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Chances are you've tried to do something consistently at some point in your life. Maybe you tried to write a book in 30 days, or you tried to do 50 push-ups every day for a month. Maybe you tried to eat only healthy foods for two weeks straight. These are all admirable goals to improve your life or do something challenging. But in this Crime Hub episode, you'll hear about two young Ukrainian men who took on a different kind of challenge.
one that shattered lives and rocked a community during one summer in 2007. Whether these two young men started out with a specific goal in mind or simply wanted to kill as many people as possible is something we'll probably never know for sure. What we do know is that they killed 21 people in 22 days.
from June 25th to July 16th, 2007. Two 19-year-olds named Viktor Sayenko and Igor Soproniuk terrorized the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, seemingly choosing their victims at random and even recording some of their brutal murders. They targeted men, women, and children during their spree, sometimes killing in broad daylight.
They used hammers, screwdrivers, and other blunt objects to beat and torture their victims. A portion of one murder video was leaked to a US-based shock website. That eight-minute video, which came to be known as "Three Guys, One Hammer," propelled the Ukrainian murder spree into the international spotlight. Although that video can still be found online, I urge you not to watch it.
The wanton and casual brutality, not to mention the disturbing gore, is something you can never unsee. A Chilean horror movie director was apparently shown the video and was so disturbed by the footage that he couldn't watch all of it. A writer for The Times also watched the video and wrote about it in her column.
The title of her piece is, "It took one minute and 47 seconds for my memory to become host to a horror that will never go." Reddit forums are full of people who regret watching the video, with most of them urging others not to do it. That said, I will describe the video in some detail during this episode, along with details of the other murders. I will also try to make some sense of these horrific and senseless crimes as we delve into this case.
You're listening to Crime Hub, and this is the story of the Dnipropetrovsk Maniacs. Part 1: It starts with animals. Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuk, the two men who would come to be known as the Dnipropetrovsk Maniacs, went to school together from an early age, along with Alexander Honza,
The three boys were close through high school, developing bonds common among adolescents their age the world over. Although Alexander Hansa was a member of the group before the killing started, he apparently declined to join his two friends on their murder spree after the three of them committed a couple of robberies early that summer. But Alexander's role in this story is important, and we'll get to it in a moment.
First, let's look at Victor and Igor, who were by all accounts normal young men. Although some of the media reported that the two boys were from poor families, while other outlets reported that they were from powerful families, the truth is somewhere in between. Igor and Victor were both from middle-class families, living fairly comfortable and normal lives, at least as viewed from the outside.
Victor had dark hair and an olive complexion, while Igor was fair-skinned and had dirty blonde hair. By all outward appearances, the two young men were little more than average in most departments. When interviewed after the murders, classmates of the two young men said that there was nothing odd about their behavior. They weren't social outcasts or noted for being cruel to their peers.
They enjoyed sports and socializing. One interviewee who had known Victor since he was a boy described him as tall, handsome, and successful with the girls. She said he always had pets in his home and was always kind and intelligent. But, like many young men, it seemed they were much more fearful and insecure than their outward appearance let on. One of the phobias Igor and Victor shared was a fear of heights.
In an effort to conquer this fear, the two decided to face it head on. One evening, they hung out on the 14th floor balcony of one of their family's apartments. They dangled their legs out over the drop off, staying out there for hours to face their fears. This line of thinking led to an activity that is a well-known warning sign among many serial killers, animal torture.
Alexander Hansa, the third in the trio of friends, shared that he had a fear of blood. In addition, he said that he couldn't even bear to bathe his pet cat for fear that he would burn the animal with hot water. In light of the fact that Victor and Igor had faced their fear of heights, Igor suggested that the three of them help Alexander get over his fears by catching and killing a stray dog.
While this leap in logic is certainly not something any normal person would make, it does make a twisted sort of sense when viewed in this context. But it seems that the boys, certainly Igor and Victor, found that they enjoyed killing animals in the woods near their homes. They would capture stray cats and dogs, hang them from trees, and torture them.
