Killers: Behind the Myth (2013–2015): Season 1, Episode 6 - Onoprienko: The Terminator - full transcript
Anatoly Onoprienko, 'The Terminator', earned his nickname from an unprecedented spree of mass killings in Ukraine. In just 4 months he slaughtered 43 people, entering households and murdering whole families at a time. Children and even babies fell victim to this merciless killer. Onoprienko claimed he was on a dark mission for supernatural powers, that he heard voices in his head telling him to kill. But in reality he killed to make money: his arrogance and avarice led to his downfall as police found over 100 trophies stolen from victims stashed in his apartment. Onoprienko is sentenced for 52 murders, making him one of the most prolific and evil serial killers of the century.
The most notoriouskillers hide in plain sight,
free to kill and kill again.
But most are not the criminalmasterminds of fiction.
In their heads, theycommit the perfect murder.
In reality, it's their foolishmistakes that get them caught.
Ukraine, the 22nd of March 1996.
Outside the town of Busk, acold blooded serial killer
was on the loose and ispreparing for his next attack.
He's already killed 36 peoplein the past three months.
The terrified locals have cometo call him the Terminator.
Galina Novosad
puts her daughter,
nine-year-old Ludmila, to bed.
She and her husband,
Mikhail, are
downstairs as the Terminatorapproaches their modest home.
What happens next followsa ruthless pattern.
First,
the Terminator kills
all the adults in the house.
Then he murders the children.
He showed no mercy.
Ivan Dovbischyukis the chief police
investigator on the case.
It was unbelievable.
He killed everyone
standing in his way.
With the entirehousehold callously murdered,
the Terminator ransacks
the place, stealing
anything of value he can carry.
Then he vanishes into the night.
And murders in Busk
bring the killer's total
to seven familiesslaughtered in just 12 weeks.
It got to the stage wherethe whole country was paralyzed
by fear of the uncatchableserial killer, the Terminator,
who could strike at any time andany place within the country,
and then escape the authorities.
To catch
the killer, a team
of 2,000 police officers
from across the country
are called in.
And 3,000 troops
are sent to patrol
the streets to assist them.
The police realized
that they were helpless.
They could not catch the
killer by themselves.
So they decided to turn
to the army for help.
Pyotr Tarasyuk isan investigative journalist.
Soldiers carrying machine guns
were patrolling the streets.
It was like being at war.
Thousands of police andtroops on the streets searching
for this one person, it wasalmost like an entire country
against one person.
We worked 24/7, with no daysoff, without even going home.
Eventually, on Easterday 1996, the Terminator's luck
runs out.
Local police investigatingreports of suspicious activity
inspect an apartment
in the town of Yavoriv.
Here, they find 37-year-oldAnatoly Onoprienko at home
alone.
He opened the door to thepolice and got quite a shock.
The police askOnoprienko for his documents.
As he goes to get
them, the police
notice that he has a pistol.
They restrain him and takehim in for questioning.
Thepolice return to the flat
and found a bag with
a sawed off shotgun,
bullets, and other weapons.
The shotgun fitsballistics evidence found
at the murder scene in Busk.
Alongside the gun,
police recover
122 items stolen from victims.
They realize that AnatolyOnoprienko is the Terminator.
Ruslan Moshkovsky isOnoprienko's defense lawyer.
I asked him,
what do you have
to say about all
52 killings you are accused of?
He raised his hands, coldlylooked at me and said,
my hands are covered in blood.
I did kill all those people.
News of the arrestbreaks around the world.
Well, tonight's
special report,
we look at the man
on trial in Ukraine
for a number of
horrifying murders.
Anatoly Onoprienko has admittedto 52 men, women, and children.
Journalists
are given access
to the Terminator
whilst he awaits trial.
I cancommunicate telepathically with
the outer world beyond
these prison walls,
or with the highest
powers that are
watching us at the same time.
Onoprienko
claims that he is
on a mission to punish Ukraine.
He says that hears supernaturalvoices telling him to kill.
He told me that he felt
a demon penetrate his body.
He felt there was another personin his body, who became a beast
and called himself a
beast in human form.
He callsit magic that he killed so many
people and that
the place could not
catch him for so many years.
Reporter
Maria Tsiptsyura
interviewed Onoprienko.
He implied that he
may have inherited
these so-called
supernatural abilities.
He told me about
his grandmother,
who was an extra sensory
individual, a witch.
He might have
inherited her abilities
and that's what people
never fought back.
