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The Blood Countess, Hungary. You're a 13-year-old peasant in 1590s Hungary, and you have two options: starve or marry a farmer who will make you starve slower.
A chilling exploration of the worst serial killers from Hungary, Russia, and the UK, revealing their crimes and backgrounds.
Key Takeaways
- Serial killers often exploit positions of power and trust to commit crimes.
- Social and legal systems sometimes fail to protect vulnerable populations, allowing killers to operate undetected.
- Historical and psychological backgrounds can provide insight into the motivations behind serial killings.
- Thorough investigations and witness testimonies are crucial in bringing such criminals to justice.
- Awareness and education about these cases help prevent future tragedies.
What the video covers
- The video covers notorious serial killers from different countries, starting with Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess of Hungary, who tortured and killed young girls in the 1590s.
- Elizabeth Bathory abused her power and wealth to commit horrific crimes, ultimately being confined to her castle until her death.
- Mikhail Popkov, known as The Werewolf from Russia, was a police officer who preyed on women for nearly two decades, using his position to gain trust before attacking them.
- Popkov was convicted of 91 murders but suspected of killing close to 200 women, making him Russia's deadliest serial killer.
- The video also introduces Harold Shipman, a British doctor who killed patients under his care, with suspicions dating back to the late 1990s.
- Shipman’s early life and experiences shaped his worldview and contributed to his criminal actions.
- The video highlights investigative failures and systemic issues that allowed these killers to continue their crimes for years.
- It discusses how social status, abuse of power, and societal neglect played roles in enabling these killers.
- The video uses detailed storytelling and historical context to provide insight into the killers’ motives and methods.
- It emphasizes the importance of vigilance and proper investigation in preventing such atrocities.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Thankfully, Cachtice Castle offers you a job, and your family celebrates it. But when you arrive, you notice that they're somehow always hiring, and nobody knows where the last dozen girls went. Then one night, you follow the screaming and
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find your boss Elizabeth Bathory bathing in blood. Turns out the suspiciously high turnover rate wasn't about competitive wages at all. Elizabeth Bathory was born on August 7, 1560, into the House of Bathory, one of the most dominant noble families in Central
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Europe at the time. At just 15 years old, she married a military commander, and the Nadasdy family gave her Cachtice Castle as a wedding gift along with 17 surrounding villages. Sounds like a green flag. But he was more like he came
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out of the dark romance stuff you see on BookTok. He taught Elizabeth how to cruelly punish servants and even gave her torture tools as gifts, which is certainly one way to show affection. And slowly, she started to enjoy it and
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wanted more and more out of it. Definitely a match made in hell. But then Ferenc died on January 4, 1604. And that's when things got really bad. Now all his wealth and assets got passed down to Elizabeth. That made her one of
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the wealthiest and most powerful people in Hungary. And since there was no husband around, there was nobody left to answer to or keep her in check. She and her servants began luring young peasant girls to Cachtice Castle under the
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promise of work. The girls who came were mostly between 10 and 14 years old from poor families too desperate to ask why the castle was always hiring. These girls were then beaten with clubs, had needles shoved under their fingernails,
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were stripped and forced outside to freeze in winter, had hot irons pressed against their skin, and in some cases had flesh cut directly from their bodies. After a while, a rumor had quietly spread through the surrounding villages, and peasant families stopped
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sending their daughters anywhere near her estate. It should have been her sign to stop, but Báthory didn't give up.
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Instead, she opened a finishing school, advertising it as a place for girls from lower noble families to learn courtly etiquette and social graces. But, in reality, it was actually just a way to keep the supply of victims coming, just
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from a slightly higher social class. And for a while, that worked, too, until 1610. Under Hungary's feudal system, hurting a peasant had almost no legal consequences, but hurting someone with noble blood was a completely different problem. And that's what finally forced
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the authorities to act. King Matthias II, the king of Hungary at the time, ordered a man named György Thurzó, who was actually Báthory's own cousin, to go investigate what was happening at that castle. Thurzó sent people out to the
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surrounding areas, and over the next several months, they sat down with over 300 witnesses and wrote down everything they heard. The crimes had happened across multiple properties over the course of decades. So, pinning down an exact victim count was nearly
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impossible. Trial records confirmed at least 80 deaths based on physical evidence alone. While some castle staff testified to numbers closer to 175 to 300. Then, on December 29, 1610, Thurzó showed up at Csejte Castle himself to raid it, where they found dead and dying
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girls at the crime scene. Báthory and her accomplices were captured on the spot. The accomplices were executed, but Báthory never went to trial at all. The official reason was that putting a woman of her status in a public courtroom
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would embarrass too many powerful families connected to her name. Apparently, mass murder is fine as long as you don't make brunch awkward for the aristocracy. So, instead, she was bricked into a set of rooms inside her own castle, with only small slits left
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open for air and food. And she stayed there for the rest of her life. She died on August 21, 1614, at 54 years old. The Werewolf, Russia. It's late at night in Angarsk, a city in Russia. A woman is
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walking home alone when a police car pulls up beside her. Then, the officer leans out with a friendly face, shows his badge, and offers her a ride home.
