutor’s office, noticed that the January 2000 victims lived near one another and were patients of the same clinic. They went through the clinic’s forms for test results that had not been collected and warned the people on the list, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported. According to 360, the screening lists gave police 72 possible targets. Petrov was arrested in St. Petersburg on January 17, 2000, and has been in custody since, the European Court recorded.
At first he denied everything. After about a week he began to talk, Rossiyskaya Gazeta said, and 360 reported that he admitted all 46 episodes in the case, including 11 killings. At the trial he pleaded not guilty and withdrew his confession, saying it was forced out of him by fear for his family. He chose to be tried by a single professional judge, Valentina Kudryashova. On November 21, 2003, the St. Petersburg City Court convicted him of multiple murder, attempted murder and robbery and sentenced him to life imprisonment, and the Supreme Court of Russia dismissed his appeal on June 24, 2004.
His case then went to Strasbourg. From January 28, 2000, to October 3, 2004, he was held in the Kresty remand prison, which the Russian government admitted to the European Court was overcrowded. On November 6, 2012, in Maksim Petrov v. Russia, the court ruled that Russia had subjected him to inhuman and degrading treatment through overcrowded detention lasting three years, ten months and five days and through the conditions in which he was transported to court, and that police statements before the verdict presenting his guilt as settled had violated the presumption of innocence. His complaints about his arrest and trial were rejected. The court awarded him EUR 15,000 for non-pecuniary damage and EUR 1,350 in costs, and the judgment became final on February 6, 2013. The legal news site Pravo.ru reported the ruling under the headline that serial killers in Russia lack effective legal remedies. The Russian state paid the award, 360 said.
In October 2004 he was moved to penal colony IK-2 in Solikamsk, in the Perm region, the special-regime colony known as the White Swan. About seven years into his sentence his wife divorced him, 360 reported in 2025. In March 2025 the Russian press reported that he was seeking parole after 25 years in custody; the Perm regional prison service said early release was not expected soon, and no court decision had been reported by March 30, 2025.
Viktor Sayenko was 19 when he was arrested in Dnipropetrovsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, on July 23, 2007. Police held him and his childhood friend Igor Suprunyuck as suspects in a series of killings of men, women, teenagers and pensioners over about a month, chosen at random, police said. A third classmate, Oleksandr Hanzha, was detained separately. More than 2,000 police officers took part in the hunt for the suspects, UNIAN reported in July 2007. On July 24, 2007, Ukraine’s deputy interior minister, Kupianskiy, told reporters in Kyiv that the three had admitted 19 murders.
One of the dead was Kateryna Ilchenko, killed on June 26, 2007, according to Gorod.dp.ua. Reports of the killings differed on almost every point of detail, and much that circulated in the first days was rumor. Gazeta.ua wrote that most of the victims were children, women or pensioners; Kupianskiy said the killers did not seem to choose by age or position, and that in only some cases were money, valuables or telephones taken. He told reporters that investigators could not identify a motive and that to him the killings looked like a form of amusement.
In February 2009 the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal, sitting as the trial court, sentenced Sayenko and Suprunyuck to life imprisonment, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the sentences on November 24, 2009. By then both denied the killings. Reports of the verdict differ on the count against Sayenko: a 2026 review in Fraza.ua gives 18 murders, citing the verdict, while a 2009 Podrobnosti television report said 21, and also reported the court’s finding that 18 were killed by the two men together and three by Suprunyuck alone. Both were also convicted of robbery and cruelty to animals, and Hanzha was convicted only of robbery and sentenced to nine years.
The defense disputed the confessions. Sayenko’s father told Gorod.dp.ua in an interview published in May 2008, under the headline that he was "100 percent sure" his son had killed no one, that his son was detained at about two in the afternoon while at work. After the verdict, Radio Svoboda reported, the defendants' parents said police had beaten the confessions out of the young men. No court is reported to have accepted the claim. Obozrevatel, reporting the end of the investigation in April 2008, named Suprunyuck as the head of the group. As of August 2026, Fraza.ua reported that Sayenko was serving life; where he is held has not been reliably reported.
