By Chris Bartholomew
The lack of a cooling-off period marks the difference between a spree murder and a serial murder. Sometimes looking at a case, the line is blurred, and this is one of those. How do we know, had they not been caught, that they wouldn't have had the 'cooling-off' period and started again. While they may not have had the rough childhood of most serial killers, they were in trouble with the law frequently before the killings, and they did kill animals, and robbed people before they started killing...
Most people pick something marvelous to do to remember in their old age, a trip to China (surely for most of us that would be a once in a lifetime vacation spot), or how about a cruise, write a book, something wonderful. But we have three boys who picked something horrible, if we are to believe what we hear, that they allegedly admitted they committed the crimes just for fun, bringing along a cell phone camera so they could play it all back in their old age, or did they do it because someone offered them a huge sum of money for 'snuff films' as one witness said?
Local media widely reported that the killers had some sort of a plan to get rich off of the murder videos they recorded. One of the suspects' girlfriends reported that they were planning to make 40 videos of 40 separate murders. This is corroborated by the suspects' classmate, who has often heard that Suprunyuck was in contact with an unknown 'rich foreign website operator' who ordered 40 snuff videos, and would pay a large sum of money once all 40 videos were made.
They attended the funerals of the people they murdered and they were seen smiling, laughing, and flipping off the coffin and gravesite. They took pictures of themselves doing this.
Three young Ukrainian men, 19-year-old Igor Suprunyuck, Viktor Sayenko and Alexander Hanzha, in 2007 killed 21 people, many more were assaulted and severely beaten, and countless small animals were tortured to death. The three youths dubbed themselves The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, or the media named them, there are varying reports on this. In any case, they are from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, and they are maniacs. They took 2 complete videos of two murders, and in all there were three hundred pictures for the jury to look at. One of the videos found its way to the internet. The video is brutally graphic. Remember, you were warned, what is seen cannot be un-seen, so view that video with caution if at all.
[The article at this point reproduced a full transcript of one of the two murder videos. It has been withheld from this archive edition. What it records is the two men killing a man with a hammer, a screwdriver and a knife over several minutes while filming, discussing whether he is dead yet, and cleaning the hammer afterwards. The man was identifiable and his family are living.]
Many accounts have the victim in the video homeless, but he was a husband, and father. He was disabled and had just barely gotten his voice back before he was killed. He had a cancerous tumor in his throat and so was laid off from work, but finding odd jobs here and there caught him out and about.
The first two murders took place late at night on June 25, 2007. The first victim was a 33-year-old local woman named Katya Ilyichenko, who was walking home after having tea at her female friend's nearby apartment. According to Sayenko's confession, he and Suprunyuck were 'out for a walk' with a hammer. As Ilyichenko walked past them, Suprunyuck 'spun around' and struck her in the side of the head. Ilyichenko's body was found by her mother at 5 am.
The next victim within an hour of the first was Roman Tatarevich, a local man who was sleeping on a bench a short walk away from the first murder scene. His head was smashed with blunt objects multiple times, rendering him unrecognizable. The bench he was discovered on was located across the street from the local Public Procurator office (an officer of a state charged with both the investigation and prosecution of crime.)
On July 1, two more victims, Evgeniya Grischenko and Nikolai Serchuk, were found murdered in the nearby town of Novomoskovsk.
On the night of July 6, three more people were murdered in Dnepropetrovsk. The first was Egor Nechvoloda, a recently discharged army recruit, who was bludgeoned while walking home from a night club. His mother found the body in the morning by their apartment building. Elena Shram, a 28-year-old night guard, was then murdered around the corner. According to Sayenko's taped confession, as Shram walked towards them, Suprunyuck struck her with the hammer he had been hiding under his shirt and struck her several more times after she fell down. She had been carrying a bag filled with clothes. The men picked up the bag, used the clothes to clean the hammer, and threw the bag out. Later the same night, the men murdered a woman named Valentina Hanzha (no apparent relation to co-defendant Alexander Hanzha), a mother of three married to a disabled husband.
The next day, July 7, two 14-year-old boys from Podgorodnoye, a nearby village, were attacked in broad daylight as they went fishing. One of the two friends, Andrei Sidyuck, was killed, but the other, Vadim Lyakhov, managed to escape. Vadim Lyakhov was first arrested on suspicion for the murder of his friend. He was cleared and was able to help investigators create sketches of the attackers.
On July 12, a 48-year-old man named Sergei Yatzenko, disabled by a recent bout with cancer, went missing while riding his Dnepr motorcycle. His body was found four days later, with signs of a savage attack clearly visible even after four days in the summer heat.
