Serhiy Tkach : Police Investigator Turned Notorious Serial Killer. His Rampage Caused At Least 37 Deaths.

Serhiy Tkach was profiled by experts as an organized and meticulous narcissist with strong egocentric behavior, lack of empathy, resistance and inability to maintain long-term relationships. In addition, he desired revenge for the guilt he felt against himself.

According to psychologists, Tkach had serious problems with anger, suffered from intense irritability and was very aggressive. Detectives investigating Tkach's case also called him a sexually motivated psychopath. They also believed that he fully enjoyed the glory he had earned with his murders.

He was born in 1952 in the city of Kiselyovsk in Russia. At school, he had average grades at school, but he was not interested in higher education. He was known for his passion for weightlifting, in which he even achieved several successes. In his hometown, for example, he became a junior champion. However, after damaging his tendon during one of his workouts, he had to involuntarily give up his career in sports.

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After completing his education, Tkach enlisted in the Soviet army, but pretended to be a veteran of a Soviet unit operating in Afghanistan in front of his neighbors. In the army, he became a technician - a land surveyor. Following the completion of his compulsory military service, he decided to continue his studies for a short time so that he could become a police officer. After successfully completing his studies, he became a police investigator in the town of Kemerovo. For a long time he was considered an excellent police officer in the local department. His goal was to get a recommendation for admission to a school for spies.

In 1979, however, Tkach's promising career fell apart after he was caught altering evidence. Subsequently, his superiors gave him two options. Either he will leave the police force voluntarily and unpunished, or he will not leave and will face criminal prosecution, which would probably get him to prison. Tkach, of course, decided for the first option. Revenge for a failed career is considered one of the potential motives for his murderous rampage.

At the beginning of 1980, he also got divorced, and subsequently moved from Russia to Ukraine. During his stay in Ukraine, he practiced many professions. He worked at the railway station, in several mines, factories and farms. Eventually, however, he again managed to score a police investigator work in Dnepropetrovsk. During his life in freedom, he married three times and had four children.

His first murder took place shortly after leaving the police department in 1980. The scene was the city of Simferopol in the Ukrainian Crimea. Tkach drank several bottles of wine that day. In a very drunken state, he suggested to his former classmate, whom he had been seeing in recent years, to meet just outside the city. The reason for the meeting was probably sexual intercourse. However, the woman did not like such an offer, so she slapped him. Drunk and determined to take revenge, he grabbed and raped the woman violently. She had no chance against his male power. Fearing her betrayal, he strangled her right after the rape.

A more or less accidental murder started the long-lasting bloody career of a serial killer, who was later nicknamed the Pavlohrad maniac. Using the knowledge he gained while working as an investigator, Tkach was a highly precise serial killer. That's one of the reasons why he's been able to carry out murders for 25 years unnoticed.

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After the murderous act, he always removed the sperm from the crime scene and completely wiped out all traces. He also exposed the victims and took all the jewelry to destroy the evidence of possible fingerprints. He was particularly active in the Crimea, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Dnepropetrovsk. He chose young women aged 8 to 18 as victims. Usually killing them in forests near railways and roads to direct suspicion towards out-of-towners. Before the murders, he used to drink a few glasses of vodka and use the drug diphenhydramine, which is used to treat insomnia.

Innocent people have been caught in several of the murder cases, accused of being the perpetrators. False allegations of murder were directed at several relatives of the victims, who were subsequently arrested. In most cases, however, the truth came to light eventually. Only in one case the false accusation ended tragically, when the falsly-accused offender decided to commit suicide.

Simultaneously, Sergei Tkach lived a seemingly normal life. He continued to commit atrocities that even his closest ones had no idea about. The 1980 murder remained without particular notice until 1984, when suspiciously high number of young women began to disappear in Zaporizhzhia, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk.

It was then that Tkach began to kill in full power. The distance between the first and the second victim is 4 years, but his appetite for blood has only increased since then. The second victim was a 10-year-old Olga D. killed in the city of Dnepropetrovsk. Her body showed signs of rape and suffocation. Half a year later, an even younger, 8-year-old Olya Š. Her parents saw her entering the apartment building, although she didn't make it home anymore.

The girl's body was found on the day of her disappearance in the basement of the house. Less than 2 months after the brutal murders of young schoolgirls, a search for a 20-year-old woman was announced. She was subsequently discovered in the river, and a forensic expert had nothing left to do, but to state death.

This was followed by a break of almost 2 years, which was followed by more than a handful of young girls corpses being found. Between 1987 and 1989, he committed the rape and murder of 8 women (one 8-year-old, two 9-year-olds, 11-year-old, 12-year-old, two 15-year-olds and one 17-year-old). He murdered at least three victims in 1990 and four more in 1993.

We could keep going like this until 2005, when Sergei Tkach was finally caught. Investigators have clearly shown that Tkach has committed at least 37 murders of young women in total, but he himself said that there could easily be as many as 100. However, other dead bodies found throughout Ukraine, didn't make a clear connection with his person.

Before the capture of Sergei Tkach, the police mistakenly imprisoned about 10 men, whom they considered possible offenders. One of them even committed suicide in 2000. Tkach demanded death penalty after being captured, but the court did not comply with his request. He got hit with a life sentence.

The questions about Tkach's motivation to commit all of these murders are not entirely clear. While some claimed that he felt a strong hatred towards women for the way they treated him, others thought he was making fun of his former colleagues in a way. Detectives eventually came to the conclusion that Tkach was committing serial killing out of sheer pleasure.