Anatoly Onoprienko straddles the end of the Soviet Union. He was convicted in 1999 of 52 murders committed in two separate periods. The first was in the summer of 1989, from June 14 to August 16, when nine people died; he was working with an accomplice, Serhiy Rogozin, in the Soviet Ukraine of that year. The second ran from October 5, 1995, to March 22, 1996, in an independent Ukraine, and the court counted 43 killings. RIA Novosti called him the bloodiest serial killer in Ukraine’s history when he died in 2013.
He was born in 1959 in the village of Lasky, in the Zhytomyr region. Accounts of his early years differ in detail. Espreso, writing in 2026, said his father left the family and that he was sent to an orphanage; the Lenta.ru profile said his mother died when he was very young and that he was placed in an orphanage in Malyn. No court record confirms these details. As a young man he served in the army and trained at a maritime school, then worked at sea. His trial lawyer, Ruslan Moshkovsky, gave the account in 2006 that he lost his place at sea for dishonesty and small thefts. By the late 1980s he was living in Dniprorudne, a town in the Zaporizhzhia region, where his wife and son lived.
The 1989 killings were heard in the Zhytomyr Regional Court in 1998. The court’s first episode was the killing of a married couple on June 14, 1989, in the Dnipropetrovsk region; the second was the killing of a married couple from Bialystok, Poland, in the Rivne region; the third took five lives, among them an 11-year-old boy, in the Zaporizhzhia region, ZN.ua reported, citing Interfax-Ukraine. Rogozin’s account, given after his release, was that he covered for Onoprienko rather than took part in the killings. The court took a different view, and he was convicted of the 1989 episodes. Moshkovsky, in his closing speech, argued that the authorities should have stopped Onoprienko in 1989; none of these claims about missed chances was tested in court.
The second series was swift. Between October 1995 and March 1996 he killed 43 people, most of them in rural households in central and western Ukraine, often whole families including small children. The court heard separate counts of robbery, theft, burglary and firearms offenses. Moshkovsky said Onoprienko told him he killed for money, yet most of the robberies yielded very little, and Onoprienko said himself, according to ZN.ua and Interfax-Ukraine, that he could not explain why he killed. He was arrested in April 1996 in Yavoriv, in the Lviv region, after a manhunt for the killer.
The hunt produced a second tragedy. In March 1996 investigators looking for the killer detained a 26-year-old man in Horodok, near Lviv, who died in custody. Radio Svoboda reported in May 2002 that a Lviv court had awarded compensation to the parents of the man, identified by his initials Yu. M., and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported in December 2002 that the Lviv prosecutor’s office and the Security Service had compensated the moral damage. It is one of the best-known examples in Ukraine of how confessions were obtained in the 1990s.
The trial ran in Zhytomyr from November 23, 1998, to March 31, 1999. In November 1998 Amnesty International criticized comments President Kuchma had made about the trial and the death penalty. On March 31, 1999, the Zhytomyr Regional Court convicted Onoprienko on all counts and sentenced him to death; the Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the verdict in August 1999. He was never executed. After the Constitutional Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in December 1999, his sentence was replaced with life imprisonment under the law that entered into force on April 4, 2000. Rogozin received 13 years, reduced to 12 on appeal, and was released in 2008. Onoprienko died in Zhytomyr prison No. 8 on August 27, 2013, at 54; the preliminary cause was cardiac. He had claimed more killings than the court counted. A cleric who heard his confession later gave the figure 56, and in 2021 Glavcom reported that the governor of the Kyiv Lavra, Pavel, had acknowledged that he did not report Onoprienko to the police.
Kaspars Petrovs was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Riga Regional Court on May 12, 2005. The court convicted him of 13 murders, together with attempted murders, theft and robbery. Almost all of the people he killed were elderly women living in Riga, and he killed them in the course of robberies between 2000 and early 2003, Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze reported. The indictment read in February 2005 listed 38 murders and eight attempted murders, but the court’s judgment covered 13. The Baltic Times called him the most prolific serial killer in Latvian history. He said throughout that he meant to rob, not to kill. "I wanted only to rob them, not to kill them," he told the court, according to The Baltic Times.