They would often take pictures with their cell phones next to these bloody and disemboweled animals, sometimes smiling as if for a family picture, but more often posing with arrogant looks on their faces, as if reveling in their power over the lives of these poor animals.
In some of these pictures, which are available for viewing on the internet, the boys are performing the Nazi salute or drawing swastikas in animal blood. Igor shared the same birthday as Adolf Hitler and was apparently proud of this fact. In other pictures, they are flipping off the dead animals. Of course, the natural progression from taking pictures of these evil deeds was easy to see, and they soon started taking videos of themselves while killing animals.
One video, which was shown by the prosecution in court after the young men were caught, showed them torturing a small white kitten. They filled the cat's nose and mouth with glue to stop its pained sounds while they tortured it. After they graduated high school, Alexander seemed to drift away from the other two, while Igor and Victor stayed close. Perhaps Alexander wasn't as enamored with the wanton cruelty they had practiced on the animals as the other two.
Whatever the reason, Alexander wasn't in the picture when the other two started to wonder what it would be like to kill a human being. Unfortunately, they didn't wait long to find out, and when they tried it, they seemed to like it.
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Part 2: Hammer Maniacs Yekaterina Ilchenko was a 32-year-old college professor and a kind woman. On the night of June 25, 2007, one of her friends came over for a visit.
The two talked over tea at Ilchenko's apartment. Ekaterina had just taken a vacation to Turkey, and she told her friend about all the fun she had on the trip. It was dark, approaching 10 o'clock, when the visit was winding down. Ekaterina offered to walk her friend home, and the two women left the apartment. Ekaterina got her friend home safely and then turned around to walk back to her apartment.
She had no way of knowing that she was just minutes away from the end of her life. A life taken by two cowards with a hammer. She wasn't far from her apartment when she encountered Igor and Viktor. She didn't know them, and they didn't know her. She was just another random person walking along the streets of Dnipropetrovsk, heading home for the night.
But Igor and Viktor were determined to kill, and Yekaterina was the victim they chose, likely because no one else was around when the two young men encountered her on the sidewalk. Igor held a hammer in his hand, and just as Yekaterina passed them, he spun around and struck her in the head with a tool. She was knocked immediately unconscious, falling to the sidewalk, where she was bludgeoned in the head and face until she died.
Igor and Viktor stole her phone and ran away. They had their first victim under their belt, and they didn't wait long to seek out a second. Less than two hours after the maniacs killed Ekaterina, they set their sights on a man sleeping on a bench near the river that runs through the city. When Roman Tatarevich's body was found the next day, his face had been smashed beyond recognition.
The morning after these two murders, Yekaterina's mother woke up at 4:30, realizing that her daughter hadn't returned from walking her friend home. She went out on the street, feeling that something terrible had happened. Barely 300 feet from her apartment, she saw three women looking down at her body. She approached and saw her daughter's body on the ground, every mother's worst nightmare. Yekaterina's face had been smashed nearly beyond recognition.
Less than a week later, on July 1st, two more victims were found bludgeoned to death. These two, Yevgenia Grishenko and Nikolai Surchuk, were murdered in the adjacent town of Novomoskovsk. On July 6th, just five days later, three more people were murdered in Dnipropetrovsk. The names of those victims are Valentina Hanza, Jelena Shram and Igor Nekvolod.
The first killed was Igor Nekvolod, who was struck in the head and then bludgeoned to death while on his way home from a nightclub. Like Yekaterina, Igor's mother found him the next morning when she searched around after realizing he hadn't come home. The second murder happened around the corner from where Igor was killed. Yelena Shram, a 28-year-old security guard, was killed in a similar manner.