To other journalists,Onoprienko described himself
as a machine, driven to kill byorders from beyond this world.
I thinkthat right now I'm something
between a human and a robot.
I've done a lot of jobs whichought to be done by robots.
He became what he
called a bio-robot,
half man, half
cyborg, that followed
the voices in his head.
Court officialswere not impressed
by Onoprienko's explanations.
Thesewere his protection tactics,
to pretend that he heardvoices and received a command
to commit these crimes.
Oleg Guzovsky is oneof five judges at the hearing.
My impression
was that he was very confident.
There was no remorse to be seen.
Life has treated
me harshly so I don't
think about being punished.
I'm a working man.
I'm an executioner.
And remember, punishment isup to the gods or the devil
and I don't think about it.
To determine
if he is sane enough
to stand trial, police delveback into Onoprienko's past.
Westudied Onoprienko's life,
from his childhood to
the day of his arrest.
What they discoverabout the Terminator
will stay with them for
the rest of their lives.
I feelabsolutely no pity for any
of those people I killed.
I am a much better
person than any of them.
Between December1995 and March 1996,
Anatoly Onoprienko, the serialkiller known as the Terminator,
rampages across Ukraine.
He has confessed to slaughtering52 in his reign of terror.
On the 7th of April
1996, police arrest
Onoprienko in an apartmentin the town of Yavoriv.
The Terminator is
finally behind bars.
To discover what drove himto commit such awful crimes,
investigators probe
back to his childhood.
Anatoly Onoprienko
was born in 1959
in the small Ukrainian
village of Lasky.
Onoprienko
had an unfortunate childhood.
His father
was supposedly a violent man.
He was also an alcoholic
who abused his family.
His parents got divorced.
And shortly after
that, his mother died.
Anatolywas very close to his mother
who was caring and good to him.
These things had a devastatingimpact on the child's life.
When he was
almost four years old,
Onoprienko went to live
with his grandparents
until they could no
longer support him.
Both his father and brother,who was 13 years his senior,
had new families to look after.
When he was six, Onoprienkowas sent to an orphanage.
Onoprienko had
already lost his mother
and that support, now hisgrandparents and that support.
He was now being parceled offand rejected in his own mind
by his own brother
and his own father.
This kind of rejection can havea profound and angering effect
on a child.
The orphanage
was a traumatizing
experience for the young
Anatoly Onoprienko.
Onoprienko told me that,
at the orphanage, the
teachers were cruel.
And the teenagers
with mental problems
started beating
him up every day.
They even tried to drown him.
That was why he
started hating people.
Within the orphanage,
Onoprienko's attitude
towards others, towards
society, basically
to anyone else on theplanet, was me versus you.
When he
was 15, Anatoly
Onoprienko enrolled
in a forestry college
in the town of Malyn.
It was a chance for
him to try to establish
a normal life Evgenia Zaichenkowas a teacher at the college.
I taught this boy.
He was a smart child.
I can't say he was stupid.
He got B and C
grades in my lessons.
He was a normal, smart
boy, deprived of love.
They say that if a child
is treated with love,
that love warms.
Even ice melts from warmth.
Children's souls also
become warm if they
are treated with love.
For the firsttwo years of his studies,
Onoprienko was a good student.
But things changed and hebegan to go off the rails.
He didn'tdo so well in the third year.
He stopped working.
When he was 18,Onoprienko joined the army.
Thiscould have been a chance
to change his fate,
to find himself
in a new environment
and take responsibility
for his future actions.
But for
Onoprienko, he army
provided a darker stimulus.
He caught the glimmer of theuse of weapons, and the power
that weapons can give
to one individual.
And this was very
important looking
back across the path
of Onoprienko's life
where he'd been--
power had been
taken away from him.
He now saw a way
of gaining it back.
Discharged from the
Army, Onoprienko
joined the Merchant Navy.
He gained a prize position,working on board cruise ships,
plying the Black Sea.
He began to
supplement his income
by stealing and smuggling.
He became very arrogant.
He brought home
presents and he said
he was treated withrespect, like a proper man.
He began to see and realize anew kind of life, which kind of
gave him higher status thanhe could have ever anticipated
back in the orphanage.
Whilst working atsea, Onoprienko met a waitress.
They became a couple and
had a child together.
But on board the cruise ship,sinister forces were at work.
Onoprienko claims
it was here that he
was inspired to become
the murderer soon
to be known as the Terminator.
He
told me that once he was
standing on the ship's deck.