His first crimes were in Liepāja, where he grew up in nearby Grobiņa. In 1996, Kurzemes Vārds reported, he robbed elderly residents of the port city, taking a few lats each time, and Neatkarīgā summarized his early record as the robbery of three elderly men and a break-in. The case was decided on April 9, 1997. Judge Vineta Vaiteika sentenced him to three years' imprisonment, suspended, a term Kurzemes Vārds described as under the legal minimum for the offenses; the court gave weight to his confession, his remorse and the fact that he had a child to support. A forensic psychiatric examination judged him sane, and Neatkarīgā reported that an investigator at the time thought him unlikely to offend again. Accounts of that first conviction differ: The Baltic Times wrote in 2005 that he had a theft conviction from 1998, and Jauns.lv wrote in 2026 that at 18 he received a suspended three-year sentence for theft. A Liepāja police officer told Kurzemes Vārds that Petrovs spoke well and knew how to win people’s trust.
He moved to Riga. RUS TVNET reported in 2017 that he went there in 2001 after a quarrel with his parents and had no fixed address; The Baltic Times reported at his sentencing that he had been living rough in Riga for the three years before his arrest. The amounts he took were small, between a few dozen and a few hundred lats from each victim, RUS TVNET said, and prosecutors put the total losses at more than 18,000 lats. Because the women were old, many of the deaths were at first taken for natural ones, Jauns.lv reported. LETA reported in February 2005 that relatives did not suspect a crime until after his arrest and the news coverage that followed, when they went to the police, and investigators then confirmed that the women had been killed.
In 2002 Riga criminal police began to see a pattern in the deaths of several elderly people, Kurzemes Vārds and Jauns.lv reported. According to LETA, police first suspected one man of the deaths of five women, two in November and December 2002 and three in late January 2003. He was detained on February 3, 2003, picked up, Neatkarīgā reported in 2007, for a petty robbery. Under questioning he began to confess. His own explanation, Neatkarīgā said, was that he could not sleep: the dead women came to him in his dreams. The case reached the Riga Regional Court as six separate criminal cases, joined into one. The final indictment listed 53 criminal episodes, 38 murders, eight attempted murders and several robberies and thefts. According to Jauns.lv, the oldest of the 38 women named was 91 and the youngest 66.
The indictment was read on February 9, 2005. The largest courtroom was full, LETA reported, mostly with relatives, friends and neighbors of the victims, and with journalists, among them reporters from Russia, France, Poland and Lithuania, as later accounts said. Petrovs admitted his guilt. At the end of the trial he spoke about his family. "I understood that I would not be able to earn as much as my family demanded from me," he said, according to The Baltic Times. "Therefore I turned to crime." He said he regretted the killings and asked the victims' families to forgive him. Kurzemes Vārds, writing in April 2005, quoted a Riga investigator who said that without a life sentence Petrovs would probably return to crime.
On May 12, 2005, he was sentenced to life. The Baltic Times' first report of the verdict had described the conviction as covering all 38 murders; its follow-up on May 18, and the Latvian press, give 13. The gap came from the evidence: a lack of forensic evidence limited the murder convictions to 13, The Baltic Times reported. Neatkarīgā wrote in 2007 that the court recognized fewer than half of the killings he had confessed to because of errors by police and medical examiners, and that 23 deaths were left with no one held responsible for them.
The number of people Petrovs killed is not settled. His lawyer, Antons Drēbnieks, told Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze in 2015 that, according to investigators, the true number might be about 100; none of the higher figures has been tested in court. The 2007 Neatkarīgā report also carried a claim pointing the other way: a prisoner who had shared a cell with Petrovs during the trial wrote to the president of Latvia to say that a cellmate may have taken the blame for murders he did not commit. The paper did not make clear whom the letter meant. In 2007 Petrovs was reported to have sold his life story to Russian television. He has been held at the prison known as the White Swan, at Daugavpils in 2007, 2015 and 2017, and, in a February 2026 report, at Daugavgrīva.
