Vinko Pintarić spent most of the last two decades of his life either in prison or on the run in Hrvatsko Zagorje, the hill country north of Zagreb. In 1974 a court convicted him of killing a neighbor and his wife the year before and sentenced him to death, a sentence commuted to 20 years. He walked out of prison in 1982, was caught again in 1983 and given a second 20-year term, and in September 1989 failed to come back from a day's leave from Lepoglava prison. In the summer of 1990 three more men were shot dead in the Zagorje villages, killings that police and the press attributed to him. A special police operation hunted him for months. In May 1991 officers surrounded a house near Veliko Trgovišće where he was hiding, and he was shot dead in the siege. The killings of 1990 never came before a court.
Some people in the villages where he hid fed and sheltered him, out of fear or sympathy, and admirers gave him a nickname borrowed from an older outlaw: the Zagorje Čaruga, after Jovo Stanisavljević Čaruga, the bandit of the years after the First World War. Dnevno.hr wrote in 2025 that his name still divided people, a cruel criminal to some and a fighter against injustice to others.
Pintarić was born on April 3, 1941, in Zrinski Topolovac, according to Dnevno.hr; the Serbian news site Ekspres placed his birth in a village near Bjelovar. His father had fought with the Partisans, and was beaten and executed by Partisan forces who accused him of collaborating with the Ustaše, Dnevno.hr reported. Both Dnevno.hr and Ekspres wrote that his mother remarried and that his stepfather drank and abused the boy for years. Index.hr, writing in 2008, said only that he lost his father very young, and linked that loss to the aggression of his later life and to an urge to avenge his father's death by killing.
By the account in Ekspres, he grew interested in guns early, used them for poaching, and had illegal weapons taken from him by police several times. He was 162 centimeters tall but very strong. A first marriage lasted only a few months; he abused his wife's parents and served several months in prison for it. After his release he moved to Zabok, in the Zagorje, where he married Katica Tisanić, a divorced woman with a child, built a house and had a daughter.
The first killing for which he was convicted happened in Zabok in April 1973. Index.hr and Ekspres both give the date as April 26, 1973. That day, according to Ekspres, he had been turned down for a job at a local factory and had been drinking. Mondo, a regional news site, named the company as Regeneracija, where his wife and her brothers worked, and cited a waitress's testimony that he had drunk a large quantity of wine and brandy.
On the way home he picked up a few discarded wooden laths. His neighbor, Vid Želimorski, objected, and the quarrel turned into a fight. Pintarić shot Želimorski dead. A second man, the neighbor's tenant, was wounded. Pintarić fled and hid for 18 days, then gave himself up.
In July 1973 an investigating judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation at the Vrapče hospital in Zagreb, Index.hr reported. About three months later he escaped from it. Mondo dates the escape to mid-September 1973.
Back at large, Pintarić went to Grabrovec, near Zabok, where his wife was staying at her brother's house. He believed she was helping the police, Index.hr reported; Ekspres adds that he also suspected her of being unfaithful. On the night of October 24, 1973, he shot her dead.
He stayed hidden for about three months more. Mondo dates his second surrender to January 19, 1974.
In 1974 he stood trial for two murders, those of Vid Želimorski and his wife, along with one count of attempted murder and a charge of endangering his neighbors by shooting at their houses. He admitted the acts, according to Ekspres, but pleaded not guilty on the ground that he had been drunk. The court found him guilty on all counts, and in November 1974 he was sentenced to death.
Under the law then in force, the death sentence was converted to 20 years' imprisonment, which Ekspres described as the longest prison term allowed at the time. He served the sentence at Stara Gradiška.
Pintarić was, by Mondo's account, a well-behaved prisoner who won the trust of the guards. After about eight years, on February 21, 1982, he put his own name on the list of prisoners allowed out of the prison and walked away, Index.hr and Ekspres reported. Five days later, according to Ekspres and Mondo, he wrote to his lawyer that he would kill many people.
Over the following year he lived in hiding in the Zagorje. Ekspres, drawing on the recollections of the police officer who later led the hunt for him, described how villagers fed and sheltered him, often under threat, and how few would report him. Police went into the villages disguised as veterinarians, power company workers and traders. They learned that he had several women friends. The longest of these relationships was with a woman who lived on the edge of a village; they had met, Ekspres wrote, when he stepped out of a cornfield and asked her for water, and she took him in.
