Serial Killers of the Day: Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs
The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs is the media epithet for the killers responsible for a string of murders in Dnepropetrovsk,Ukraine in June and July 2007. The case gained additional notoriety because the killers made video recordings of some of the murders, with one of the videos leaking to the Internet. Two 19-year-old locals, Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck were arrested and charged with 21 murders.
A third conspirator, Alexander Hanzha was charged with two armed robberies that took place before the murder spree. On February 11, 2009, all three defendants were found guilty. Suprunyuck and Sayenko were sentenced to life imprisonment, while Hanzha received nine years in prison. The lawyers for Suprunyuck and Sayenko launched an appeal, which was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Ukraine in November 2009.
The first two murders took place late at night on June 25, 2007. The first victim was a 33-year-old local woman named Ekaterina Ilchenko who was walking home after having tea at her female friend’s apartment. According to Sayenko’s confession, he and Suprunyuck were “out for a walk.” Suprunyuck had a hammer. As Ilchenko walked past, Suprunyuck “spun around” and struck her in the side of the head. Ilchenko’s body was found by her mother at 5 AM.
Within an hour of the first murder, the two men attacked their next victim, Roman Tatarevich. He was sleeping on a bench a short walk away from the first murder scene. Tatarevich’s head was smashed with blunt objects numerous times, rendering him unrecognizable. The bench he was discovered on was located across the street from the local Public Prosecutor’s office.
On July 1, two more victims, Evgeniya Grischenko and Nikolai Serchuk, were found murdered in the nearby town of Novomoskovsk.
On the night of July 6, three more people were murdered in Dnepropetrovsk. The first was Egor Nechvoloda, a recently discharged army recruit, who was bludgeoned while walking home from a night club. His mother found the body in the morning by their apartment building on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street.
Elena Shram, a 28-year-old night guard, was then murdered around the corner on Kosiora Street. According to Sayenko’s taped confession, as Shram walked towards them, Suprunyuck struck her with the hammer he had been hiding under his shirt and struck her several more times after she fell down. She had been carrying a bag filled with clothes. The men picked up the bag, used the clothes to clean the hammer, and threw the bag out.
Later the same night, the men murdered a woman named Valentina Hanzha (no apparent relation to co-defendant Alexander Hanzha), a mother of three married to a disabled husband.
The next day, July 7, two 14-year-old boys from Podgorodnoye, a nearby village, were attacked in broad daylight as they went fishing. One of the two friends, Andrei Sidyuck, was killed, but the other, Vadim Lyakhov, managed to escape.
On July 12, a 48-year-old man named Sergei Yatzenko, disabled by a recent bout with cancer, went missing while riding his Dnepr motorcycle. His body was found four days later, with signs of a savage attack clearly visible even after four days in the summer heat.
Thirteen more murders followed, often with multiple bodies found in the same day. In addition to the earlier sprees, two victims were found every day from July 14 through 16. Victims were seemingly selected at random. Many were vulnerable to attack, including women, children, elderly, vagrants, or people under the influence of alcohol.
Most of the victims were killed using blunt objects, including hammers and steel construction bars. Blows were often directed at the victims’ faces, leaving them unrecognizable. Many victims were also mutilated and tortured, and some had their eyes gouged out while they were still alive. One of the victims was a pregnant woman, whose fetus was cut out of her womb. No sexual assaults on any victims were reported.
Some of the victims were also robbed of their cell phones and other valuables, with their possessions pawned to a large network of second-hand shops in the area. However, most victims had their possessions intact.
The murders spanned a large geographical area. In addition to the city of Dnepropetrovsk itself, many took place in the outlying areas of theDnepropetrovsk Oblast.
The prosecution asked for life imprisonment for Sayenko and Suprunyuck, and 15 years of hard labor for Hanzha. Ukraine has no capital punishment.
The three suspects attended school together and by the eighth grade they had found some common ground. “Me and Igor [Suprunyuck ] were both afraid of heights, and we were afraid we’d be beaten up by bullies”, Sayenko stated during questioning. Suprunyuck went looking for advice on getting rid of their fears, which led the two boys to stand on a balcony of their 14th floor apartment for hours, hanging over the railing. This reportedly had a positive effect on their fear of heights. Hanzha was reportedly the most squeamish of the three. He had blood phobia, and would even refuse to give a bath to his kitten, afraid he might scald it. Suprunyuck suggested tackling the fears by torturing stray dogs. The boys would capture dogs in a wooded area near their house, hang them from trees, disembowel them, and take pictures standing next to the corpses. Prosecution evidence included many of these photos taken by the underage suspects. Some photos show the boys drawing swastikas and other symbols with animal blood, and giving the Hitler salute. In one photo, Suprunyuck poses sporting a “Hitler moustache”. Suprunyuck was born on April 20, the same day as Adolf Hitler, and often made references to the fact.
A long video showing the three torturing a white kitten was shown in court. It takes place in their garage. The suspects fashion a cross out of two wooden boards and nail the kitten to it, then shoot at it with two pistols, placing foam and glue in its mouth in order to muffle the kitten’s screams.
When the boys were 17, Suprunyuck beat up a local boy and stole his bike, which he then sold to Sayenko. Both were arrested, but did not go to jail due to their age.
After high school, Hanzha drifted between odd jobs, which included a pastry chef and a construction worker. At the time of the arrest he had been unemployed for some time. Sayenko went to a metallurgy institute part-time and worked as a security guard. Suprunyuck remained officially unemployed, but made a living driving his green Daewoo Lanos as an unlicensed taxi. The car was reportedly a birthday gift from his parents.
Some months before the murder spree began, Suprunyuck - with the help of Sayenko and Hanzha - began picking up passengers and robbing them. A green Daewoo with a taxicab’s checkerboard marking was often described as the vehicle used in the murders. According to the suspects’ confessions, some of the murder victims were picked up as passengers in Suprunyuck’s unlicensed cab. Hanzha reportedly participated in a single incident where two men were robbed, and subsequently declined to take part in any further attacks.
Local media reported that the suspects had wealthy influential parents with ties to local law enforcement. Vladimir Suprunyuck, Igor Suprunyuck’s father, in his interview to Segodnya stated that he had been employed at Yuzhmash as a test pilot, often flying with Leonid Kuchma, the future president of Ukraine, and continuing to serve as his personal pilot on domestic flights after Kuchma’s rise to power. Local authorities, including deputy interior minister Nikolay Kupyanskiy, initially referred to the supposed influence of the suspects’ families, but later denied the assessment, claiming that all three suspects came from poor families. However, Viktor Sayenko was represented in court by his father Igor Sayenko, a lawyer.
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