Silvo Plut was convicted of two murders in Slovenia and sentenced in Serbia, in his absence, for a third killing. The first came in 1990, when he was in his early twenties, and earned him a 15-year sentence, of which he served 13. The second, of a 25-year-old in the Serbian town of Aleksinac in November 2004, he always denied. The third, of Ljubica Ulčar, near Ljubljana in February 2006, brought the maximum term under Slovenian law, 30 years. He died in custody in Ljubljana in April 2007. Years later his case returned to the Slovenian courts in a different form: Ulčar’s husband and sons sued the state, and in March 2012 the Supreme Court confirmed that the state was liable for her death.
He was born in 1968 near Novo Mesto. A Kanal A report on 24ur.com said he and his brother grew up in very unfavorable conditions, with violent quarrels between their parents and physical abuse by their father. The criminologist Mojca Plesničar, asked by Kanal A why a person becomes a serial killer, said there were no simple answers and that Slovenia had too few such cases to study. The same report pointed out that Plut’s brother grew up in the same family and did not follow his path. He finished six grades of primary school, two years of vocational school, and worked as a bricklayer.
In 1990 he killed Marjanca Matjašič, 21 or 22, a former schoolmate from his area, RTV Slovenija reported in 2008. He was caught, convicted and sentenced to 15 years. Kurir described how, after his release, he met a man from Aleksinac whom he had known in prison, and the two robbed a post office in Ljubljana. A postal worker recognized Plut and told the police, Kurir wrote, and identified that postal worker as the man whose wife Plut would kill in 2006. In April 2005 Plut was arrested in Slovenia over two armed robberies and released in December for lack of evidence.
In Serbia, Plut had been linked to the killing of Jasmina Djošić, 25, in November 2004. Telegraf and Kurir reported that a second young woman in Aleksinac encountered him and survived, and that her account helped Serbian police, who passed the details to their Slovenian colleagues, who confirmed the suspect was Plut. By then Plut had left Serbia. He never admitted killing Djošić, Kanal A reported, and Telegraf said he later told Slovenian media he had been framed. In April 2007 the criminal panel of the Niš District Court sentenced him in his absence to 40 years in prison, Kurir reported. Whether the Serbian judgment became final was not reported.
On February 24, 2006, Plut went to a village near Ljubljana, seeking revenge on the husband of the postal worker who had reported him, according to Kurir, which wrote that the husband had been due to testify. Ljubica Ulčar, a wife and mother of two sons, was killed. Her husband escaped and called the police. Plut was arrested the next day, about 18 hours after the killing, Žurnal24 wrote. On October 2, 2006, the court in Ljubljana convicted him and sentenced him to 30 years, the maximum under Slovenian law; prosecutors had asked for 45 years. The judges agreed that he had also intended to kill her husband, and the conviction therefore covered attempted murder as well as murder. His defense lawyer, Andrej Žabjek, argued that a person who commits such crimes cannot be sane, as he later told Kanal A’s program Svet, and no court ordered compulsory treatment. Kanal A described how he smirked in the courtroom at those who believed he had at last been stopped.
He died in custody in Ljubljana on April 28, 2007, aged 38, within days of the Serbian judgment. RTV Slovenija and Telegraf report that he died by suicide.
The husband and sons then took the state to court. He sought about 125,000 euros for himself and his sons, together with an annuity, RTV Slovenija reported, arguing that the state had contributed at least as much to his wife’s death as Plut had. The lawyer Luka Devjak represented the family; the state attorney, Valerija Šter, argued that police and prosecutors had acted with due diligence. In August 2009 the Ljubljana District Court ruled that the state was not responsible, finding that police and prosecutors had had no grounds to seek Plut’s detention before the killing. Devjak appealed, arguing that the authorities had failed to act against Plut for more than a year. In March 2012 the Supreme Court confirmed that the state was liable, because Plut, already a convicted murderer, had not been stopped in time. Citing Delo, RTV Slovenija said the courts held that Slovenia should have started a criminal case over the Serbian killing and sought Plut’s detention, given the evidence, his way of life and his character, in order to protect people and property.
