Serhiy Tkach was arrested in the small town of Polohy, in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, in August 2005. He was a man who had worked in mines, factories and collective farms, and who had once been trained as a police forensic expert. Within weeks he was confessing to killings of girls and young women that he said went back to 1980. His first count was about 80. Later he said it was more than 100.
Investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office spent about three years assembling evidence. In December 2007 his case went to trial in closed session before the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal, and on December 23, 2008, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Reports of how many killings the court found proven differ, from 29 to 37. What is not in dispute is that, while he was free, police in at least three regions arrested other men for crimes he later admitted. One of them, the father of a 9-year-old girl, hanged himself in a detention cell. Another was 14 when he was taken out of school. Tkach died in a prison colony in Zhytomyr on November 4, 2018.
Tkach was born in 1952 in Kiselyovsk, a coal-mining town in the Kemerovo region of Siberia, then part of the Soviet Union. Lenta.ru, Interfax-Ukraine and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group all give that year; a 2007 interview published by Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine gave 1953.
After military service, where his specialty was surveying, he was assigned to the police and recommended for the Soviet Interior Ministry's school in Novosibirsk, according to a 2007 report in Moskovsky Komsomolets. He did not graduate. For about a year he worked as a forensic expert in the police department of the Kemerovo district. There he falsified the findings of an expert examination. Lenta.ru dates his dismissal to 1979.
In his 2007 interview Tkach said he had faked the report out of curiosity, to see how his superiors would react. They could have prosecuted him, he said, by having a body exhumed, but instead they made him write a letter of resignation and give up his studies. He told the paper he had laughed at them for a long time afterward.
Moskovsky Komsomolets described him as a former regional weightlifting champion. He told people he had served in combat zones and showed a scar, but the paper reported that he had never served in one and that the scar came from a drunken fight.
After leaving the police he moved often and changed jobs often. He worked at a railway station, in several mines and on collective farms, and he had a reputation as a capable worker, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group says he moved to Ukraine in the late 1970s; Moskovsky Komsomolets says he went first to Crimea.
He was married three times and had four children by 2007, both papers reported. Friends and relatives who spoke after his arrest said they had thought of him as a good man and a devoted husband. He himself told the interviewer that after a killing he could go home and behave like any other husband and worker.
Tkach told investigators that his first killing was in Simferopol, in Crimea, in 1980. He confirmed it to Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2007. He said he had been drinking and approached a woman he did not know, and that he strangled her.
Afterward he telephoned the police emergency number, 02. He hung up when the duty officer insisted on his name, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, writing in 2018, said he had called the police to confess and was not believed. That killing was not among the episodes tried in 2008, which began in 1984.
By about 1983 Tkach was living in Pavlohrad, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets. In 1984, the paper said, the administrative department of the Communist Party's Central Committee in Moscow asked for the files on an unsolved series of killings in the region. No one was charged with them as a series.
One of the girls who died in the Pavlohrad years was Olenka Svetlichnaya. She was 9. Her father was arrested and accused of killing her. He was held in the Dnipropetrovsk pretrial detention center, where, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets, he was allegedly tortured, and in 2000 he hanged himself in his cell. Radio Svoboda reported in 2008 that one of the innocent men punished for Tkach's crimes had taken his own life. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, in a 2018 review of the men wrongly held in the case, named him as the father of one of Tkach's victims.
From 1984, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, Tkach was attacking girls and women in the Zaporizhzhia region, and from 2000 he lived in Polohy, a district town southeast of Zaporizhzhia. The paper said that by then he attacked at intervals, about twice every six months. The verdict, as UNIAN reported it, covered crimes in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions between 1984 and 2005. Lenta.ru and Interfax-Ukraine list Crimea and the Kharkiv region among the places where he admitted killings.
Psychiatrists who examined him reported that he drank at least a liter of vodka mixed with the sedative diphenhydramine before each attack.
Few details about the girls and young women whose deaths were attributed to Tkach have been published, and most of the court record was closed. Ukrainian and Russian papers named some of them.
Olenka Svetlichnaya was 9 and lived in Pavlohrad. Her case is known mainly because her father was blamed for it.
Yana was 10 and lived in Rody, a village in the Zaporizhzhia region. Her 14-year-old cousin was arrested for her killing.
Olha Prystepa was 13 and lived in Polohy. She was killed on March 26, 2003. A young man from the town was arrested after two schoolgirls said they had seen him nearby. DNA later linked the killing to Tkach, Gazeta po-ukrainsky reported in 2012, and Tkach confessed to it.
