Vlado Taneski spent more than two decades as the Kicevo correspondent for newspapers in Skopje, the capital of what was then the Republic of Macedonia. Between 2005 and 2008 he wrote about the deaths of older women from his own neighborhood, women who had worked as cleaners and custodians. In June 2008 the police arrested him for those deaths. They said his reports contained details that had not been released, and that his DNA matched evidence from two of the women. He was charged with two murders and was under investigation for a third death and for a woman who had been missing since 2003.
A note he left denied the killings. Three days after his arrest he was found drowned in the prison at Tetovo, and the authorities called his death a suicide. He was never tried, and no court ever ruled on the evidence against him. Two other men had already been convicted of one of the killings he was charged with.
Kicevo is a small town in western Macedonia, about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southwest of Skopje, according to Associated Press and ABC30 reports. A long-form account in the Virginia Quarterly Review placed it on a high mountain plateau a few kilometers east of the Albanian border, a quiet provincial place that few travel guides mention and that stayed relatively calm during the 2001 conflict around nearby Tetovo.
Taneski was born there, or nearby, in 1952. His father worked as a night watchman and his mother as a custodian at the local hospital; neighbors told the Virginia Quarterly Review that both parents were strict. He had a younger brother, who left home young and was estranged from him for about 30 years, and a sister who moved to Skopje. Speaking of their childhood, his brother told the magazine that Vlado was "just a normal child."
He went to a technical high school and worked as a metalworker in a local factory. He then became head of the Communist youth organization in Kicevo and spent two years at a political school in Kumrovec, in Croatia. In 1973 he met his future wife at a regional poetry reading; they married in 1977, according to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and had two sons. One son became a writer and university lecturer abroad; the other served in the army. His wife, a lawyer, told Agence France-Presse in 2008 that they had been married for 31 years and had separated four years before his arrest, that their relationship had been normal, and that he was not an aggressive man. She told the Virginia Quarterly Review that he had been caring and tender, that he helped her through her studies and built an office for her law practice in their house, and that he was pedantic and organized almost to a fault. She also said he could become aggressive in arguments with his parents.
In 1980 Taneski returned to Kicevo as an editor at Radio Kicevo. In 1985 he joined Nova Makedonija, the Skopje daily that Agence France-Presse described as the country's oldest, as a staff reporter. He was laid off in 2003, when the paper changed hands, and after that he wrote freelance for Utrinski Vesnik, for Vreme and again for Nova Makedonija. The Virginia Quarterly Review reported that he had won the national award for best reporting three times, and Agence France-Presse reported that Nova Makedonija itself had once given him an award.
Alongside news from the town he wrote nostalgic essays about rural life, under titles such as "Pictures from Life" and "Pictures without a Frame," including pieces on a deserted village and a local monastery. He still worked on a typewriter and phoned his copy in to Skopje. He did not drink or smoke, had few friends and seldom had guests. Kiro Kiproski, a Nova Makedonija reporter, called him an introvert; Ljupcho Popovski, editor in chief of Utrinski Vesnik, called him a good, quiet journalist.
The Virginia Quarterly Review recorded a harder side as well. Sasa Dukoski, a colleague, said Taneski had sometimes passed off other reporters' work as his own and had once made threatening telephone calls to him, about 15 years earlier, which Dukoski chose not to report.
He lost both parents in 2002, and with them their pensions, and his staff job in 2003. His father died in August 2002 at the family's summer cottage outside town, and his mother died in December 2002 of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, according to the Virginia Quarterly Review; accounts of how his father died differ. His wife's job in Skopje supported the family, and he opened a local dealership for an air-conditioner company to bring in more money. He had talked about selling the family house and the cottage and moving to Skopje. Police and press reports in 2008 said he had had a poor relationship with his mother. The police themselves did not confirm that this relationship had anything to do with a motive, the Croatian news site Index.hr reported.
The first woman later linked to the case vanished in May 2003. Gorica Pavleska was a retired custodian; her age was given as 73 by the Virginia Quarterly Review, 78 by the Associated Press and 79 by Agence France-Presse and Index.hr. She was never found. People in Kicevo did not connect her disappearance with anything else until the later deaths, and in 2008 police said they believed she might have been another victim of the same person. Taneski was to be questioned about her, but no charge was ever brought.
Mitra Simjanoska, a retired custodian, disappeared in November 2004. Her age was reported as 61 by the Virginia Quarterly Review, 64 by the Associated Press and 70 by Agence France-Presse. Her body was found on January 12, 2005, and police judged that she had died some weeks earlier.
Her case was closed, as far as anyone knew, before the later deaths. Two men were charged with killing her and with the robbery and killing of an elderly man in December 2004, which the prosecution treated as a double homicide. According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, both men admitted the two killings during questioning before trial but told the court they had killed only the man. Both were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Spanish agency EFE reported in June 2008 that the two men, by then serving life terms, had always denied any part in the killings of the women. Biological evidence recovered from Simjanoska did not match either of them, the magazine reported, which left open the possibility of a third person. Taneski covered their trial for Nova Makedonija.