Igor reportedly held his hammer under his shirt as the two maniacs approached her. When they were alongside the young woman, he pulled the hammer out and hit her in the head, then struck her several more times when she was on the ground. The victim had been carrying a bag of clothes during the attack.
and Igor used some of the clothes to clean the blood off the hammer before discarding them. The third and final victim to die at the hands of Igor and Viktor on July 6th was a mother of three named Valentina Hansa. The two victims they went after the next day, July 7th, would help dispel their eventual downfall. Two 14-year-old boys were headed on a fishing trip when they were attacked by the hammer maniacs.
the duo managed to kill one boy, Andrey Sidiok, but the other boy, Vadim Lyakov, escaped after running and hiding in the woods. Until this attack on the two boys, there had been no witnesses to the murders, but now there was one. Unfortunately, the police in the city initially tried to blame Andrey's murder on the young survivor, holding him without access to counsel and beating him in an effort to get him to confess to the murder.
It's worth noting here that many people were mistrustful of the police in Ukraine at the time, believing them corrupt. And if they held this boy without a lawyer and beat him, it's not hard to see why, corrupt or not. The police soon realized that the teenager wasn't to blame for his friend's murder, and they finally started to tie the recent killings together. But while the authorities were putting this all together, more people were dying in Dnipropetrovsk and the surrounding areas.
On July 12th, a 48-year-old family man named Sergei Yatsenko left his home on his bike. He was on the other side of a battle with cancer, but things were looking up. Reportedly, the cancer was in remission and Yatsenko was getting a new lease on life. But as he passed through a wooded area, he came upon two young men with their car parked by the side of the road.
As Yatsenko got closer, one of the men approached him with a hammer concealed in a bright yellow plastic bag. This young man was pretending to ask for help, as if their car had broken down. When Yatsenko slowed down, as any good Samaritan would, the man lashed out with the hammer, striking the older man in the head and knocking him down.
the other young man was recording the whole thing on his cell phone. The two of them dragged the semi-conscious Yatsenko into the woods and proceeded to torture him, capturing the brutal event on the cell phone camera. An edited, 8-minute version of this video was eventually leaked and became known as "3 Guys, 1 Hammer". During the course of the video, Sergei Yatsenko is struck in the face with a hammer, which is still inside the yellow plastic bag.
He lies on his back in the woods, lapsing in and out of consciousness as the two men torture him. One of the assailants uses a screwdriver to stab him in the torso and in the eye.
At various points during the video, you can see the young men's faces as they do this violence. One of them even smiles while he's on camera, next to the brutalized and beaten Yatsenko. Here are some snippets of conversation from the video, translated into English to give you an idea of what was going through the minds of Victor and Igor as they took another human's life. He's still moving his arms after I ripped up his intestines.
"He's having a fucked up day. I poked out his eyes and he's still not dead!" While they torture him, the camera's microphone picks up the sounds of Yatsenko groaning in pain and struggling to breathe. When they finally tire of stabbing and bludgeoning the man, they hit him in the head with the hammer until they are sure he is dead. They then walk back to the car on the road, speaking casually about how long the man survived the torture.
as they wash their hands and their murder weapons with water from a bottle. They laugh about what they've just done. Igor suggests they should get a picture. "With him?" Victor asks. "Yes, with him, so we can keep it as a memory." Igor replies after washing off the hammer and putting it in the trunk of his car. He then asks if there's blood on his face. Victor says that there's some on his forehead and in his hair.
"This time was awesome," Igor says as he washes blood off his forehead. They both laugh. "I stuck the screwdriver in his brain. I don't understand how he was alive. I felt his brain," the other says. The footage ends as the two go back into the woods to take their pictures with the victim.
They return to Sergei's dead body and take turns posing over him, each of them performing the Nazi salute. The picture with Igor in it is one where much of Sergei's bloody and smashed face is visible. Igor appears to be smiling thinly as he crouches over the dead man's body. This video, among others, would help put these two men away for their heinous crimes, but not before several other innocent people lost their lives.
Part 3. Closing the snare. The maniacs committed 13 more murders in the days that followed Sergei Yatsenko's brutal killing. In fact, some sources say that the two men killed another victim, an 85-year-old woman, that same day. 45-year-old Natalia Mamarchuk was attacked while riding her scooter two days later, on July 14th.
