he 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 the 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, d
isabled 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 the
Dnepropetrovsk Oblast.
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