The man recorded in this archive as Tcaiuc is Vasile Tcaciuc, born around 1900 in Bessarabia, or by other accounts at Kitsman in Bukovina, and known in Romania as the Butcher of Iasi.
He was a career thief, known to the Iasi police from about 1930 and jailed more than once for robbery and burglary. Alongside that he was killing. He lured people to his house and killed them for what they had on them, with an axe he had made for the purpose: the handle was shaped so that it would not slip out of his hand once it became slippery with blood. He used the same axe afterwards to cut up the bodies, to make them easier to hide.
He was in police custody on a robbery charge when the murders came to light, and the discovery owed nothing to any investigation of him. He had sold the house he had lived in for years. The new owner's dog kept scratching at the floorboards. The man dug where the dog was scratching and found six bodies buried less than a metre down, all of them showing wounds from a heavy blade.
Confronted with the find he denied it, and then gave himself away when he was put face to face with two women he had lived with. His account, once it came, was that there were another twenty victims beyond the six under his floor, one of them a child, buried under the floors of other isolated houses and in a forest. He said he had acted at the instigation of a seventeen-year-old girl who had helped him bury them.
Twenty-one of the murders could be proved. The remaining bodies were never found, and the figure most often given for the total is twenty-six. The span of the killings is given in some sources as 1930 to 1935 and in others as running back to 1917.
He was never tried and never convicted. On October 17, 1935, during a reconstruction of one of the killings, he tried to escape and a policeman shot him dead. He was about thirty-five.
This entry previously carried his name as Tcaiuc with no first name, described the record as consisting of a single 1935 wire report, and said the reference works assumed he had been executed. All of that came from reading only English-language sources. The Romanian record is detailed, and it shows he was shot escaping rather than executed. The old spelling is kept as an alternative name so that searches for it still reach this page.