She was knocked down and quickly beaten to death. Nearby witnesses gave chase, but Igor and Viktor stole the woman's scooter and escaped. It's clear that they went after people they knew they could beat without much of a fight. In fact, thanks to the Chilean journalists who traveled to Ukraine not long after the maniacs were caught and convicted, we can hear it from their own mouths.
In an unedited version of Yatsenko's murder video obtained by the Chilean journalists, there is a good chunk of footage in which Victor and Igor wait along a stretch of road next to Igor's car, discussing their plans to kill. It's apparent that they mean to pretend as though they've broken down and need assistance. In this footage, they talk about what they will do if someone stops on the road to help them.
They say that if it's a big man, meaning someone who can fight back, they will tell him it's no problem and send him on his way. They discuss what they will do if a man and a woman stop, saying that they will just kill them both and then leave. They seem unsure who will do the initial violence, but they eventually settle on a plan.
Victor will record the interaction. Igor, who holds the yellow plastic bag with the hammer in it, says he will walk up to whoever stops with the plastic bag in one hand, held casually by the handle. When he's next to the person, he will shift his grip onto the hammer inside and strike the person on the head. As soon as the person is down, Victor says he will pull his gloves on so he can drag the person into the woods while Igor takes the camera to record.
It's plain to see in this disturbing footage how premeditated their actions were. They were treating murder like a game, and the fact that they didn't have any ties to their victims made it hard for the police to track them down, at least until they encountered someone who, by some miracle of circumstance, survived their brutal attack. That person was probably someone they least expected to survive. It was a 70-year-old woman named Lidia Mikrenesheva,
On the day of her attack, Lydia was out walking three dogs when she noticed two young men following her, one with fair hair and one with dark hair. She thought they were looking at the empty lots along the wooded path, perhaps looking for a place to build an office. She noticed they were taking pictures, and she only found out later that they were actually taking video footage of her. Thinking that she was safe, she didn't consider the fact that these two young men might be dangerous.
But when they came up closer to her, she felt one of them hit her in the head from behind. She fell to the ground, unconscious and helpless. She wasn't aware of what happened next until watching the video footage, later recovered by the police. The three dogs she'd been walking started barking loudly at the two culprits, who were beating Lydia in the face and head. This barking scared Igor and Viktor off before they could do enough damage to kill her.
One of the young men had a pistol with rubber bullets in it, and he fired at the dogs as they ran, killing two of the animals. Lydia was found soon after and taken to the hospital, where she underwent reconstructive surgery to repair the damage to her face and jaw. Her description of the two assailants helped the police, who were working hard to catch the killers.
Another help was the description the 14-year-old kid gave to police after Igor and Victor attacked him and his friend while they were on a fishing trip. The descriptions from the different parties matched, and the police handed out sketches of the two young men to pawn shop owners around the city. This line of investigation eventually started to bear fruit as some of the property stolen from the victims was identified.
The snare finally closed on July 23rd, when Igor arrived at a pawn shop to sell a cell phone he'd stolen from one of the victims. The pawn shop owner powered the cell phone on to see if it worked. Since the police were monitoring the cell phone, they had a location as soon as the device was powered on. They raced to the shop and arrested Igor there. Later the same day, they arrested Victor Sayenko,
They also apprehended Alexander Hanza, who had participated in the animal killings and a few robberies, but hadn't joined in the murder spree. Part 4. Maintained Innocence Even after the police knew that the string of killings had likely been performed by the same two people, they hadn't made any announcement warning the people of Dnipropetrovsk.
They prepared to play things close to the chest for fear of scaring the two men into hiding or making them more cautious. But the people of Dnipropetrovsk knew something was up. Before the two young men were caught, people were scared. They didn't walk around alone, instead going in groups. Women didn't leave the house without their husbands or a male companion.
If they could help it, they wouldn't leave their homes at night, even though some of the murders had happened in broad daylight. But when the two men were caught, the police quickly called a press conference to announce their success. The community was shocked, especially those who knew Igor and Victor personally. They searched for answers that weren't forthcoming.