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She gets in because why wouldn't she? He's a cop. But that's the last decision she ever makes. His name was Mikhail Popkov. He was born in 1964 and grew up in that city. His mother was an alcoholic who regularly beat him, and
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this abuse planted a deep hatred of women. As a young man, he joined the Soviet police force. There, he met a fellow officer named Elena, and the two got married and had a daughter named Ekaterina. To everyone around him,
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Popkov seemed like a perfectly normal guy. At work, he was funny and easygoing. He walked his daughter to school every morning, shared hobbies with her, and had a collection of model cars at home. Real family man vibes.
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Just don't ask about his night shift. Then, in 1992, he found out Elena had been having an affair with a coworker after he found two condoms in his house.
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He later told investigators that moment was his trigger point, and that the hatred he had for his mother just finally had somewhere to go. So, from then on, he started going out at night and targeting women he considered
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immoral, which to him meant any woman out alone after dark. So, using his police car, his uniform, and his badge to gain trust, Popkov would offer lone women rides home at night, then drive them out to isolated forest areas
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outside the city. Then, he attacked them with axes, knives, screwdrivers, hammers, baseball bats, and shovels. It was so bad some victims were even stabbed more than 170 times. The sheer savagery of the attacks is what gave him his nickname, The Werewolf, because what
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he was doing to them didn't look like something a human being would do. He kept this up from 1992 all the way through 2011, targeting women between 16 and 50 years old across three cities: Angarsk, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok.
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Eventually, people in Angarsk noticed the pattern of dead women and launched an investigation, but they never seriously considered it could be one of their own. Then, in 1998, a 15-year-old girl named Svetlana survived one of his attacks and reported it. When police
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showed her a photo of Popkov, she pointed straight at him. But instead of arresting him, police went to his wife Elena and asked if he was home that night. Elena said yes. They took her word for it and dropped the case. Peak
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investigative work. Really top-tier stuff. But then the case came back to life in 2012 when investigators noticed that the same tire tracks kept showing up near the bodies. And those tracks matched a lot of 4x4, the type of
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off-road vehicle that police officers commonly drove. That one detail made them think that the killer might actually be a cop. So, they asked roughly 3,500 current and former police officers to give a DNA sample. Popkov walked in and gave his without any
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hesitation. It came back as a match to evidence found at multiple crime scenes. And on June 23, 2012, he was arrested.
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He was convicted of 91 murders and three attempted murders, making him the most efficient serial killer in Russian history. Investigators believe the real number could be close to 200. Doctor Death, United Kingdom. In March 1998, Dr. Linda Reynolds reported her
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colleague to the coroner's office in Hyde, Greater Manchester. His patients were dying at a suspicious rate. She believed he was killing them. Police investigated, found nothing, closed the case. But what nobody knew yet was that they just walked away from one of the
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worst serial killers in British history. The colleague's name was Harold Shipman. Harold grew up in a regular working-class family, but his mother raised him to believe he was smarter and better than everyone around him. He wasn't beating the boy mom allegations.
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Then, when he was 17, she got lung cancer. Since the cancer
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went in, her suffering eased. Harold watched this happen over and over until she died in 1963. Doctors who studied Shipman later believed those moments shaped how he saw the world.
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Specifically, the idea that the person holding the needle had control over human lives gave him some satisfaction.
