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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun, and in tonight's episode, we fast forward to more modern times. But we leave the United States of America. Tonight, we are visiting your humble host, native continent of Europe.
While most serial killer cases in the media occur in the US or UK, the most gruesome and the ones with the highest body count are often found in other regions of the world. And the case before us now is no different.
When I first started investigating the fascinating topic of serial murder, one of the first serial killers I read about was a vicious looking man from the former Soviet Republic, now sovereign country of Ukraine. I remember thinking this killer's story was particularly interesting, since his case had garnered very limited media coverage.
There's never been made any film about him, and the few articles in Western publications were very short and limited in detail. I am, of course, talking about none other than the man known as the Beast of Ukraine, Citizen O and the Terminator, Mr. Anatoly Onoprienko.
He terrorized the Ukrainian countryside in the chaotic years following Gorbachev's Soviet reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost, which ultimately resulted in the downfall of the USSR. Onoprienko started his reign of murder in 1989 and didn't stop until his capture almost a decade later in 1996.
By that time, 52 innocent people, including 10 children, were savagely murdered by Onoprienko, and tonight we look closer at what really happened in those isolated villages on the cold, desolate plains of Ukraine. In his book, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote described the village of the butchered victims of that crime as being on the high wheat plains of western Kansas,
a lonesome area described as out there. This passage came to mind when I first read about the murder of the Zaychenko family in December 12, 1995, in Gamarnia, Zhytomarskaya Oblast. It is a small village, about 150 kilometers to the northwest of Kiev.
The family lived in the outskirts of this small village, and there were no witnesses nearby to record what happened. The family had been killed at night in their own home. The father had been killed first, then the mother, and finally the two infant sons, one of which was only three months old. They had all been killed by several shotgun blasts from a sword-off shotgun, and after the killer left the house—
He set it on fire, burning any evidence left behind. This method was Anatoly Onoprienko's usual modus operandi, and the Zaychenko family was only one of nine families that endured such an ordeal. But who was this Onoprienko?
A native of Lasky in the Zhitomirskaya Oblast district of the Ukraine, Anatoly Onoprienko was born in 1959. Back then, Ukraine was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. As with many serial killers, Anatoly Onoprienko was placed in an orphanage at a very early age.
Only one year old, following his mother's death, and while Anatoly was shipped off, an older brother was kept at home with her father. The consensus among psychiatrists is that Onoprienko developed a deep-seated hatred of all families as a result of this. Little is known about his upbringing and life in the orphanage, but it is common knowledge that orphanages...
in the poorer areas of the Soviet Union, as the Oblast district of the Ukraine most certainly could be said to be, was harsh and brutal. In the words of an anonymous immigrant from the Soviet Union, now living in the US, and I quote, it's extremely understaffed in an orphanage. This is something common in all countries. There's no supervision and no security. The older students or children become tyrants.
It is not uncommon for the older children to rape or abuse the younger children. That's just the daily life there. You worry about food, you worry about getting hit or raped. It's not a place where you can grow up. It's a place of sheer torment. So as with many orphans in the former Soviet Union, life was harsh for young Anatoly. And whether he was born with psychopathic tendencies...
or he was brain damaged, suffering from schizophrenia, or simply mentally ruined from a life in a sadistic orphanage, he did not start out in life as a criminal. Records are sparse regarding his early life, but most sources agree he started life working as both a seaman and in the forestry industry.
According to later interviews and interrogations, Onoprienko was also largely self-sufficient. He hunted wild animals for food and had learned to find food and sustenance in the wild. When he was 17 years old, he became a sailor, and he met his future wife. On his sea trips, his merciless fantasies got shaped. Onoprienko himself claims he hadn't become a murderer by his own free will.
I've been chosen to fulfill a mission. In a way, I feel related with M. the hero from the Russian author Bulgakov's book. He was evil, and so am I. I did what I had to do. Kill people.