The amounts were modest. At first instance the husband was awarded 5,000 euros and each son 6,500 euros; on appeal the higher court raised these to 7,000 euros for the husband and 13,000 euros for each son, and rejected the annuity. By February 2014 the state had paid the family 33,000 euros including interest, RTV Slovenija reported. The Slovenian Press Agency, in a 2021 roundup of the heaviest sentences handed down in Slovenia, listed the case alongside the 30-year term and noted the Supreme Court’s 2012 finding on the state’s responsibility.
Vlado Taneski spent more than two decades as the Kicevo correspondent for newspapers in Skopje, the capital of what was then the Republic of Macedonia. Between 2005 and 2008 he wrote about the deaths of older women from his own neighborhood. In June 2008 the police arrested him for those deaths. They said his reports contained details that had not been released, and that his DNA matched evidence from two of the women. He was charged with two murders and was under investigation for a third death and for a fourth woman’s case from 2003. A note he left denied the killings. Three days after his arrest he died in custody at Tetovo, and the authorities said he had died by suicide. He was never tried, and no court ever ruled on the evidence against him. Two other men had already been convicted of one of the killings he was charged with.
He was born in 1952 in the Kicevo area, then part of Yugoslavia. Alongside news from the town he wrote nostalgic essays about rural life, under titles such as "Pictures from Life" and "Pictures without a Frame." He still worked on a typewriter and phoned his copy in to Skopje. Kiro Kiproski, a Nova Makedonija reporter, called him an introvert; Ljupcho Popovski, editor in chief of Utrinski Vesnik, called him a good, quiet journalist. He lost his staff job in 2003, and his wife’s job in Skopje supported the family, according to the Virginia Quarterly Review. Police and press reports in 2008 said he had had a poor relationship with his mother; the Croatian news site Index.hr reported that police did not confirm that this had anything to do with a motive.
The women were Mitra Simjanoska, Ljubica Licoska and Zivana Temelkoska, whose ages were reported as 61 to 70, 55 or 56, and 65. Simjanoska’s case was closed, as far as anyone knew, before the later deaths. Two men were charged with killing her and with the robbery and killing of an elderly man in December 2004. According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, both men admitted the two killings during questioning before trial but told the court they had killed only the man. Both were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Spanish agency EFE reported in June 2008 that the two men, by then serving life terms, had always denied any part in the killings of the women. Biological evidence recovered from Simjanoska did not match either of them, the magazine reported, which left open the possibility of a third person. Taneski had covered their trial for Nova Makedonija.
The detail that police said gave him away appeared in his report on Temelkoska. In 2008 the Interior Ministry spokesman, Ivo Kotevski, told Agence France-Presse that suspicion arose because his articles contained details that had not been released. The Associated Press reported that the details appeared in Utrinski Vesnik. Kotevski told EFE that Taneski had used his visits to the victims' families to follow how the investigation was going. The decisive evidence, police said, was DNA. EFE reported on June 21, 2008, that analysis had identified his biological traces on two of the victims, and the Virginia Quarterly Review reported that three independent laboratory tests matched his DNA to samples from Simjanoska and Temelkoska. Investigators drew up a profile of a man who knew the women and acted alone, and about 150 men were interviewed, among them Taneski himself.
Police arrested Taneski in Kicevo on Friday, June 20, 2008. "Police have already filed charges for the murder of two women," Kotevski said, as quoted by ABC30. The charges covered Temelkoska and Simjanoska, the Associated Press reported; the investigation of Licoska’s death continued. In questioning he said little and insisted that he was innocent. Police told Agence France-Presse that he neither confessed nor denied. He was assigned a public defender, and a court in Gostivar ordered him held for 30 days. The Interior Ministry announced his name, his work and the evidence on television the day after the arrest, a step that Ljubomir Kostovski of Utrinski Vesnik criticized as suspending the presumption of innocence before any independent verdict. Critics also complained that evidence had been collected without a witness present, which the ministry denied.