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So, he became a doctor himself to get those feelings himself. He graduated in 1970, and eventually built his own practice in Hyde. His patients actually loved him. He was warm and attentive, and people in the community genuinely trusted him, which is exactly what he
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used against them. He quietly built up a secret supply of a drug called diamorphine, which is basically medical-grade heroin. He would prescribe more than his patients needed, and then keep the leftovers from patients who died. His victims were mostly elderly
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women who had been in good health before he spawned at their door. As their family doctor, home visits were completely normal. So, when Shipman knocked, they just let him in without a second thought. And then, when he got
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in, he would inject them with a lethal dose. Once they were dead, he would fill out their death certificate himself, writing causes like old age or heart failure. Then, he would go back to his office and edit their medical files,
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typing in fake symptoms of his patients to make the death look normal. Eventually, his downfall came from his last victim, an 81-year-old woman named Kathleen Grundy. After her death, out of nowhere, she left a will leaving her entire estate of 300 86,000 lb directly
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to Shipman. The problem was it was obviously fake. Shipman's fingerprints were on the forged will, but Grundy's own fingerprints were not, which made no sense for a document she supposedly wrote herself. Turns out you can be brilliant at murder and terrible at
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forgery. Who knew? Grundy's daughter, Angela, who worked professionally with legal documents, saw it immediately and went to the police. Grundy's body was dug up. She had a massive amount of diamorphine in her system. Then, investigators checked Shipman's computer
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and found he had been editing the medical files of dead patients after they had already died, and the timestamps on those edits proved it.
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There was no explaining that away. He was convicted of 15 murders in 2000 and sentenced to life with no chance of release. On January 13, 2004, the day before his 58th birthday, he hanged himself in his prison cell. He never
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admitted to a single killing. Resuscitation Rambo. Germany. Imagine you're a patient in a hospital in Germany and asleep in your bed in the middle of the night. Then a nurse quietly walks in and slips something into your IV tube without waking you.
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You don't feel anything at first, but then your chest starts tightening. Your heart starts beating weird. The ceiling is spinning and the machines are going insane. Everything is going dark slowly and the last thing you see is that same
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nurse bursting back through the door to save you. His colleagues think he's one of the best on the floor, always first to respond and always fighting to save a life. What they don't realize is that things keep going wrong specifically
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because he's there. His name was Niels Hogel and he came from a nursing family since both his father and grandmother worked as nurses. After finishing his nurse training, he got a job at a cardiac intensive care unit, a ward for
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patients with serious heart conditions. At work, he was actually well-liked and easy to work with. Nothing about him stood out as dangerous, but that's exactly what made him so hard to catch.
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His method was always the same. He'd walk up to a patient's bed and secretly inject drug into their IV line without any doctor telling him to do so. And these were drugs that in the wrong dose could throw your heart into a dangerous
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rhythm or shut it down entirely. So once the patient crashed, he'd rush back in with the rest of the team to try and bring them back. And because his colleagues always see him right in the middle of every emergency, they gave him
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a nickname for it, Resuscitation Rambo. Even though somehow nobody bothered to ask why there were so many emergencies to begin with. Over time, the pattern became very hard to ignore. At his first hospital in Oldenburg, more than half of
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all patient deaths and emergencies on the ward happened only during Högel's shifts. And during a 3-week stretch when he was off sick, almost no one died at all. At his second hospital in Delmenhorst, the numbers were even worse, with the total death count at
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that hospital doubling during the years he worked there, and 73% of all deaths happening specifically during or right after one of his shifts. Both hospitals actually realized all of this, but they chose to protect themselves instead of their patients. When Oldenburg doctors
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flagged the pattern in 2001, they quietly moved him to a different department instead of calling the police. And in 2002, when a senior doctor confronted him directly, the hospital let him resign with full pay and handed him a glowing reference
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letter, praising his work ethic and how he acted prudently and in an objectively correct manner in critical situations.