I don't owe any explanation to my victims, their families or the police, he said. He also claims he spoke to Hitler once and that this one advised him to unchain a new world war. However, life was hard and money and resources hard to come by. After a life of hardship and increasing mental problems...
Life for Onoprienko and the history of Ukraine changed forever, one night in June of 1989. A young couple, and I was unable to find the names of the unlucky pair, was standing by the highway. Their Lada had broken down, and they were probably discussing what to do. Onoprienko came upon them by chance in his own car. He passed them, stopped,
reversed his car and got out. As he approached, the couple probably smiled, thinking he was there to help out with their ladder. However, their smiles must have evaporated as the skinny and rough-looking Anatoly produced his shotgun. Without speaking, he shot them down. Due to the scarcity of detailed evidence, little is known if they were left to bleed out or
or if they died instantly. What is known is what Anatoly had to say about his first murder. I just shot them. It's not that it gave me pleasure, but I felt this urge. From then on, it was almost like some game from outer space. After the first double murder, Onoprienko teamed up with another criminal, named Seri Rogozin.
The first murders were apparently, at least on Rogozin's part, motivated by simple greed. One night while robbing a secluded home outside of town, the owners discovered two intruders. Armed with weapons they carried for self-defense, the two felt that killing the family was necessary in assuring their own freedom.
"'Hence, in covering up their tracks, they murdered the entire family. "'Two adults and eight children. "'Onoprienko informed investigators that he broke all ties with Sergei a few months later "'and shot and killed five people, including an eleven-year-old boy who were sleeping in a car. "'He then burned their bodies. "'I was approaching the car only to rob it,' he said.'
"'I was a completely different person back then. "'Had I known there had been five people, I would have left.' "'He said he had derived no pleasure from the act of killing them. "'Corpses are ugly,' he said. "'They stink and send out bad vibes. "'After I killed a family in the car, "'I sat in the car with their bodies for two hours, "'not knowing what to do with them. "'The smell was unbearable.'
This little nugget of information, the murder of these eleven people after Arnold Prienko's first double murder, is one of the things that makes the case of Citizen O so strange. I had to search for two days in order to find the information from an obscure article by David Lohr, one of the world's foremost experts on crime and murder in particular.
I recommend his articles, and even though I didn't know it at the time, Law was one of the key people behind the excellent, now unfortunately defunct, crimelibrary.com, the very site that launched my own interest in serial killers. After the first burst of murders, back in the last days of the Soviet Union, Onoprienko entered a significant cooling-off period for five years.
He moved in with a distant cousin and continued his work in the forestry industry. However, Onoprienko's day-to-day life and details regarding them is scarce. Did he continue simply robbing people? Are there murders we do not know about from this period? Considering how the American serial killer previously covered on this podcast, BTK...
also had a hibernation period of several years between his activities, it is very much possible that Anatoly lived a normal, humble life for several years before the beast inside of him broke out and reared its savage head. And so it was that Arnold Prienko continued his rampage alone in late 1995, where in the next six months he would murder 43 people.
Nine days after his first murder of the already mentioned Zaychenko family, four members of the Krutschkov family were also shot and killed at Bratkovichy. Their home set afire. A passerby named Malinsky was also shot dead on the street outside when he glimpsed the fleeing gunman.
On one occasion, while in the process of murdering a whole family in their home, he confronted a young girl who was huddled on her bed, praying. She had seen him kill both her parents. Seconds before, I smashed her head. I ordered her to show me where they kept their money. She looked at me with an angry, defiant stare and said, ''No, I won't.'' That strength was incredible.''
But I felt nothing, he said. The young girl's body was later found with her head smashed from several hammer blows. In March of 1996, police began to panic as the number of bodies rose and soon a manhunt once launched across western Ukraine after eight families were brutally murdered in their homes. Many of Onoprienko's victims lived in remote villages in the Lvov region near the border of Poland.
