Serhiy Tkach

Serhiy Fedorovich Tkach (also spelled Sergey) was born on September 15, 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 a 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.

In 1984, young women and girls began to noticeably disappear across Kharkiv Oblast, Zaporizhzhia 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 sex acts on their bodies.[3] Tkach used 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.

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.[3][4] 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.[3] Over the years 15 men were wrongly jailed for some of the murders of which Tkach was found guilty, one of whom committed suicide, and another was not released until March 2012.[3][5]

A 2018 Netflix documentary titled Inside the World's Toughest Prisons revealed that Tkach fathered a child while in prison with a woman in her twenties who became infatuated with him after reading an interview in the media. She went on to marry Tkach in 2015, who was allowed conjugal visits according to human rights provisions.

Serhiy Tkach died in the Prison No. 8 of Zhytomyr, where he served his sentence, on November 4, 2018, at 7 p.m. local time. The cause of death was heart failure. Tkach was buried on November 7 by the prison staff as none of his relatives had claimed the body.[6]

• List of serial killers by country
• List of serial killers by number of victims