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Yes, that's a real quote, by the way. Then he took that letter to Delmenhorst and kept killing. A fellow nurse finally caught him in June 2005 when she walked in and found him standing over a patient with empty medication vials nearby that
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wasn't supposed to be there. A blood test on the patient confirmed a dangerous overdose of heart medication, and she reported it straight away. But hospital management waited two full days before calling the police. And in that gap, Högel killed his last victim, a
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67-year-old woman named Renate Röper. He was convicted of 85 murders in 2019 and sent to prison for life. Investigators believe the real number could be as high as 300, but because so many of his patients had already been cremated
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before anyone looked into this, those deaths can never be confirmed. Samuel Little, United States. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, something strange was quietly happening across the United States. Women's bodies kept turning up in different cities, and
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in almost every single case, the death got written off as an overdose, a medical episode, or an accident. The cases would close, the files would get shelved, and life would move on. Nobody was connecting any of it, because the
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deaths were scattered across different cities, different states, sometimes thousands of miles apart, with no obvious reason to think one person was behind all of them. But, that's exactly how the killer wanted it. His name was Samuel Little. He grew up in Lorraine,
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Ohio, raised by his grandmother after his mother left him when he was very young. Dropped out of school early and spent decades drifting across the country, picking up arrests for theft, assault, and drug charges in state after state, racking up more than 100 arrests
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total. Yet, he served fewer than 10 years in prison across all of it combined. Somewhere along the way, he learned to box, and he was genuinely good at it, building a large and powerful frame that he'd later use in
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ways that had nothing to do with sport. Besides violence, Little was also obsessed with women's necks from a young age, and he got it from watching a teacher touch their own neck when he was still a kid. That image stuck with him,
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grew with him, and by the time he was an adult, it had turned into a full obsession with strangling women. And not because he wanted them dead, but because it would bring him pleasure. The killing was just a side effect of that. His
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method was built around his boxing skills. He would punch his victims first to stun them, and then strangle them with his bare hands until they were dead. What made this so hard for investigators to detect was that strangulation leaves little obvious
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evidence on the body, especially when the examiner isn't specifically looking for it. With no blood, no stab wounds, no bullet holes, and if the victim already had a history of drug use or health problems, it was easy for a
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medical examiner to write a death off as something other than murder. He chose his victims deliberately and carefully.
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Almost all of them were black women, night workers, drug users, and homeless women, people who are less likely to be reported missing. Despite being caught multiple times, the system kept letting him go. In 1982, a grand jury reviewed a
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murder charge against him and decided not to take it to trial. Two years later in Florida, he went on to trial for another murder and was found not guilty.
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In San Diego, he physically attacked two women and instead of being charged with attempted murder, prosecutors let him plead guilty to a lesser assault charge and he served just 19 months before walking out. He then moved to Los
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Angeles and killed at least 10 more women. The justice system kept catching him, giving him a light tap and sending him right back out. He was finally arrested in 2012 when police picked him up at a homeless shelter in Kentucky on
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an old drug warrant from California. While he was in custody, investigators ran his DNA against unsolved case files and got matches to three murders in Los Angeles from the late 1980s. He went to trial for those three killings in 2014,
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was found guilty and received three consecutive life sentences. He screamed that he didn't do it as the judge read out the sentence. That should have been the end of it, but then a Texas Ranger named James Holland came to interview
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him about a separate unsolved killing in Texas. But unlike usual bad cop tactics, Holland didn't come in aggressive or confrontational. He came in calm, friendly and patient. So naturally, over time Little started to open up. The two met many times over hundreds of hours of
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recorded conversations, sitting together, eating food, talking with Holland calling him Sammy and Little calling him Jimmy. Holland also brought him art supplies and it turned out Little had an almost perfect memory for faces. He drew detailed color portraits
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of his victims from memory and investigators were able to match several of those drawings directly to old case photographs, finally putting names to women who had been unidentified for decades. At the end of those sessions, Little confessed to 93 murders spread
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across 35 years and 19 states. The FBI reviewed all 93 confessions and confirmed at least 60 of them as credible, which makes Samuel Little the deadliest killer in American history. He died in prison in 2020 at 80 years old
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and around 30 of his victims still have not been identified. La Bestia, Colombia. In November 1997, workers near the city of Pereira in Colombia were going about their day when they stumbled onto something that stopped them cold.
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They found the remains of 36 boys buried in the ground nearby, all from poor families. All had been missing for some time and in most cases nobody had looked for them. These were kids that Colombian society at the time called desechables,
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a Spanish word that means disposables. Basically, they were so poor and so invisible that their disappearance didn't matter to anyone with power. The man who had put them there had been doing this for years across multiple cities and nobody had connected a single
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case. His name was Luis Garavito and he grew up in a very poor farming family in rural Colombia. His father was an alcoholic who regularly and on top of that he was assaulted by neighbors during his childhood. Then to make
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things worse, his father pulled him out of school in fifth grade and put him to work. By the time he reached his teenage years, people around him described him as extremely aggressive and full of rage. He got thrown out of his own home
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more than once for trying to molest young boys in the neighborhood and through the 1980s he was in and out of hospitals for depression, psychosis, and thoughts of self-deleting. By the time he got out for the last time, something
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in him had changed from disturbed to genuinely dangerous and he started targeting children. His method was organized. He dressed up in disguises, like a priest, a charity worker, or a street vendor and used those disguises to get close to young boys from poor
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families, street children, or orphans. He'd offer them money, candy, or the promise of work, then walk with them toward remote areas until the child was too tired and too far from anyone to call for help. Once they were alone,
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he'd tie them up, tortured and assaulted them, and then killed them, usually by cutting their throats. His victims were mostly boys between the ages of 8 and 16. What eventually led police to him was a mix of his own carelessness and
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one act of unexpected bravery. In early 1999, Garavito got so drunk during one of his attacks near Palmyra that he passed out on top of his victim's body.