He blew the doors of homes on the edges of villages, gunning down adults and battering children with metal objects. He stole money, jewelry, stereo equipment and other items before burning down the houses. Onoprienko's bloodlust climaxed with a three-month massacre in early 1996, where he began the systematic slaughter of families in the Ukrainian villages of Bratkovichi and Busk.
Army and special forces were mobilized in the areas to try and assist those still living in the region, as well as trying to catch the man, now dubbed the Terminator. On January 5, two businessmen named Odintsov and Dolinin were shot while sitting in their stalled car outside Endgordar, the Zaporizhskaya Oblast.
And before the night was out, two more victims were killed at nearby Vasiljevska Dneprodni, including a pedestrian named Garmasha and a policeman named Pibalko. The very next day, Onoprienko told the investigators he killed four more people in the three separate incidents. He was hanging out near the Beregiansk-Dneprskaia highway and decided to stop cars and kill the drivers.
Onoprienko stated that he shot to death three travelers that day, a Navy ensign named Kasai, a taxi driver named Savitsky, and a Kolkhoz cook named Kocheregina.
The Terminator returned to Bratkovichy on the 17th of January and broke into a home owned by the Pilat family. "'I look at it very simply,' he told the investigators, "'as an animal. I watched all this as an animal would stare at a sheep. He shot five in all, including a six-year-old boy.'
Following the murder, just before daybreak, he set the house ablaze prior to leaving. While making his getaway, he was spotted by two witnesses, a 27-year-old female railroad worker named Kondzela and a 56-year-old man named Jakaro. He wasted little time and shot them both in cold blood. In Forstov, Kievskaya Oblast.
Four more victims were victims of the Beast of Ukraine's shotgun on the 30th of January, including a 28-year-old nurse, her two sons, and a male visitor. The Dubchak family was next, annihilated at home in Orlevsk, Zhitarskaya Oblast, on the 19th of February. The father and son were shot in that attack.
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Just a week afterwards, Onoprienko said that he drove to Malina in the Lviv-Skaja Oblast region and broke into the Budnashuk family home. He shot the husband and wife to death and then murdered their two daughters, aged seven and eight. Rather than shooting the young children, he hacked them both to death with an axe.
One hour later, a neighboring businessman named Chalk was wandering around outside, and Onoprienko decided to kill him as well. He shot the man, and then hacked up his corpse with the same axe he had used to murder the children. Onoprienko spoke, ''Oh, you know, I killed them because I loved them so much, those children, those men and women. I had to kill them.''
The inner voice spoke inside my mind and heart and pushed me so hard. Back in Bratkovichy neighborhood, on the 22nd of March, the Terminator shot and incapacitated his last entire family. However, they were only severely wounded by his gunshots, although, as usual, he didn't shoot the children. He used his knife.
One child was ripped open from the stomach to the throat. The rest of the family was left prone and bleeding. Onoprienko poured kerosene all over them and their home. Then he set them on fire and watched as the four members of the Novosad family burned to death together with their house. Bratkovich's residents had seen enough.
With the largest manhunt in Ukrainian history already underway, they demanded and received an extreme response. A National Guard unit, complete with rocket launchers and armored vehicles, was sent to protect the village, while some 2,000 officers scoured the western Ukraine in search of their nameless, faceless quarry.
However, Onoprienko was, as many serial killers are known to be, not looking like a monster. He wasn't particularly tall. He was considered average-looking and a member of Ukraine's lower working class. Since he systematically murdered any witnesses to his crimes, finding the elusive killer was not simply a matter of gathering enough soldiers. And so it is that we find ourselves.
On Easter Sunday, on the morning of 1996, western Ukraine, Yavoriv, was once a town dominated spiritually by a giant Soviet military base. But now communism is forgotten. The base has been cut in size and, like most of the villages near Ukraine's Polish border, religion is the focus of life once again.
