Silvo Plut was given fifteen years for raping and killing a woman he had been at school with. He served thirteen, released early for exemplary behavior. Two more women died after he came out.
He was born at Novo Mesto on May 29, 1968. A cultural anthropologist who later wrote a book about him recorded that he had shared a bed with his mother until he was sixteen.
On February 16, 1990 he killed Marjanca Matjasic, a woman from his own village who had been at school with him. He raped her, killed her, mutilated the body and ran. Police caught him quickly and he admitted it. He did not express regret.
The court-appointed expert, Joze Lokar, described it as an impulsive aggressive breakthrough in which he destroyed and disfigured the cause and the witness of his failed attempt to prove himself a man through sex. Plut was sentenced to fifteen years and sent to the prison at Dob.
He served thirteen. He was released early on account of exemplary behavior, his blue eyes and what one Slovenian account calls his Mona Lisa smile, and he left for Serbia.
There he took part in a number of robberies, and on November 18, 2004, at Aleksinac, he killed Jasmina Dosic, who was twenty-five. Her body was mutilated as well.
He fled back to Slovenia. Serbia issued a warrant and Slovenia refused to extradite him. He was arrested there instead on a Slovenian warrant over the robberies, and then acquitted for want of evidence and let out. The public in both countries was furious.
On February 24, 2006 he went to a house at Jance, in the hills outside Ljubljana, and waited inside for the couple who lived there. Ljubica Ulcar was twenty-five and had two small children. Her husband Miro had given evidence against Plut about a robbery at Polhov Gradec, and that is why Plut was in the house.
He raped and killed Ljubica Ulcar. Miro Ulcar got out of the house and survived.
Seven hundred police officers took part in the search. He was arrested the next day.
At his trial in Ljubljana his own lawyer, Andrej Zabjek, recounted the medical evidence: that Plut had killed her slowly, not at a stroke, pushing the knife into her body. On October 2, 2006 the court sentenced him to thirty years for the murder, the attempted murder of her husband and false imprisonment. On April 26, 2007 the district court at Nis in Serbia, trying him in his absence, sentenced him to forty years for the murder of Jasmina Dosic. Across all the first-instance judgments the terms came to more than a hundred and sixteen years.
He had gone on hunger strike during the Slovenian proceedings because the court refused to hear the psychiatrist he wanted as an expert. Only two psychiatric assessments of him exist.
He had already tried to kill himself twice and had been held for a period under a special regime. A friend said he had been refusing his tranquilizers for more than a month, which is presumably how he accumulated them. On the morning of April 28, 2007, at a quarter past seven, staff distributing breakfast at the remand prison on Povsetova street in Ljubljana found him dead in the cell he occupied alone. He had died between four and six. The autopsy found a combination of three drugs; the overdose was of sleeping pills. The director of the prison service said the death could not have been prevented.
The Slovenian judgment had become final less than a month earlier.
His family disowned him and the court paid for the funeral. He had asked to be buried and was not; his remains were stored at Zale cemetery in Ljubljana, and lawyers pointed out that there was no legal basis for storing them.
Karmen Sterk, in a book on the case, proposed piquerism: sexual gratification obtained from stabbing and piercing and cutting. That is her hypothesis and not the finding of any court.
There is one more Plut in the record. In 1986 his cousin Bojan Plut, doing national service with the Yugoslav army in Ljubljana, broke into the barracks armory, stole a rifle and ammunition and ran. During the manhunt across Slovenia and Croatia he stole several vehicles and shot two policemen dead. When police tracked him down he killed himself, having written on the rifle that his head was buzzing and that he had not meant to kill them.