Vladimir Kondratenko lived in Kyiv and was in his twenties during the first years of Ukrainian independence. Ukrainian reporting called the pair the Nighttime Killers.
Between 1991 and 1996 he killed sixteen people, fifteen men and one woman, in the parks, stairwells and courtyards of the city. He used a .22 sporting rifle and, at other times, whatever came to hand: stitching awls, bricks, iron bars. The variation in method was one reason the killings were not connected.
He was arrested in 1997. On May 31 that year he died in police custody from an overdose of prescription medication.
The official finding was suicide. It was questioned at the time and has been since, on the ground that a suspect in custody in Kyiv in 1997 who had not yet been tried and who could have named others is an inconvenient thing to have die of an overdose. No inquiry established anything further, and because he never came to trial, the sixteen killings were attributed to him administratively rather than proved.