Ljubica Licoska, 56 (55 in one Agence France-Presse report), cleaned apartment buildings. Her relatives told the Virginia Quarterly Review that she was a quiet and gentle woman who worked to keep her family out of poverty. She disappeared in November 2007, three years after Simjanoska, and her son reported her missing two days later. Her body was found after she had been missing for about three months, according to the magazine; the Associated Press reported the year of the discovery as 2007.
On February 6, 2008, Utrinski Vesnik carried Taneski's report on her death under a headline describing the new crime as the main story in Kicevo. In it he speculated about how she had died. While reporting, he visited her sister several times, asking whether she had any news or suspected anyone. Her sister later told the private television station A1 that he had also asked her for details and for a photograph of Licoska.
Zivana Temelkoska, 65, had worked as a custodian at the local primary school and lived in the same part of Kicevo as the others. She disappeared on May 7, 2008, and was found dead about a week later. Her mobile telephone turned up separately, on the other side of town.
Her death set off fear across Kicevo. The Virginia Quarterly Review described older women afraid to go out alone and parents keeping children off the streets. On May 19, 2008, Nova Makedonija published a Taneski article that described the fear in the town, linked the deaths of Temelkoska and Licoska to a single killer, and said the killer's motives were unclear. He told his editors that interviewing Temelkoska's family would be easy because they lived a few houses from him. Her son said afterward, on A1 television, that Taneski had come to their home, talked with the family and asked for details.
The detail that the police said gave him away appeared in his report on Temelkoska. He described how she had been killed, and police said that point had not been made public. In 2008 the Interior Ministry spokesman, Ivo Kotevski, told Agence France-Presse that suspicion arose because his articles contained details that had not been released. The Associated Press reported that the details appeared in Utrinski Vesnik; Agence France-Presse said that from 2003 to 2008 he had written about the killings for Nova Makedonija and other Skopje media and regularly reported on the progress of police investigations. Kotevski told EFE that Taneski had used his visits to the victims' families to follow how the investigation was going.
All three women, police said, had been strangled. Police told reporters that the women had the same profile: of similar age, education and work, all of them cleaners, all from the same neighborhood, and, by Agence France-Presse accounts, women who had raised children alone. Several reports said they resembled Taneski's late mother, who had also worked as a custodian.
The police account of the inquiry, as the Virginia Quarterly Review reported it, was never tested in court. Investigators drew up a profile of a strong, intelligent, middle-aged man who knew the women personally and acted alone. About 150 men were interviewed, among them a taxi driver, neighbors and Taneski himself. Police used the blood type found on a jersey recovered during the Temelkoska inquiry to narrow the field.
The decisive evidence, police said, was DNA. EFE reported on June 21, 2008, that analysis had found his biological traces on two of the victims, and the Associated Press reported that his DNA had been found on two of the women. The Virginia Quarterly Review reported that three independent laboratory tests matched his DNA to samples from Simjanoska and Temelkoska, and that about two weeks after the arrest Kotevski privately confirmed that hairs recovered in the Licoska case had been matched to him. EFE also reported that police suspected he might have had an accomplice; no one else was named.
Police arrested Taneski at his home in Kicevo on Friday, June 20, 2008, and searched both the house and the family cottage in a nearby village. Kotevski confirmed the arrest to EFE the next day. The Interior Ministry announced his name, his work and the evidence on television the day after the arrest, a step that Ljubomir Kostovski of Utrinski Vesnik criticized as suspending the presumption of innocence before any independent verdict. Critics also complained that evidence had been collected without a witness present, which the ministry denied.
According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, police seized shoes and clothing from the house and the cottage; his wife said the clothes had belonged to her mother-in-law.
"Police have already filed charges for the murder of two women," Kotevski said, as quoted by ABC30. The charges covered Temelkoska and Simjanoska, the Associated Press reported; the investigation of Licoska's death and of Pavleska's disappearance continued. In questioning he said little, according to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and insisted that he was innocent and did not know the women. Police told Agence France-Presse that he neither confessed nor denied the killings and stayed calm under questioning. He was assigned a public defender. A court in Gostivar ordered him held for 30 days while the investigation went on, and he was moved to the prison at Tetovo, on Sunday, June 22, by the ABC30 account and on June 21 by the Virginia Quarterly Review's.
The arrest stunned the newspapers he had written for. Branko Zakev of Nova Makedonija told the Virginia Quarterly Review that ministry staff remarked that the paper no longer had a reporter in Kicevo. Daniela Trpchevska, an editor at Utrinski Vesnik, said she was speechless when she heard and that part of her still doubted he was the killer. A barber who cut his hair told Agence France-Presse that Taneski had talked about the murders in the chair and that he had assumed the journalist was getting his information from the police. A neighbor called him a good neighbor and said he could not believe the charges.
Relatives of the women were shaken to learn that the man who had sat in their homes asking questions was the suspect. Temelkoska's son told A1 television he was outraged, and later told the Virginia Quarterly Review it was a horrible thought that the killer had been in his house.
