On May 19, 2008 the Skopje daily Nova Makedonija published an article by its Kicevo correspondent under the headline "Serial Killer Stalks Kicevo, Too." The people of the town, Vlado Taneski wrote, lived in fear after another butchered body had been found, one that closely resembled a body found outside Kicevo the year before; both women had been tortured and killed in the same way. He wrote about the killings for the national daily Utrinski Vesnik as well, visiting the victims' families and talking with their relatives.
The police read the articles too. They contained details that had not been released, and investigators concluded that he must be writing from his own experience. His DNA was then found on the bodies of two of the victims.
The three dead women were elderly cleaners who lived in the same neighborhood of Kicevo, in western Macedonia, about seventy-five miles southwest of Skopje. Mitra Simjanoska, sixty-four, was found in 2005; Ljubica Licoska, fifty-six, in 2007; and Zivana Temelkoska, sixty-five, in 2008. Each had been beaten and sexually abused and strangled with a telephone cable, and their naked bodies had been stuffed in nylon bags and hidden in different places. A fourth woman from the area was missing.
Taneski was born in Kicevo in 1952, the second of three children, and was fifty-six, married with two children, and known as a quiet local correspondent. Macedonian coverage noted that the victims resembled his mother, who had also worked as a cleaner; nothing beyond the resemblance supports the idea that it mattered.
He was arrested at his home on Friday, June 20, 2008, while police searched the house and his cottage in a nearby village. He was charged with two of the murders, including Temelkoska's, and questioned about the third death and the missing woman. On Sunday a court in Gostivar ordered him held for thirty days, and he was taken to the prison outside Tetovo.
Early on Monday, June 23, other inmates alerted the wardens when he failed to come back from the bathroom. He was found there dead, his head in a bucket of water. A police spokesman, Ivo Kotevski, said a preliminary examination did not suggest his head had been forced into it; the bucket was sealed for forensic examination and his body taken to Skopje for autopsy. Under his pillow was a handwritten note: "I did not commit these murders." His death was recorded as suicide, and he was never tried.