For almost two years after he broke out of Lepoglava prison in September 1989, Vinko Pintarić lived in the woods and hills of Hrvatsko Zagorje, the rolling country north of Zagreb, breaking into houses, shooting at people who crossed him and slipping police stakeouts. Newspapers across Yugoslavia followed him, and some people in the villages came to see him as a kind of Robin Hood. They called him the Čaruga of Zagorje, after Jovo Stanisavljević Čaruga, a notorious outlaw of the years after the First World War. By the time he died he had killed five people over seventeen years and escaped from custody three times.
He was born on April 3, 1941, in Zrinski Topolovac, near Bjelovar. His first killing, of a neighbor, came in April 1973. He was arrested in May 1973 and escaped that September. He shot his wife, was arrested again in January 1974, and on November 18, 1974, was sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to twenty years, then the longest prison term Yugoslav law allowed. In February 1982 he escaped again.
Back at large, he went on robbing houses. On one occasion two brothers, Milan and Matija Kucelj, surprised him, overpowered him and cut him with a cleaver, and left him for dead while they raised the alarm with the Oroslavje police. He survived but lost the full use of his right arm. He was recaptured in April 1983, charged with threats, attempted murder and thirty burglaries, and sentenced again to twenty years in Lepoglava. After his escape in September 1989 he killed three more neighbors, Rudolf Belina, Barbara Šipek and, in August 1990, Božo Habek, and wounded several other people, two police officers among them. Croatian accounts give the order and dates of these later killings inconsistently.
The Zabok police set up a team to hunt him, in an operation called Prsten, the Ring, that ran for eleven months. In May 1991 they learned that he was visiting his lover, Ankica Buhiniček, at her house near Veliko Trgovišće, and staked it out. On the third night officers saw a man come out of the woods to the house. A special forces team from Kumrovec joined them and surrounded the place. When Pintarić came out in the morning and was called on to surrender, he opened fire. Before he died he shot Ankica Buhiniček in the stomach; she survived and later described his last hours. He was killed by a shot to the head on May 25, 1991, at fifty.