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But at that time, he was holding a lit cigarette. That cigarette fell and set the surrounding sugarcane field on fire.
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He ran, but left his glasses, some receipts, and a note with his girlfriend's address. Then the police found it and went to her home and found his photographs of boys, his kill notebooks, and identity cards taken from his
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victims. In Colombia, even young children were required to carry a national ID card. So, these became some of the clearest proof of exactly who he had killed. A few months later, he tried to grab a 12-year-old boy off the
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street, and a nearby teenager started throwing rocks at him until he let go and ran. But because police investigators were already cross-referencing arrests across cities and the details kept pointing back to him, the police caught him shortly after. Once he was in custody,
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investigators gave every prisoner in the facility an eye exam and matched his very rare vision prescription to the glasses found at the crime scene. Under interrogation, he admitted to around 140 murders and led police to dozens of burial sites. The court sentenced him to
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1,853 years, the longest sentence in Colombian history. But because he cooperated, it got reduced to around 22 years. The public outrage was so loud that Colombia changed its laws entirely, raising the maximum penalty for crimes like his to
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60 years, which is one way to find out your legal system had a serious gap to it. Garavito never got out though. He died in prison on October 12, 2023 at 66 years old. The Green River Killer, United States. Imagine you're a night
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woman working on the streets late at night. A friendly looking man pulls up in his truck. You check. He shows you a photo of his son. Seems normal, wholesome even. So, you get in. And then somewhere along that drive, his hands
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grab your throat and don't let go. His name was Gary Ridgway and he lived right there in the SeaTac area, just south of Seattle. Everyone around him he looked completely normal. He painted trucks at a company called Kenworth for 30 years.
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Went to church every week. Knocked on neighbors' doors to talk about his faith and was a father who loved his son. When police were looking for a killer, someone like Gary Ridgway was the last people they were thinking about. His
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background, though, was far from normal. Growing up, his mother was harsh and controlling and one of the ways that showed up was how she handled his bed-wetting problem, which he had until he was 13 or 14. Instead of dealing with
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it normally, she would wash his parts as punishment in an inappropriate way for a kid. On top of that, he struggled with reading his whole life, scored below average on IQ tests and got held back in school. So, he grew up feeling stupid
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and humiliated at every turn. All that anger had to go somewhere. So, he grew up setting fires, hurting animals and as a teenager openly told people he wanted to kill his mother. When he was 16, he walked a 6-year-old boy into the woods
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and stabbed him through the ribs just to see what it felt like. The boy survived and told people that Ridgway walked away laughing. But for unknown reasons, no charges were ever filed against him and he faced zero consequences for it. So,
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he just went back to his life like nothing happened. As an adult, to satisfy his lust, he started paying night workers to sleep together regularly. But at the same time, he hated them deeply. He later told investigators that hatred came from the
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unresolved anger toward his mother his whole life. So, that combination of lust and hate was what pushed him to kill them. Starting in 1982, he killed around 40 women in just 2 years. All of them were night workers or teenage runaways
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he picked up along Pacific Highway South in King County. He would show them photos of his son to make them feel comfortable, then strangled them with his hands or a cord once they were somewhere quiet. After that, he left the
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bodies in the forests and often dropped several victims in the same area. He even sometimes came back to those spots regularly to sleep together again with the bodies of his victims. No, he was not just cuddling with them, even though
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that would be creepy and disgusting in its own right. In his own words, it saved him the effort of having to find a new victim again. What's strange is that despite his low intelligence test, he was actually very careful in not getting
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caught. He planted fake evidence like cigarette butts and gum wrappers at scenes to send investigators in the wrong direction. Never kept anything belonging to his victims, and targeted women that were not important in society.