Svitlana Starostina was 17. Another man spent nearly eight years in prison for her killing in 2004.
Katya was 6, the daughter of a neighbor in Polohy. She was the last of his victims. She drowned in 2005.
The men arrested for Tkach's crimes are a large part of why the case is remembered in Ukraine. Counts differ. Radio Svoboda reported at the verdict in 2008 that nine innocent people had been punished. Moskovsky Komsomolets and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group put the number of men charged or imprisoned at no fewer than ten. In 2012 Radio Svoboda reported that twelve other people had been arrested for his crimes. Most of those convicted served up to ten years, the Kharkiv group said.
The youngest was Ya. P., an eighth-grader from Rody. He was taken from an English lesson, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, and accused of killing his 10-year-old cousin, Yana. His mother told the paper he had been tortured into confessing. He was sentenced to 15 years and was still in prison in December 2007. The Kharkiv group reported that he was freed in 2008.
I. R. was sentenced to 10 years in 1997 for a crime that Moskovsky Komsomolets said Tkach had committed. The Kharkiv group, citing the journalist and lawyer Serhiy Dovhal, said he had at one stage been sentenced to death; the sentence was reduced after some charges were withdrawn, and he served a ten-year term in full for two attempted attacks on women who survived. He had been released shortly before the trial began.
V. K., a young man from Polohy, was detained on March 28, 2003, two days after Olha Prystepa's death. He told Gazeta po-ukrainsky in 2012 that he confessed after police threatened him and his family. The Kharkiv group said the threats were made against his wife and infant daughter. The case against him rested on his confession, a filmed reconstruction and the two schoolgirls' account, and no forensic examination showed his guilt, the paper reported. On April 24, 2004, the court of appeal sentenced him to 15 years, and the Supreme Court left the verdict in place. He was also ordered to pay the girl's family damages. He served his term in a strict-regime colony in Vilniansk. By his own count he spent 4 years, 8 months and 13 days in custody. Afterward his wife left him, and in 2012 he was suing for 2.5 million hryvnias in damages in a court in Marhanets. "What life taught me," he said, "is never to talk to the cops."
M. D. was detained on October 1, 2004, after he walked into a cafe one evening, and charged with crimes that Tkach later confessed to. He told Radio Svoboda in 2012 that he had been held for 37 days in the temporary detention facility of the Polohy district police, then in the pretrial detention center in Zaporizhzhia, and that he was beaten during interrogation and confessed under pressure. He later withdrew the confession. Gazeta po-ukrainsky reported that he was imprisoned for Svitlana Starostina's killing. A television report prompted a review in 2011, the Kharkiv group said. The Higher Specialized Court acquitted him in March 2012, and he was released on March 22, 2012, after nearly eight years. He told Radio Svoboda that he had received no compensation and did not expect justice in Ukraine. "Moral pressure is much worse," he said of the abuse. He died in early 2015, at 39, the Kharkiv group reported.
Another man served 4 years and 6 months for an attack on an 8-year-old girl, who survived, on August 17, 2003, and was released on February 25, 2008, Gazeta po-ukrainsky reported. He said his leg had been broken during his interrogation, and he was seeking compensation and the punishment of the officers involved.
The Prosecutor General's Office told Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2007 that the wrongly convicted would not be released until a verdict had been reached against the real killer. Edward Bagirov, head of the International League for the Protection of Citizens' Rights in Ukraine, told the paper that after the verdict they could be freed and sue for compensation.
In the summer of 2005, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, a new run of crimes with a recognizable pattern began in the Zaporizhzhia region, and more than 600 officers of the Zaporizhzhia garrison were assigned to the hunt. A woman who had survived an attack helped police produce a composite sketch.
Then Katya died. She had been playing by the river with friends, two girls and two boys, before she disappeared. Tkach went to her funeral. The children who had been with her recognized him and told adults that a man had been acting oddly and had said something funny to her, the paper reported. In his 2007 interview Tkach said he believed the children had seen him and told their parents, and that the girl's death was what brought him down.
Tkach was detained in Polohy on August 5, 2005, according to Gazeta po-ukrainsky; Lenta.ru reported that he was picked up on the outskirts of the town, where he lived. According to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, he told the officers who came for him that he had been waiting for them for 25 years.