In April 1983 police arrested that companion. Pintarić responded, according to Ekspres, by forcing his way into a family's house near Oroslavje with a shotgun and demanding that a letter be taken to the police: unless she was released, he would kill 30 people. Index.hr placed the episode in Andraševec and described the letter in the same terms.
The family overpowered him. He was badly hurt and lost the use of his right arm, Ekspres reported, and he was treated at the trauma clinic in Zagreb, according to Index.hr. He was back in custody.
Pintarić was tried again, on charges of threats, attempted murder and burglary. He was convicted and sentenced to another 20 years. Index.hr dates that sentence to 1986. He served it at Lepoglava.
After about six years of good behavior, by Ekspres's count, he was granted a day's leave. On September 3, 1989, he left the prison and did not come back. It was the last time he was in custody.
For several months after the Lepoglava escape there were reports of sightings but no arrest. Then, in the summer of 1990, three men were shot dead in the Zagorje within about eight weeks. Police and the press attributed all three killings to Pintarić. None was ever tried, because he was killed before he could be brought to court.
Rudolf Belina was 54, a retired man from Zagreb who kept a weekend house at Začretski Prosenik. He was shot dead there in June 1990 while feeding his animals, Mondo reported. Mondo gave the date as June 4, 1990. Index.hr reported that Pintarić believed Belina had betrayed him to the police; Ekspres wrote that the killing came days after police had spoken to Belina. Mondo described the hours that followed: police searched the hills while residents stayed indoors.
Stjepan Kišur was shot dead on June 24, 1990, according to Mondo, which reported that the police were not called until the next morning. Index.hr linked his death to a quarrel over a chicken that had crossed into a yard, and reported that Pintarić later described the killing to the people who were hiding him.
Božo Habek, the father of two young sons, was shot dead on August 2, 1990, Mondo reported; Index.hr, Ekspres and Dnevno.hr also reported the killing. Mondo wrote that Pintarić afterward described Habek, in a letter to his lawyer, as a brave man.
Beyond these killings, the press linked him to break-ins at dozens of houses and weekend cottages, to thefts, and to the wounding of several people, two police officers among them, who were shot in two failed attempts to take him, Index.hr reported.
The Belina killing led the Croatian interior ministry to set up a special unit with a single task, to find and arrest Pintarić, according to Index.hr. Its operation was called Prsten, the Ring. Index.hr and Ekspres name its leader as Mate Laušić, who later headed security for President Franjo Tuđman and commanded the military police during the war. Dnevnik.hr, the news site of Nova TV, wrote in a profile of Laušić that he was in charge of Prsten as assistant to Damir Lončarić, the chief of the criminal police.
The operation lasted 11 months, Dnevno.hr and Ekspres reported. Ekspres wrote that about 50 special police officers combed the forests and villages. Laušić, recalling the hunt about two decades later in remarks quoted by Ekspres, said they had expected to catch him quickly and had been wrong. He said there were about 10,000 weekend cottages and outbuildings in the area and that the teams covered about 30 square kilometers a day.
Laušić described the people who helped Pintarić as women living on the margins of the villages, poor, divorced or estranged from their neighbors. To them, he said, Pintarić was a kind of savior who brought meat and wine and protected them. Most villagers gave him food, shelter, sometimes ammunition and rides, often at gunpoint, and few dared to inform on him.
Two episodes from the hunt stayed in the accounts. In one, reported by Ekspres, Pintarić broke into the home of an elderly couple and, after eating, telephoned the duty officer at the police station in Bjelovar and talked for about four hours. Police traced the call and surrounded the house. When he came out, he spotted an officer standing up rather than lying flat, fired a hunting rifle, wounded the officer and got away. "The only problem was that we did not know where we were going," Laušić said of that night, in Ekspres's account.
In the other, reported by both Ekspres and Dnevno.hr, tracker dogs followed his trail to a small stream and lost it there, and the search was called off. The next day police learned that he had spent the whole night lying in the water with only his head above the surface. Ekspres added that clothes were later found drying at a nearby mill.