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Eventually, police got his name in early 1983 when an 18-year-old woman named Marie Malvar got into a paint-patched pickup truck and vanished. Her boyfriend had watched it happen from the street and gave police a description that pointed straight to Ridgeway. They went
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to his house, questioned him, and in 1984 gave him a lie detector test, but he passed it, so they had nothing on him, and he walked right back out into his normal life and killing on the highway at night. For the next 3 years,
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the bodies kept turning up, and the task force kept hitting dead ends. So, in 1987, they came back to Ridgeway and collected saliva and hair samples from him. But even with that, scientists at the time just didn't have the technology
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to match those samples to anything useful, so they got filed away and the investigation went nowhere. And then, everything changed in 2001 when investigators used a newer DNA testing method on Ridgeway saliva from 1987 and matched it to evidence from three
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victims. Police drove to the Kenworth factory on November 30, 2001 and arrested him as he walked out of the end of his shift. He just said, "Okay." Handed them his lunch bucket and got into the car without any argument. He
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agreed to plead guilty and help police find victims in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. In November 2003, he pleaded guilty to 48 murders and got 48 consecutive life sentences with no chance of release plus 480 additional years. He's still alive in prison today.
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The Beast of Ukraine. In the winter of 1995, people living in small villages across western Ukraine were living in terror. Many families were being killed overnight and then the house would be burned down afterwards so that almost nothing was left. It kept happening
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again and again, moving from village to village and nobody knew who was doing it or where they'd show up next. The situation got so bad that the Ukrainian government eventually deployed 2,000 police investigators and over 3,000 soldiers with military vehicles just to
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find this one person and even then they still couldn't catch him. The man behind all of it was Anatoly Onoprienko. He was born in 1959 in a small village in Ukraine and his life fell apart before it even really started. His mother died
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when he was just 4 years old and after that his father made a decision that shaped him into a killer. He had two sons but he chose to keep the older one, Valentin and sent Anatoly to an orphanage. So his brother got a normal
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family life while Anatoly grew up knowing his own father threw him away. He never got over it and he told investigators years later that that single moment was the reason everything in his life turned out the way it did.
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As an adult, he drifted from job to job, traveled around Europe and at some point spent time receiving mental health treatment at a hospital in Kiev. Then he got married and had a son which on the surface looked like he'd finally had the
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family he never had. But the marriage fell apart and he divorced in 1989. With his life crumbling and his money running out, he started spending time at a local gym. And that's where he met a man named Sergey Rogozin. The two became friends
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and started breaking into isolated homes at night to steal whatever they could find. It started as simple burglaries, sneaking in and slipping out before anyone woke up. But then one night during a robbery in a village called Bratkovichi, the family inside woke up
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and caught them. Onoprienko and Rogozin were carrying weapons and rather than run, they used them. They killed all the children and adults in that house. After that, Onoprienko shot five more people he found sleeping in a car nearby, then
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cut ties with Rogozin, left for Europe and things went quiet for several years. Then in late 1995, he came back and started again. This time, completely on his own. He'd drive out to a quiet rural village, find an isolated house where a
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family was sleeping, and make a noise outside to get someone to open the door.
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The moment someone appeared, he'd shoot the man of the house first with a sawed-off shotgun, then go inside and kill everyone else using knives, axes, and hammers. After that, he burned the house down. And if anyone happened to be
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passing by and saw what was happening, he killed them, too. In under 6 months, he killed 43 more people this way. The thousands of investigators and soldiers searching the countryside never actually found him though. What caught him was
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someone much closer. A relative of his girlfriend happened to find a rifle hidden at Onoprienko's place one day and asked where it came from. Onoprienko responded by threatening him, which was enough for the man to go straight to the
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police. On April 16, 1996, more than 20 detectives surrounded his apartment building and waited. And when Onoprienko opened his front door expecting his girlfriend, they grabbed him on the spot. Inside the apartment, police found 122 items, including weapons that
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matched the crime scenes and personal belongings taken from his victims. When investigators sat down with him afterward, Onopriyenko was completely open about everything. He told them like he was a robot driven by a dark force, that he heard voices commanding him to
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kill, and that he could read minds and hypnotize people. A doctor who examined him before his arrest suspected schizophrenia, but the official court evaluation declared him fully sane and responsible for his actions. He showed zero guilt throughout the entire trial,
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and at one point actually boasted that he wanted to be recognized as the world's deadliest serial killer, which really does say everything you need to know about the man. A court convicted him of all 52 murders in 1999 and
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sentenced him to death by firing squad, with crowds outside spitting at him and demanding a slow and painful death. But Ukraine had joined the Council of Europe in 1995 and was obligated to abolish capital punishment, so his death
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sentence got commuted to life in prison instead. He died of heart failure on August 2013 at 54 years old and never once expressed any regret for any of it.
Topics:serial killersElizabeth BathoryMikhail PopkovHarold Shipmantrue crimehistorycriminal psychologyHungaryRussiaUnited Kingdom