Police who searched his home found items that had belonged to victims in several regions, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets, among them jewelry, cosmetics, mirrors, bags and clothing. He had kept them.
Tkach began to talk. He described the killings one by one, starting with the most recent and working back toward Crimea. The count he gave rose from about 80 to more than 100. Anatoly Shaida, a senior investigator for especially important cases at the Prosecutor General's Office, told Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2007 that the case sent to court contained 40 crimes, that collecting the evidence had taken about three years, and that the criminal investigation police, the Interior Ministry's organized crime unit and his own office had all worked on it. Other episodes were being investigated separately. Shaida said that when the work was finished the total could reach about 100. Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote that more than 70 killings were officially attributed to him.
Going to the scenes with investigators, he asked for a bulletproof vest and for any places a sniper could hide to be secured, the paper reported. At one cemetery he refused to get out of the car until a funeral procession had passed. He said alcohol set off his urges and that he did not look his victims in the eye.
Asked in 2007 why he had killed, Tkach gave two motives. One was revenge on the police, who he said would never work properly. The other was revenge on a girl from his school days who had rejected him, he told Komsomolskaya Pravda. Asked whether he regretted anything, he said he did not see himself as a human being but as a beast, and he compared himself with Andrei Chikatilo, the Soviet serial killer executed in 1994. He said he did not dream about the victims and did not believe in God or the devil. He was afraid of being killed in prison, and said that if it came to that he would fight.
A forensic psychiatric examination delayed the trial. The experts found him sane, responsible for his actions and in no need of compulsory treatment, Komsomolskaya Pravda in Ukraine reported. They described strong egocentrism, emotional coldness, resentment, vindictiveness, hostility and aggression, and an inability to form lasting close relationships. Those traits, combined with heavy drinking, had turned an ordinary man into a serial killer, they concluded. Radio Svoboda reported that he sometimes behaved erratically at hearings, but that doctors had found him fit to stand trial.
In 2007 the Prosecutor General's Office sent the case to court, and Tkach was held in the Dnipropetrovsk pretrial detention center, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. The Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal was due to begin hearing the case in closed session in mid-December 2007, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, and the trial lasted almost a year. Relatives of the victims and some of the women who had survived his attacks attended, Radio Svoboda reported. Tkach was defended by the lawyer Yuriy Sirotenko.
On November 17, 2008, while the trial was under way, the Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal case against three former officers of the Polohy district police in the Zaporizhzhia region: a first deputy chief and two operatives of the criminal investigation unit, UNIAN reported. A preliminary inquiry had found that they used physical and psychological pressure to make a man identified as D. confess to an attack on a girl. Citing Tkach's confession and other evidence, the prosecutors asked the Zaporizhzhia Regional Court of Appeal to set aside D.'s conviction under an exceptional procedure. The court agreed, and D. was released. The three officers were charged with abuse of office causing grave consequences, and a district court in Kyiv ordered them held in custody.
On December 23, 2008, the panel presided over by Judge Serhiy Voloshko sentenced Tkach to life imprisonment. UNIAN reported that he was convicted of 36 murders and attempted murders of women and girls committed in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions between 1984 and 2005, and of robbing and stealing from his victims. Relatives of three victims were awarded more than 370,000 hryvnias for moral and material damage. After the hearing Voloshko told reporters that guilt had not been proven in four of the murders.
Later reports gave different figures. In 2017 Lenta.ru wrote that the court had found 37 murders and eight further crimes proven. Interfax-Ukraine, in 2018, reported that the court had proven 29 murders and eight further attacks on victims who survived, and had set three episodes aside for further investigation. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group wrote that his guilt was established in 37 cases.
The verdict was open to cassation appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine and would take effect in 30 days. Tkach said in court that he would appeal. His lawyer said Tkach wanted to be moved quickly to a colony for prisoners serving life, where he believed conditions were better than in pretrial detention.
The men jailed in his place were released slowly. Radio Svoboda reported that when M. D. walked free in March 2012, three people involved in his unlawful arrest and torture had been detained and others were being sought. In December 2012 the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group reported that the journalist Serhiy Dovhal had written to the Prosecutor General, Viktor Pshonka, asking who would answer for the convictions, and that there was no information about any further investigation.