And in the face of such cruelty, some of the people refused to believe that these two seemingly kind and normal young men were capable of such evil acts. Even though the police had their men, they, too, wanted to know the reason behind the murder spree. When the authorities interviewed Victor Sayenko, the young man at first claimed that he'd done all the murders alone, but soon he changed his story, admitting that he and Igor had done all the killings.
When asked how many people they had killed, he said he wasn't sure, that he couldn't remember, but he relented and said they'd counted 19 kills. He also admitted that they'd used two pipes to kill people in addition to the hammer that was their preferred weapon.
When the police searched Igor and Victor's homes, they discovered a bevy of evidence that included bloody clothes, the hammer, and items that belonged to the victims, along with numerous pictures and at least five recordings documenting the murders. Investigators delved into the possibility that the young men had recorded their murders as part of an agreement with an unknown snuff film website.
One source claimed that Igor had a connection to someone who operated one of these websites, and the man was willing to pay big money for murder videos. However, this theory was never proven. Igor claimed during one of his police interviews that they recorded the murders because they wanted something to look back on when they got old. A source and the police noted that one of the boys had read a mythological book that said the more lives you sacrifice, the more respect you get in heaven.
Whether this was Igor or Victor isn't clear, but whoever it was, he claimed he wanted to become a warrior for God, which meant taking lives on Earth. In the end, the prosecution decided to present the motive as money, since the two young men had stolen items from their victims and then sold them. It seemed like the most straightforward motive, even if it didn't explain their joy of torturing and killing the people they targeted.
The most likely motive, given what the two young men said while they killed Sergei Yatsenko and the comments they made after their arrest, is that there was no motive. They simply liked killing. It was fun for them. It made them feel powerful. It helped them shove down their insecurities. When all was said and done, Victor and Igor were nothing more than cowards who picked on the weak, the small, or the intoxicated to make themselves feel stronger.
The first weeks of the trial went as expected, seeming like a slam dunk to the prosecution. The two young men underwent psychiatric exams and were found to be sane. Both Igor and Victor had confessed to the murders, which was damning enough even when you didn't consider all the other evidence stacked against them. But then their parents decided to take a different tack.
They maintained that their sons were innocent of the murders and wanted the case reviewed on the basis of mistakes or irregularities on the part of the investigators. They claimed that the confessions were illegally obtained, pointing to an interrogation video of Alexander Hansa in which the young man had bruises, bumps, and lesions on his face. And the families claimed that the police had beaten the young men into confessing.
But in the video of Victor's confession, there is no evidence of violence against him. He appears unharmed and unthreatened. The defense also claimed that the pictures and video footage obtained of the murders had been edited to make it seem as if Victor and Igor had been the ones doing the crimes, when in fact, it had been two other people altogether.
Their claim was that two other young men with powerful families had done the killing and were arrested for the crimes before Victor and Igor. But when the families of these two mysterious culprits got involved, the corrupt police were forced to find two patsies and make the evidence point to these innocent young men. The family showed the Chilean journalists who interviewed them how this could be done. They held up two pictures of Igor, an original and a doctored one.
While this may have been possible with the photographs, the possibility that the videos could have been expertly edited in such a way in 2007 didn't hold much water with experts in video editing. When the defense brought this possibility up in a hearing, the prosecution called an expert in to refute the claim. He said that making such a video would take the resources of a major Hollywood studio.
Their families also claimed that this was why the footage was so grainy, never consenting to the fact it was taken with a cell phone. In the end, this wasn't nearly enough to derail justice. For his part in the robberies that had happened before the murder spree, Alexander Hansa received a nine-year sentence. Igor Soproniuk and Victor Sayenko were charged with robbery, animal cruelty, and 21 counts of murder. They received the maximum sentence.
Life in prison. Seven years earlier, the death penalty had been abolished in Ukraine. But if it had not, Igor and Viktor would surely be dead by now, executed by the state. Instead, they've been in prison since 2009 and will likely only leave when they themselves are just as dead as the victims they took from this world.
The only difference is that the two cold-blooded killers will get the chance to live to old age, even if it is locked inside the walls of a prison.