He died in the prison at Tetovo early on Monday, June 23, 2008. The arrest stunned the newspapers he had written for. Branko Zakev of Nova Makedonija told the Virginia Quarterly Review that ministry staff remarked that the paper no longer had a reporter in Kicevo. Daniela Trpchevska, an editor at Utrinski Vesnik, said she was speechless and that part of her still doubted he was responsible. Relatives of the women were shaken to learn that the man who had sat with them asking questions was the suspect. Temelkoska’s son told A1 television he was outraged, and later told the Virginia Quarterly Review it was a horrible thought that the killer had been in his house. His wife, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, reported that he maintained his innocence.
Ondrej Rigo straddles the year 1991 and three countries. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 7, 1994, for a series of killings that ran from June 1990 to March 1992. The Slovak press agency SITA reported that he was serving life for nine murders: two women in Germany, one in the Netherlands and the rest in Bratislava, where the victims were women and the teenage son of one of them. TV Markíza and noviny.sk described him as the first person in Slovakia convicted on DNA evidence.
He denied every killing. "I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it," he said in a prison interview with the Slovak daily Plus JEDEN DEŇ, as the Czech paper Blesk reported in 2022. He died in a prison hospital in Trenčín on June 14, 2022, aged 66. He was born in 1955 in Modra, and he had been convicted 11 times before the first killing, according to TV JOJ and noviny.sk, which described the earlier cases as minor property offenses; 444 reported that most were for burglary. noviny.sk wrote in 2022 that he had been freed early under the amnesties of the Husák era.
The killings went unsolved for almost two years. Blesk reported that German, Dutch and Slovak investigators were looking for the killer during that time. In Bratislava, ČTK wrote in 2026, the police had only one clue they could use: DNA the killer had left. They turned to a group of Slovak geneticists who were developing new ways to identify offenders. With the help of German and Dutch police, Rigo was linked to all of the killings by DNA, according to ČTK’s report of his death. The last killing was on March 4, 1992, in Bratislava, and police arrested Rigo the same evening, noviny.sk reported in 2022.
The court convicted him although he never confessed. TV JOJ and noviny.sk reported in 2018 that he had not admitted the murders despite strong evidence and DNA tests. According to 444, he appealed the first verdict, saying he was innocent, but offered nothing to support the claim, and a psychological assessment made during the trial described him as a schizoid antisocial psychopath. TV JOJ, in a 2011 report on DNA testing, said the tests helped with both his arrest and his life sentence.
He served his sentence first at Ilava and later at Leopoldov. Under the Slovak Criminal Code, a person sentenced to life may apply for conditional release after 25 years, provided set conditions are met. Rigo applied in May 2018. Jana Kondákorová, spokeswoman for the Regional Court in Trnava, told TV JOJ that the application reached the Trnava District Court on May 11. Experts gave him little chance. "Given all the circumstances, I would say there is probably little chance," said Lucia Kurilovská, a criminal law expert. The court never ruled: on June 5, 2018, Kondákorová told SITA that the district court had not set a date for a hearing and that Rigo had withdrawn his application. He was 62. SITA’s report of his death in 2022 said the court had rejected it; the 2018 court statement supports the withdrawal.
Rigo died in the early morning of June 14, 2022, in the Hospital for Accused and Convicted Persons in Trenčín. Monika Kacvinská, spokeswoman for the Prison and Judicial Guard Corps, confirmed the death to SITA and said an examination would determine the exact cause; 444 reported two days later that the authorities had not disclosed it. His family distanced itself from him, Blesk reported, and the municipality made the arrangements after his death. In July 2026 the streaming platform Oneplay released a four-part documentary series about the case, directed by Peter Bebjak and written by Jakub Režný. ČTK reported that it tells the story from the point of view of detectives, a prosecutor, a judge and geneticists, and that Režný worked through a police file of more than 5,000 pages. ČTK called him the second-worst serial killer in postwar Czechoslovakia, and Slovak and Czech outlets regularly describe him as the best-known serial killer in Slovakia.
