When detectives came to Serhiy Tkach's house in August 2005, he met them with a sentence Ukrainian papers repeated for years: "I have been waiting for you for twenty-five years." His last victim had been a nine-year-old neighbor, Katya. She had last been seen with a man, and when that man turned up at her funeral, witnesses recognized him. In the house police found things he had taken from his victims and kept.
Serhiy Fedorovych Tkach was born in Kiselyovsk, in the Kemerovo region of Siberia, in September 1952; sources give the day as the twelfth or the fifteenth. He served in the Soviet militia as a criminal forensic expert in the Kemerovo district and was dismissed for falsifying evidence. By his own later account he carried a grudge over that dismissal and wanted to show that the police were good for nothing.
He knew what investigators looked for, and he removed it. Between 1980 and 2005, across Crimea and the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions, he raped and killed girls and young women, some as young as eight, suffocating or strangling them and leaving them in water, in fields and beside railway lines, often in ways that looked like accidents. Ukrainian reporting called him the Pologovsky maniac, after the district of Polohy, and also the Pavlograd maniac. He was detained more than once, and each time either talked his way out or, according to some accounts, paid a bribe.
Other men went to prison for his crimes. In July 1989 he killed a nine-year-old girl in a village near Pavlograd; the police arrested her father and persuaded the grieving mother to denounce him, and the father later killed himself. A fourteen-year-old, Yakov Popovich, was arrested in class and convicted of killing his nine-year-old relative, Yana Popovich; he was sentenced to fifteen years and served more than eight, and even after Tkach confessed to the killing he was not freed until Tkach himself had been sentenced. Mykola Demchuk was beaten into confessing the rape of a nine-year-old girl named Ilona. Former prisoners later described torture, beatings and psychological pressure used to obtain their confessions. The number wrongly convicted is given as nine by some accounts and eleven by others, and no police officer involved in any of those cases was ever convicted; they were at most dismissed.
After his arrest he confessed at first to about eighty killings and then to more than a hundred, describing each in detail. "I am not a man, but a beast, like Chikatilo," he said during one interrogation. Psychiatrists found him sane. The trial ran until December 23, 2008, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The number proved is reported differently: at least twenty-nine by one account of the court's findings, thirty-three or thirty-seven by others, the gap being episodes the court did not accept despite his confessions. At trial he and his wife demanded that those who had jailed innocent men be punished.
He died in Zhytomyr prison on November 4, 2018.