You may have never heard of Vlado Taneksi. That could be because he is the exception to the rule in all of my case studies.
Rather than being a serial killer who wrote to the press, Taneski was a member of the press who was a serial killer, and wrote of his crimes as if he was an extremely talented and insightful journalist, rather than a bloodthirsty power-crazed maniac.
The 56 year old father of two committed suicide by drowning himself in a prison toilet, after being arrested for the murders of three elderly women in the tiny Macedonian town of Kicevo in 2008.
Unsurprisingly, his articles about the murders were extremely in-depth and detailed. This was the main factor which brought about his downfall.
“All these women were raped, molested and murdered in the most terrible way and we have very strong evidence that Taneski was responsible for all three,” said police spokesman Ivo Kotevski speaking from the capital Skopje. “In the end there were many things that pointed to him as a suspect and led us to file charges against him for two of the murders,” he added. “We were close to charging him with a third murder, and hoped he would give us details of a fourth woman who disappeared in 2003 – because we believe he was involved in that case, too.”
The three women were aged between 65 and 56. Zivana Temelkoska, Ljubica Licoska, and Mitra Simjanoska were each beaten repeatedly and strangled with a phone cable. Temelkoska was murdered in May, Licoska in February last year and Simjanoska in 2005.
Each of the three bodies was discovered wrapped in plastic bags and dumped and discarded around Kicevo, a drab town southwest of Skopje with a population of fewer than 20,000. The fourth woman, aged 78, went missing in 2003, and her body has never been found.
Like many serial killers, Taneski was described by many as being quiet and thoughtful, and his arrest and suicide were greeted with shock among the Macedonian journalistic community.
“On May 18, just after the gruesome murder of Zivana Temelkoska, he called and pitched the story to us,” said Goce Trpkovski, a reporter at the daily Nova Makedonija.
“He was very quietly spoken but also very persuasive. As a contributor we published his story as the main article on the crime pages the next day – under the headline ‘A serial killer stalks Kicevo, too’ – because the murders followed a series of killings in Ochrid, although they were nothing like this.
“To tell the truth, I didn’t believe the story – almost nothing happens in Macedonia, and suddenly we have two serial killers stalking our tiny country in a matter of months.”
No one will ever know why a mild-mannered journalist turned into such a brutal killer. The only link between his victims is that they were all cleaners, a job also held by his mother.
Much of my research on Taneski came from a superb article by Helena Smith in the Guardian; the article can be found here http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/24/pressandpublishing.internationalcrime
Red Ink Letters 