Depending on their faith, drivers cross themselves when they pass Greek or Roman Catholic churches in their cars. Nobody works Sunday, much less Easter Sunday. Nobody, that is, except the police, for whom any holiday means double shifts and unwanted overtime. Sunday is usually patrolman Igor Kune's day off.
But by 10 a.m. on Easter, he was on his beat in the military housing area as part of an added holiday detail. At the precinct house a few kilometers across town, Huni's boss, Deputy Police Chief Sergei Krukov, was sitting in his office, stirring his fifth cup of tea that day. He'd been at work since midnight Saturday. On holiday weekends, he splits 24-hour shifts with the police chief.
Both men were prepared for a long evening. Holidays always mean more public drinking and subsequently more work for police, but neither had the faintest idea that within a matter of hours he would be preparing to arrest a suspect in the worst series of murders in Europe's modern history.
The Easter arrest and subsequent confession of Anatoly Onoprienko, suspected of killing 52 people, was hailed by Ukrainian interior ministry officials in Kiev as the result of a long, beautiful investigation by federal detectives. In the end, however, it was apparently a family quarrel that brought the reign of terror to a close.
Anatoly Onoprienko was staying with a cousin's family when one of his hosts found weapons hidden in his room, and a quarrel erupted, ending with Anatoly's ejection from the house. Before he left, Anatoly vowed that his cousin's family would be punished on Easter, a threat that was relayed to a friend of Anatoly's cousin, who also happened to be a police officer.
So it was. On Easter holiday, 16th of April, police traced Onoprienko to a girlfriend's home, where he was arrested following a brief scuffle. A search of the premises revealed a cassette tape deck stolen from the Novosad family, a pistol taken from a murder scene in Odessa, and a second firearm linked to several of the family massacres.
The case of Anatoly Onoprienko becomes, perhaps, more interesting after his arrest. Few serial killers are as proud of their deeds as Onoprienko was, and few show so little regard for the courts and justice system. It is, though, not unusual for serial killers to relish in telling the police and courtroom about their murders.
Doing this allows them to relive the crime, and most serial killers are chronic narcissistic psychopaths, thriving on attention and watching the relatives of the victims cry in emotional pain as they tell of their crimes in graphic detail. In this regard, Onoprienko was not so similar. He didn't brag in detail about his crimes in court, and it was only after his conviction he began to open up about his activities.
On 12th of February 1999, a Ukrainian court ruled that Anatoly Onoprienko was mentally competent and could be held responsible for his crimes, even though he claims he has heard voices telling him to kill. Looking at Onoprienko in court, dressed in a denim jacket with a bald head and a very haggard, rather pathetic look, it is hard to combine this with the knowledge that
that it is the same man as the murderer given the nickname of the Terminator. He speaks slowly and calmly about dark forces standing behind him, urging him to kill. Onoprienko surprised the courtroom by demanding to replace his state-appointed attorney, Ruslan Marshovsky, with another lawyer who is, and I quote,
at least 50 years old, Jewish or half-Jewish, economically independent, and has international experience. When the court refused his request, Onoprienko, who had been cooperative in the past, refused to testify further. He was confined to a metal cage throughout the proceedings.
Onoprienko said he had nothing to say about his alleged seven years of killing that left at least 52 people dead. The accused murderer exuded arrogance and boredom throughout the hearing. Asked if he would like to make a statement at the start of the trial, Onoprienko shrugged his shoulders, slowly sauntered to the microphone, and said, "'No, nothing.'
Informed of his legal right to object to the court's proceedings, he growled, ''This is your law? I consider myself a hostage.'' Asked to state his nationality, he said, ''None.'' When Judge Dmitry Lipsky said, ''This was impossible,'' Onoprienko rolled his eyes and replied, ''Well, according to law enforcement officers, I'm Ukrainian.''
Onoprienko's attitude angered the hundreds huddled in the unheated courtroom. Some had traveled hundreds of kilometers for the hearing. Judge Dmytro Lipsky had to call the court to order on several occasions as people shouted abuse at Onoprienko. Outside, about fifty more people pushed and shoved in an unruly queue, demanding to be allowed into the courtroom so they could get a closer look.