In May 1991 police learned that Pintarić was visiting a woman who lived near Veliko Trgovišće. Ekspres reported that officers waited in ambush near her house and, on the third night, saw a man come out of the forest toward it; a special police team from Kumrovec was called in. Mondo dates the encirclement to May 24, 1991.
He was called on to surrender, Ekspres wrote, and opened fire instead. He was wounded in a brief exchange and went back inside. He refused to come out and asked for his lawyer. When the lawyer arrived, Pintarić asked him to come into the house; police would not allow it. Index.hr reported that the lawyer tried to talk him into surrendering and finally gave up.
In the afternoon police fired tear gas into the house. Pintarić shot and wounded the woman who had been sheltering him, accusing her of betrayal, Ekspres reported; she survived, according to Index.hr, and later described his last hours. Officers stormed the house, and one of them shot Pintarić dead. Dnevno.hr gives the date of his death as May 25, 1991.
Ekspres reported that he left behind a bag of newspaper clippings about his own crimes, which he had kept with him to the end. His longtime companion died a few months after him, according to the same report.
Pintarić was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery at Lepoglava, Ekspres and Dnevno.hr reported.
His case returned to the Croatian press whenever violence struck the Zagorje again. In March 2008, after a series of killings in a single night in the villages of Velika Veternička and Vitešinac, Index.hr retold his story under a headline saying the new killings had brought him back to mind. In 2015 the Bosnian daily Avaz included him in a series on the most violent killers of the former Yugoslavia, and in 2020 the regional site Mondo retold his story at length, as did Ekspres in 2019 and Dnevno.hr in 2025.
The three killings of 1990 were attributed to Pintarić by police and the press, but they were never tested in court. He was killed before any charge could be heard. Only the two killings of 1973 ended in convictions.
The accounts differ on several dates. The first killing is dated April 26, 1973, by Index.hr, Ekspres and Dnevno.hr, but June 26, 1973, by Mondo. The year of the second 20-year sentence is given as 1986 by Index.hr; Ekspres does not give a year. The Habek killing is dated August 2, 1990, by Index.hr, Ekspres, Dnevno.hr and Mondo, but October 2, 1990, in the Avaz series of 2015. The death is dated May 25, 1991, by Dnevno.hr, while Mondo puts the encirclement on May 24; Index.hr gives only the month.
The accounts also differ on details of the siege. Ekspres describes a three-night stakeout before the house was surrounded and says police kept the lawyer outside; Index.hr says the lawyer tried and failed to persuade him to give up. The motive for the killing of his wife is given as his belief that she was helping the police (Index.hr), or as that belief together with suspicion of infidelity (Ekspres). The number of killings usually credited to him in the press, five, combines the two convictions of 1974 with the three attributed killings of 1990.
April 3, 1941: Vinko Pintarić is born, in Zrinski Topolovac according to Dnevno.hr.
April 26, 1973: Vid Želimorski is shot dead in Zabok after a quarrel; a second man is wounded. Pintarić surrenders 18 days later.
July 1973: An investigating judge orders a psychiatric evaluation at Vrapče hospital, Zagreb.
September 1973: He escapes from Vrapče (mid-September, according to Mondo).
October 24, 1973: His wife, Katica, is shot dead in Grabrovec, near Zabok.
January 19, 1974: He surrenders again (Mondo).
November 1974: Convicted of two murders, attempted murder and shooting at houses; sentenced to death, commuted to 20 years. Sent to Stara Gradiška.
February 21, 1982: Walks out of Stara Gradiška after adding his name to a list of prisoners allowed out.
April 1983: Overpowered and badly injured at a house near Oroslavje after threatening to kill 30 people unless his companion was released; returned to custody.
1986: Sentenced to another 20 years for threats, attempted murder and burglary (date per Index.hr); held at Lepoglava.
September 3, 1989: Fails to return from a day's leave from Lepoglava.
June 1990: Rudolf Belina is shot dead at Začretski Prosenik (June 4, according to Mondo). The interior ministry forms the Prsten unit to catch Pintarić.
June 24, 1990: Stjepan Kišur is shot dead.
August 2, 1990: Božo Habek is shot dead.
May 1991: Police surround a house near Veliko Trgovišće; Pintarić is shot dead in the siege (May 25, 1991, according to Dnevno.hr). Buried in the prison cemetery at Lepoglava.