On December 12, 2013, the city court in Marhanets, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, found four police officers and an investigator from the Polohy district prosecutor's office guilty of torture, forgery in office and abuse of power, UNIAN reported. The investigator received five years. Two officers received seven years each, with confiscation of property. Two others were found guilty but freed because the time limit for prosecution had run out; their offenses dated from 2003 and 2004. The court found that the officers had held a man for 15 days in an unfit cell, beaten him and forced a confession to an attack on a girl. He had been sentenced to 10 years and served 6. The investigator had questioned him without a lawyer and falsified the statements of the victim and witnesses, and had falsified records in a second case, against a man with a psychiatric disorder, who was then ordered to undergo compulsory treatment.
Tkach served his sentence in the Zhytomyr region, in penal colony No. 8 in Zhytomyr. He shared his cell with one other prisoner. The head of the colony later told the newspaper Segodnya that Tkach had been calm, had caused no incidents and had no disciplinary violations, UNIAN reported.
In 2017 Lenta.ru reported, citing her account to Russian television, that a woman from Russia who had written to him after seeing him on television had married him in prison and had a daughter with him. It was his fourth marriage.
On November 4, 2018, Tkach fell ill in the colony. Staff called an ambulance at about 3 p.m.; his blood pressure was very low, and the ambulance did not take him. He was declared dead at about 7 p.m., the head of the colony told Segodnya, as reported by UNIAN and Interfax-Ukraine. He had complained of heart trouble and shortness of breath. Lenta.ru, citing Ukraine's State Penitentiary Service through the TSN news service, gave the cause of death as heart failure. Interfax-Ukraine said he died in his 67th year.
No relatives came for the body. Staff tried and failed to reach his wife, whose whereabouts were unknown, and on November 7, 2018, the colony buried him itself.
The number of killings. Tkach confessed to about 80 killings and later to more than 100. Investigators in 2007 spoke of 40 crimes in the case before the court and a possible total near 100, and Moskovsky Komsomolets of more than 70 officially attributed to him. The court's findings are reported variously as 36 murders and attempted murders, as 29 murders with eight further attacks, and as 37 murders. Killings beyond those found proven are his admissions or the investigators' attributions, not convictions.
The first killing. His account of a killing in Simferopol in 1980, followed by a call to the police, comes from his own statements to investigators and to the press. It was not among the episodes in the verdict as UNIAN reported it.
How he was identified. Moskovsky Komsomolets credits the children who had been with Katya and recognized him at her funeral, alongside a survivor's description used for a composite sketch. Tkach himself said he believed the children had given him away.
His age and birth year. Lenta.ru, Interfax-Ukraine and the Kharkiv group give 1952; one 2007 interview gives 1953.
The number of men wrongly held. Reports range from nine people punished (Radio Svoboda, 2008) to at least ten charged or jailed (Moskovsky Komsomolets, 2007; Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 2018) and twelve arrested (Radio Svoboda, 2012).
1952: Tkach is born in Kiselyovsk, Kemerovo region, Soviet Union.
1979: Dismissed from police forensic work in the Kemerovo district after falsifying an expert report (date as given by Lenta.ru).
1980: First killing he admitted, in Simferopol, Crimea.
About 1983: Living in Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovsk region.
1984: Earliest crime among the counts in the 2008 verdict; Moscow asks for the files on an unsolved series in the region.
1997: I. R. is sentenced to 10 years for a crime later attributed to Tkach.
2000: Tkach is living in Polohy. The father of Olenka Svetlichnaya, held for her killing, hangs himself in the Dnipropetrovsk pretrial detention center.
March 26, 2003: Olha Prystepa, 13, is killed in Polohy; V. K. is detained two days later.
August 17, 2003: An 8-year-old girl survives an attack for which another man is later jailed.
April 24, 2004: V. K. is sentenced to 15 years.
October 1, 2004: M. D. is detained.
2005: Katya, 6, drowns in Polohy, shortly before Tkach is identified.
August 5, 2005: Tkach is detained in Polohy.
December 2007: Trial opens in closed session at the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal.
February 25, 2008: The man jailed for the 2003 attack on the 8-year-old is released.
November 17, 2008: The Prosecutor General's Office opens a case against three former Polohy district police officers.
December 23, 2008: Tkach is sentenced to life imprisonment.
March 22, 2012: M. D. is released after his acquittal.
December 12, 2013: A court in Marhanets convicts police officers and a prosecutor's investigator of torture, forgery and abuse of power.
2017: His marriage in prison to a Russian woman is reported.
November 4, 2018: Tkach dies in Zhytomyr penal colony No. 8.
November 7, 2018: He is buried by prison staff.