On July 14, a 45-year-old woman was riding a scooter in a nearby village. As she passed through a wooded area, two men ran towards her and knocked her down. They took a hammer or a pipe and bludgeoned her to death. After she stopped moving, the men jumped on her scooter and drove off. The attack was witnessed from a distance by several locals. They chased them but lost sight of the attackers. Two children hidden in a tent also saw the attack from just a few feet away. They provided a detailed description that matched the sketch. Reportedly over two thousand investigators were working on the case.
Twelve more murders followed, often with multiple bodies found in the same day. In addition to the earlier sprees, two victims were found every day from July 14 through 16. Victims were seemingly selected at random. Many were vulnerable to attack, including women, children, elderly, vagrants, or people under the influence of alcohol.
Most of the victims were killed using blunt objects, including hammers and steel construction bars. Blows were often directed at the victims' faces, leaving them unrecognizable. Many victims were also mutilated and tortured, and some had their eyes poked out while they were still alive. One of the victims was a pregnant woman, whose fetus was cut out of her womb. No sexual assaults on any victims were reported.
Apparently the investigation was kept secret, with no official information about the murders being released. The local people were not warned about possible attacks or given descriptions of the suspects, but rumors of the attacks kept most people home at night. Eventually, investigators distributed sketches and lists of stolen property to the local pawn shops and stolen property began to appear in the pawn shops of the city. The combination of the sketches and stolen property led to the suspects.
The police had said that the home life of the kids probably had something to do with why they were killing, being from poor families (not that poor families make killers); however, these kids were from prosperous backgrounds.
The three suspects were lifelong friends who attended school together. Sayenko and Hanzha were friends from an early age. Suprunyuck moved to the area later, and the three became friends in the third grade. The two other boys had been good students before making friends with Suprunyuck, when their grades began to slip. One of their teachers reported that Suprunyuck was shy and withdrawn, but always picking fights and getting into trouble. By the fifth grade, the boys had their first brush with the law when they were caught throwing rocks at passing trains.
After high school, Hanzha drifted between odd jobs, which included a pastry chef and a construction worker. At the time of the arrest he had been unemployed for some time. Sayenko went to a metallurgy (metal working) institute part-time and worked as a security guard. Suprunyuck remained officially unemployed, but made a living driving his green Daewoo Lanos as an unlicensed taxi. The car was reportedly a birthday gift from his parents.
Some months before the murder spree began, Suprunyuck, with the help of Sayenko and Hanzha, began picking up passengers and robbing them. A green Daewoo with a taxicab's checkerboard marking was often described as the vehicle used in the murders. According to the suspects' confessions, some of the murder victims were picked up as passengers in Suprunyuck's unlicensed cab. Hanzha reportedly participated in a single incident where two men were robbed, and subsequently declined to take part in any further attacks.
Suprunyuck's father was reported to be a well-known lawyer, and Hanzha's father was described as a local prosecutor. Vladimir Suprunyuck, the father of one of the suspects, in his interview stated that he had been employed at Yuzhmash as a test pilot, often flying with Leonid Kuchma, the future president of Ukraine, and continuing to serve as his personal pilot on domestic flights after Kuchma's rise to power. Viktor Sayenko was represented in court by his father Igor Sayenko, a lawyer.
On February 11, 2009, the court in Dnepropetrovsk found Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced both to life imprisonment. They were also found guilty of robbery and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Alexander Hanzha, who was not involved in the killings, was found guilty of robbery and sentenced to nine years in prison. Hanzha said of Suprunyuck and Sayenko: "If I had known the atrocities that they were capable of committing, I would have not gone near them at gunpoint."
Editor's note: this article was written in March 2009, weeks after the verdict, and is reproduced as written with one omission. The original carried a full transcript of one of the two murder videos, taken from a copy circulating online. It has been withheld here. The man in that video was Sergei Yatzenko, named later in this same article, and the transcript records the last minutes of his life in the words of the men killing him; his family are living and the archive's rule is that victims are named, not described dying. Nothing else has been cut, and the withheld passage can be restored on request. On the record: Igor Suprunyuck and Viktor Sayenko were convicted on February 11, 2009 of twenty-one premeditated murders and sentenced to life imprisonment, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the sentences. Alexander Hanzha took no part in the killings and was convicted of robbery alone. This archive has no roster entry for any of the three, and the case is a candidate for one: twenty-one convicted counts, two offenders, a third convicted of a lesser offence. The article's opening question, whether this was a spree or a series, is the reason it is worth having. Twenty-one deaths in under a month, with no cooling-off period, is a spree by the usual definition; the plan the prosecution described, forty killings filmed to order, is not.