Taneski was placed in a cell with three other detainees. Prison officials said, according to Index.hr, that he had been put with others on purpose so that he would not be alone. Jordan Mihajlovski of the Justice Ministry said he arrived in good health, with no signs of violence and nothing to suggest a risk of suicide.
Early on Monday, June 23, 2008, he was found drowned. The Associated Press, quoting Kotevski, reported that other inmates alerted the guards when he did not come back from the bathroom; the Virginia Quarterly Review reported that a cellmate found him at about 2 a.m. and that attempts to revive him failed. The Justice Ministry told Agence France-Presse that he had gone into the bathroom at 11:30 p.m. GMT on Sunday. A preliminary examination did not suggest that anyone had forced him, the Associated Press reported; the scene was sealed for forensic examination, and his body was taken to Skopje for autopsy. Kotevski told Agence France-Presse that it was "like in a horror movie" and that police could not explain how no cellmate or guard had noticed.
Under his pillow police found a handwritten note. The Associated Press translated it as "I did not commit these murders." The Virginia Quarterly Review gave it as "I have not killed the women. I'm proud of my family," and reported a second note in red ink in his pocket, with a return train ticket and tablets of the antidepressant paroxetine; it was not clear whether he had been taking them. The autopsy recorded death by drowning and found no defensive injuries, and police reported no signs of a struggle. The authorities treated the death as suicide. The head coroner, Aleksej Duma, declined to be interviewed and referred the magazine to his report.
Taneski's death ended the case against him. Licoska's sister told Agence France-Presse that she wanted the process completed whether or not he was alive. Temelkoska's son said Taneski should have faced justice rather than dying in prison. His wife told the Virginia Quarterly Review that he had sworn on their children that he was innocent; she declined to discuss the events of 2008.
Opinion in Kicevo split. Some residents insisted that he had been framed, the magazine reported, while others worried about what the case meant for the town's name.
No court ever weighed the evidence against Taneski, and several points remain open.
The charges: police filed charges for two murders, Temelkoska and Simjanoska. The Licoska death and the Pavleska disappearance were under investigation only. Some foreign reports said he was suspected in four killings.
The earlier convictions: two other men were serving life sentences for the Simjanoska killing when police charged Taneski with it. According to EFE they had denied any part in the women's deaths; according to the Virginia Quarterly Review they had admitted the killings before trial and then denied killing her in court.
The blood type: the Virginia Quarterly Review reported that the blood on the jersey was rumored to be type B positive, while Taneski's military records listed him as O positive. Police said they had never announced a blood type and declined to release the test results.
His death: the authorities called it suicide, and the autopsy found drowning. The Virginia Quarterly Review reported doubts about how he could have died that way without his cellmates noticing; the coroner's report, the magazine said, left those questions unresolved. Kotevski himself said police could not explain how no one noticed.
Motive: police and the press pointed to the women's resemblance to his mother and to his poor relationship with her. The police did not confirm any link between that relationship and a motive, according to Index.hr.
Dates and ages: reported ages for each woman vary by several years between agencies. EFE gave the years of the deaths as 2003, 2004 and May 2008, which differs from the Associated Press account of 2005, 2007 and 2008. The Associated Press put the discovery of Licoska's body in 2007, while the Virginia Quarterly Review described her as missing for about three months from November 2007.
1952: Vlado Taneski is born in the Kicevo area of western Macedonia, then part of Yugoslavia.
1973: Meets his future wife at a regional poetry reading; they marry in 1977.
1980: Becomes an editor at Radio Kicevo.
1985: Joins Nova Makedonija as a staff reporter.
August 2002: His father dies at the family's summer cottage.
December 2002: His mother dies of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.
2003: Laid off by Nova Makedonija; works freelance for Utrinski Vesnik, Vreme and Nova Makedonija.
May 2003: Gorica Pavleska, a retired custodian, disappears in Kicevo. She is never found.
November 2004: Mitra Simjanoska disappears.
December 2004: An elderly man is robbed and killed.
January 12, 2005: Simjanoska's body is found. Two men are later convicted of her killing and the man's and sentenced to life imprisonment.
November 2007: Ljubica Licoska disappears.
February 6, 2008: Utrinski Vesnik prints Taneski's report on Licoska's death.
May 7, 2008: Zivana Temelkoska disappears; she is found dead about a week later.
May 19, 2008: Nova Makedonija prints Taneski's article on fear in the town.
June 20, 2008: Taneski is arrested at his home in Kicevo; his house and cottage are searched.
June 21, 2008: The Interior Ministry confirms the arrest; police say DNA links him to two of the women.
June 21 or 22, 2008: Police file charges for the murders of Temelkoska and Simjanoska; a court in Gostivar orders 30 days' detention; he is moved to the prison in Tetovo.
June 23, 2008: Found drowned in custody early in the morning; officials call it suicide. A note under his pillow denies the killings. No trial follows.