Among the people who came forward to help the Kyiv police after Oleksandr Bykov was found shot and stabbed in his apartment in September 1996 was a man who turned up in the crime scene photographs, volunteered to help look for clues, and gave his name: Volodymyr Dmytrovych Kondratenko. He had been Bykov's friend for years. He had also been having an affair with Bykov's wife, and Bykov owned a pistol that Kondratenko wanted. After the killing he kept seeing the widow, drove her to the morgue and to her meetings with investigators, and helped her look for her husband's killer. The detectives did not have his address. When they finally found him, loitering on Sotsialistychna Street near the scenes of two of the killings, he was with a second man who matched the other description they had been circulating, Vladyslav Volkovych.
The case had come together that summer. On June 18, 1996, a forty-four-year-old factory worker, Yevheniy Osechkin, was found dead near the Karavaevi Dachi railway station, shot with a .22 and stabbed repeatedly, his day's wages still in his pocket. Months before, a homeless man had been killed the same way a hundred meters away. Two weeks later a well-known doctor, Oleksandr Yehorov, was shot in his car in daylight, and within the hour another man was found shot and stabbed a few blocks off; fingerprints from the scenes matched no records. Then Oleksandr Shpack argued at a birthday party with two men who had crashed it, left with them, and was found shot and stabbed; his girlfriend remembered that one of them was called Volodymyr. On September 4 an unidentified man was found shot in the head and chest. On September 28 Petr Gromov was shot twice in the head and stabbed in his VAZ-2106, and the killers, having shot out a window and the roof, abandoned the car within a block. A neighbor near that scene recognized one of the men as a Volodymyr who lived nearby, and in the building she pointed out police found Bykov's body, dead since about September 23, with unlit matches wedged in the door frame as a marker. A man watching the building ran from the surveillance team into a market.
By then eleven killings had been tied to the rifle. Before the order to detain the two men came down, they killed once more: driving drunk and fast in a stolen VAZ-2102, on their way to rob a commercial warehouse and kill its lone guard, they struck and killed an unidentified woman. Once in custody they confessed to more than twenty murders and to robberies, carjackings and burglaries. They said they had begun by practicing on the homeless to prepare themselves for careers as contract killers, and had gone on killing for money and for fun. Their method with drivers explained why witnesses usually saw only one man. Volkovych would hitch a ride and ask to stop for a friend with a box. The friend was Kondratenko, the box held their .22 TOZ-16 sporting rifle, and as Kondratenko shot the driver Volkovych stabbed him. At least seven men were killed that way for their cars, most of which the pair sold.
According to the prosecution's psychological profile, Kondratenko had been a model child until his perfectionist father, a construction worker, began beating him for any grade below the top mark. He begged his teachers on his knees not to mark him down, then grew shy and withdrawn. His father forced him into an architectural college, which he left after a semester, and at eighteen he was drafted into the Soviet Army, where he was badly hazed and suffered a serious concussion falling from a tank. Coming home in civilian clothes earned him another beating. A severe case of jaundice left marks on his face that kept him indoors for months, and his parents had him committed to a psychiatric hospital, which released him as sane. Jobless, still at home and in constant conflict with his father, he wanted money to get out. Volkovych, a twin from an unremarkable home, was preoccupied with appearances and money but did not want a job, and the two talked about ways to make it.
Many of the early victims, who had been homeless, were never found, and the two men were charged with sixteen murders. Two others were tried with them: Andriy Tymoshyn, a former senior customs inspector, charged with one of the murders and the car theft that followed, and Serhiy Tretiachenko, a delivery driver, charged with helping Kondratenko in the planned warehouse robbery. Days after the trial began, Kondratenko died in police custody of an overdose of prescription medication, and the death was ruled a suicide. Volkovych then tried to change his testimony and make Kondratenko the only gunman, and Tymoshyn claimed he had meant only to rob a taxi driver, although Kondratenko had said Tymoshyn paid them to kill the man, with whom he was in conflict. In August 2000 all three surviving defendants were convicted, and Volkovych was sentenced to life imprisonment, Ukraine having abolished the death penalty.