"'Afraid that the crowd might take the law into their own hands, "'police searched the bags and made everyone pass through an airport-style metal detector. "'Let's tear him apart!' shouted a pensioner at the back of the court just before the hearing started. "'He does not deserve to be shot. He needs to die a slow and agonizing death,' "'others muttered agreement, saying, "'The beast should be tortured.'
"'They should cut him in shreds and then rub salt in his wounds,' said Zinaida Miller, 64 years old, who had traveled 240 kilometers to attend the trial. "'I can't believe they're wasting money on him.' All of the witnesses, summoned to speak, failed to appear at the trial.'
which began by looking into the murder of the first two victims. The husband and wife shot dead in June of 1989. The judge read a telegram saying family circumstances had prevented relatives of the couple from attending. Prosecutor Yuri Ignatenko said the Ma's no-show will not hurt his case.
This case is built around specialist evidence. There really weren't any eyewitnesses, Ignatenko said. They probably just don't want to see Onoprienko. And then again, it has been quite a long time since it happened. Public pressure was high for Onoprienko to be sentenced to death. Ukraine had imposed a moratorium on capital punishment the year before.
a requirement for it to join the Council of Europe, a leading human rights organization. President Leonid Kuchma said he was willing to appeal to the Council to grant Ukraine an exception and allow Onoprienko's execution. On 3 March 1999, after more than 400 statements and 100 volumes of gruesome evidence,
Anatoly Onoprienko, dubbed Ukraine's worst serial killer, was sentenced to death. Judge Dmitry Lipsky told the court, in line with Ukraine's criminal code, Anatoly Onoprienko is sentenced to the death penalty by shooting. Onoprienko stood with his head bent, staring at the floor of the locked metal cage as the sentence was announced. After the trial, Onoprienko has expressed no remorse.
He issued a press release from his prison cell, saying he had wanted to hold the world record for killing, telling a reporter after his sentence, "'To me it was like hunting, hunting people down. I would be sitting, bored, with nothing to do, and then suddenly this idea would get into my head. I would do everything to get it out of my mind, but I couldn't. It was stronger than me.'
"'so I would get in the car or catch a train and go out to kill. "'Onoprienko, however, claimed he was possessed. "'I'm not a maniac,' he said, without a hint of self-doubt. "'If I were, I would have thrown myself onto you and killed you right here. "'No, it is not that simple. "'I have been taken over by a higher force, "'something telepathic or cosmic, which drove me.'
"'For instance, I wanted to kill my brother's first wife, because I hated her. "'I really wanted to kill her, but I couldn't, because I had not received the order. "'I waited for it all the time, but it did not come. "'I am like a rabbit in a laboratory, a part of an experiment, "'to prove that man is capable of murdering and learning to live with his crimes.'
to show that I can cope, that I can stand anything, forget everything. Onoprienko insisted he should be executed, claiming, if I am ever let out, I will start killing again, but this time it will be worse, ten times worse. The urge is there. Seize this chance, because I am being groomed to serve Satan.
After what I have learned out there, I have no competitors in my field. And if I am not killed, I will escape from this jail, and the first thing I'll do is to find Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, and hang him from a tree by his testicles. Even though Onoprienko's death sentence ultimately was commuted to life in prison,
His story ends rather anticlimactic. Onoprienko died of something as mundane as heart failure in the prison of Zlotomir on the 27th of August 2013 at the age of 54. I have been your host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, but if you do want to support me, it is greatly appreciated.
I have created a Patreon account that you can find at patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. Any donation, no matter how small, helps a great deal. If only 2% of my monthly listeners donated $1 a month, it would enable me to really increase the quality further and ensure the continuation of the series. Most of all,
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Finally, as always, if you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe to it. Thank you, dear listener, for listening. And join me next time for another tale of serial murder. Good night and good luck.
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