Some of the facts are counted differently across the press. The press agrees on nine killings, eight women and a boy, but one noviny.sk report counted eight women and the boy in Bratislava alone, after three earlier killings in other countries; other outlets do not support that reading. The boy’s age is given as 14, 15 and 16.
In February 2014 a prosecutor in Uzbekistan confirmed that a court had sentenced two Uzbek citizens to life in prison for crimes against 11 women, seven in Uzbekistan and four in neighboring Kazakhstan, between 2011 and 2012. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reporting on February 26, 2014, named the men as Abduseit Ormanov and Polat Pardaliev. The killings had alarmed Uzbekistan when they happened, the service said, but no official information about them was made public until that week. Much of what is known comes from Kazakhstan, where reports name Ormanov’s accomplice as Polatbay Berdaliyev; MK Kazakhstan reported in 2018 that Berdaliyev was sentenced to life in Kazakhstan and Ormanov to life in Tashkent.
Between December 2011 and March 2012, four women were killed in the South Kazakhstan region, which was renamed the Turkestan region in 2018. Kazakh police said in 2018 that the women were of different ages and that jewelry and money were taken from them. MK Kazakhstan named Yekaterina Tishkunova, 29, and Aliya Dauletbayeva, 25, of Saryagash, among them, with a woman of 50 and Tamara Asherova. Investigators had little to work with. Ruslan Abdraimov, of the prosecutor’s office, told MK Kazakhstan that the one thing linking the cases was a black Mercedes that witnesses had seen. Patrols stopped dark cars with Kazakh plates but did not check cars with Uzbek plates, a choice the paper said no one could explain.
Colonel Saken Kozhamuratov, who from 2011 to 2014 led the crimes-against-persons unit of the regional criminal police, described the hunt in 2018. The killings, he said, had left Shymkent "literally stirred up." A special group of experienced detectives was formed inside the criminal police, and officers from Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry came to help. Suspecting that the killers were traveling offenders hiding in a neighboring country, the group sent international requests to Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan under the Minsk Convention. The answer came from the Interior Ministry of Uzbekistan: seven women had been killed there in the same way. The two countries' investigators combined the 11 cases into a single investigation.
Berdaliyev was identified as a suspect, MK Kazakhstan reported, and detained in May 2012; shortly before that, Uzbek police had arrested Ormanov. In the account the Turkestan regional police gave in 2018, the first man detained was a citizen of Uzbekistan born in 1986, with earlier convictions for robbery and theft, who was held in Almaty; he confessed and said he had acted with an accomplice. The second man was detained in Tashkent with the help of Uzbek police. Police said it took more than four months to find the men and nearly three months to complete the investigation.
At his trial in Kazakhstan, Berdaliyev said he had confessed under physical and psychological pressure from the police. The court rejected the claim, citing strong evidence, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, the most severe penalty in Kazakhstan; relatives of the victims had wanted the death penalty, MK Kazakhstan reported. In Uzbekistan, Ormanov was sentenced to life in a strict-regime colony. When the prosecutor Azizbek Nazarov confirmed the sentences in February 2014, he did not say when the judgment had been handed down, and the names of the seven women killed in Uzbekistan and of the Uzbek court were never reported. Nazarov said that Pardaliev had first been arrested and sentenced in Kazakhstan and then extradited to Uzbekistan, RFE/RL reported. The second man’s name appears in different forms, Polat Pardaliev in the 2014 report from Uzbekistan and Polatbay Berdaliyev in the Kazakh accounts.
The ten cases are a poor fit for any single story about a region. Pichushkin, Popkov, Petrov, Sayenko, Onoprienko, Petrovs, Rigo and Ormanov were each convicted and sentenced. Plut was convicted in Slovenia and separately sentenced in his absence in Serbia. Taneski never faced a court at all. What the files share is arithmetic: almost every one gives more than one number. Pichushkin was convicted of 48 murders and has claimed 60 to 63. Popkov’s verdict counts, as reported, add up to 86, and prosecutors say 91. Petrovs was indicted for 38, and the court proved 13. Sayenko’s count is 18 or 21. Onoprienko was convicted of 52, and a cleric who heard his confession gave 56.
