Quick Facts
Biography
Serhiy Fedorovich Tkach (Ukrainian: Сергій Федорович Ткач, Russian: Серге́й Фёдорович Ткач; born September 12, 1952) is a Soviet-Russian serial killer, convicted for the killing of 37 women and girls in Ukraine from 1980 to 2005.
Background
Serhiy Fedorovich Tkach (also spelled Sergey) was born on 12 September 1952 in Kiselyovsk, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. He served in the Soviet Army, and according to neighbours he claimed to be a veteran of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Tkach worked as a police criminal investigator in Kemerovo Oblast, where he was recommended for admission to an Ministry of Internal Affairs school until he was caught falsifying evidence and forced to resign. Afterwards Tkach worked numerous different jobs before moving to the Ukraine SSR in 1982, where he began working again as a police criminal investigator in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Murders
In 1984, young women and girls began to noticeably disappear across Kharkiv Oblast, Zaporizhia Oblast, Dnipropetrovsk and Crimea in eastern Ukraine, near where Tkach lived and worked. He targeted female victims, aged between 8 and 18, who would be raped, suffocated, and after they were dead performed necrophilic acts on their bodies. Tkach used to his police knowledge to mislead others investigating his killings, such as choosing victims near railway lines recently treated with tar to throw police dogs off his scent.
Arrest and conviction
In August 2005, Tkach attended the funeral of one of his victims, where children who were also attending claimed to have seen him with the victim shortly before her death. Tkach was arrested at his home in Polohy and admitted to his crimes, claiming to have killed over 100 people until his arrest, and demanded the death penalty. After a one-year trial, in 2008 a tribunal in Dnipropetrovsk sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murder of 37 women and girls over more than two decades. Over the years 15 men were wrongly jailed for some of the murders of which Tkach was found guilty, one of which committed suicide, and another was not released until March 2012.