The courts and the police do not come out of these files untouched. In Moscow a criminal case was started in 2007 over inaction, and in 2010 the officer who had concealed the first crime was sentenced to three years. In Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights ruled for Petrov on prison conditions and on police statements made before his verdict. In Ljubljana the Supreme Court held that the state had failed to stop a convicted murderer. In Riga a court recognized fewer than half of the killings Petrovs confessed to because of errors by police and medical examiners, Neatkarīgā wrote. In Lviv a man died in custody during the hunt for Onoprienko and his parents were later compensated.
DNA connects several of the files. It identified Popkov after a screening that reached the letter P, linked Rigo to killings in three countries, and was the evidence police cited against Taneski. Borders connect others: Plut was sentenced in Slovenia and in Serbia, Rigo’s victims were in Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia, and the Ormanov case was solved when Uzbek and Kazakh investigators compared cases after requests sent under the Minsk Convention. The families, where they appear, are the people in the courtroom: a dozen relatives at Pichushkin’s verdict, a full courtroom in Riga, Temelkoska’s son telling a television station he was outraged.
• 1989: Anatoly Onoprienko’s first series, nine deaths between June 14 and August 16.
• June 1990 to March 4, 1992: Ondrej Rigo’s killings in Munich, Amsterdam and Bratislava.
• 1990: Marjanca Matjašič is killed in Slovenia; Silvo Plut is later sentenced to 15 years.
• July 27, 1992: Mikhail Odiychuk is killed, the first death in the Pichushkin record.
• 1992: Popkov’s first victim dies in Angarsk, according to his later confessions.
• December 7, 1994: Rigo is sentenced to life.
• October 5, 1995, to March 22, 1996: Onoprienko’s second series; he is arrested in April 1996.
• April 9, 1997: Kaspars Petrovs receives a suspended sentence in Liepāja.
• Summer 1997: Maxim Petrov’s robberies begin in St. Petersburg.
• March 31, 1999: Onoprienko is sentenced to death; the sentence is later replaced by life.
• January 17, 2000: Petrov is arrested in St. Petersburg.
• May 17, 2001: The main Pichushkin series begins.
• February 3, 2003: Petrovs is detained in Riga.
• November 21, 2003: Petrov is convicted and sentenced to life.
• November 2004: Jasmina Djošić is killed in Aleksinac, Serbia.
• May 12, 2005: Petrovs is sentenced to life by the Riga Regional Court.
• February 24, 2006: Ljubica Ulčar is killed near Ljubljana; Plut is arrested the next day.
• June 2006: Pichushkin is arrested in Moscow.
• October 2, 2006: Plut is sentenced to 30 years.
• April 28, 2007: Plut dies in custody in Ljubljana.
• July 23, 2007: Sayenko and Suprunyuck are arrested in Dnipropetrovsk.
• October 24, 2007: Pichushkin is convicted; he is sentenced on October 29.
• June 20 to 23, 2008: Taneski is arrested in Kicevo and dies in custody at Tetovo.
• February 2009: Sayenko and Suprunyuck are sentenced to life.
• March 2012: The Supreme Court of Slovenia confirms the state’s liability for Ljubica Ulčar’s death.
• June 23, 2012: Popkov is arrested near Vladivostok.
• November 6, 2012: The European Court of Human Rights rules in Maksim Petrov v. Russia.
• August 27, 2013: Onoprienko dies in Zhytomyr prison.
• February 26, 2014: A prosecutor in Uzbekistan confirms the life sentences in the Ormanov case.
• January 14, 2015: Popkov receives his first life sentence.
• December 10, 2018: Popkov receives a second life sentence.
• June 14, 2022: Rigo dies in Trenčín.
• December 1, 2025: Popkov’s sixth verdict; investigators give 89 victims.
• April 2026: Popkov is moved to Mordovia.
• August 2026: Pichushkin’s complaint to the Supreme Court over a transfer refusal is reported.