He saw lightning in the sky.
At that moment, he felt
like some other creature
possessed him.
He started hearing an innervoice saying, kill, kill, kill.
In 1986,Onoprienko's luck ran out.
Suspected of smuggling,
he was forced out
of the Merchant Navy.
It was difficult for him,
not just because
of the humiliation,
but because of the
cut in his income.
This coincided with thedisintegration of his marriage.
So Onoprienko, now without afamily or a well-paid job that
funded his pension, and withoutany income from smuggling,
had to start afresh.
Onoprienko at
that point, decided
he was going to move towardsstraightforward robbery.
He was going to use force.
He was going to use weapons.
Ukraine,
14th of June 1989.
Anatoly Onoprienko,working with an accomplice,
sets out to commit
armed robbery.
A couple are parked
by the side of a road
near the town of.
Without warning,
Onoprienko shoots
and kills the two of them.
He takes what little money theyhave and sets the car ablaze.
Onoprienko has taken the
first step on his road
to becoming the Terminator.
Suddenly, there was
a breaking point in his life.
He crossed a boundary.
And this boundary
was his first murder.
Despite
the meager takings,
Onoprienko shows no remorse.
They didn't make much,
400 rubles maybe.
They realized thateverything went smoothly.
So they decided to continue.
Onoprienko, by
killing immediately,
had gone through that barrier.
And there was now no
point of return to being
an ordinary thief again.
Just weeks
after his first murders,
on the 16th of July
1989, Onoprienko
and his associate, Rogozin,strike for a second time.
They attack two
newlyweds in their car.
Once again,
Onoprienko shows no mercy.
He kills both of them
then torches the car.
But the Terminator's killingspree is only beginning.
Just weeks later, the
pair attack again,
this time a family of
five who were driving
back from their holidays.
Onoprienko takes the fivebodies to a secluded spot
and piles them up.
After taking any
valuables he can find,
he pours petrol over hisvictims and sets them alight.
It's the pair's third attack.
But this time, Onoprienko
has killed a child.
He went through
yet another barrier,
another point of no return, inthat he killed an 11-year-old
child within that car.
Heexplained that in killing
the parents of those
children, he had to kill
them as well so that
they wouldn't end
up in an orphanage like him.
It was the crossing of anotherboundary for his criminal.
Local farmers see thesmoke from the burning bodies
and alert the police.
Thepolice were very efficient.
They quickly
identified the victims.
They took all necessary measuresto track down the killer.
Onoprienko and
his associate split up.
Onoprienko decides that withthe police hot on this trail,
the safest place for him
is out of the country.
He crosses the border
illegally and heads
to Western Europe
and stays there for six years.
Onoprienko liveson the margins of society,
moving between Germany,Austria, and Scandinavia,
stealing and doing
menial jobs to survive.
It's a hiatus in his
murderous career.
But in 1995, he is
deported from Germany
as an illegal immigrant.
Fearful that he's wantedfor his previous murders,
on arrival in Kiev
he feigns insanity.
Hestarted to behave crazily.
And when he got off theplane, his strange behavior
attracted the attention
of airport security.
Onoprienko is takento a psychiatric hospital,
where he is diagnosed withparanoid schizophrenia.
To be diagnosed as
paranoid schizophrenic,
he would emulate symptomssuch as pretending he's
hearing persecutory voices.
And he would pretend thathe was having ideation,
that he was thinking thatthe world was talking
to him through the
TV or that people
were out to get him
at every corner,
every junction in his life.
And perhaps the doctors
and psychiatrists
were plotting against him.
When he realizesthat the police are
not looking for him,
Onoprienko feigns
recovery and is discharged.
But he has no money and no job.
He is forced to rely on thehospitality of his family.
It's a humiliating situationfor the arrogant Onoprienko.
He had great financial
expectations and
needs, and so decided
to return to a life of crime.
Onoprienko
steals a shotgun
from a friend of his brother.
He cuts it down to a sizethat can easily be concealed.
The Terminator,
now acting alone,
is armed and ready to
begin a killing spree
of unprecedented savagery.
Ukraine, 24th of December, 1995.
Anatoly Onoprienko is aboutto earn the title, Terminator.
Outside the village
of Garmarnia,
within half a mile ofhis old forestry college,
the killer waits for nightfall.
Onoprienko decided
that cars were
fairly limited when
it came to loot
and began to be more ambitious.
Onoprienko is
about to begin a killing
spree of unimaginable savagery.
He's set to exterminate
a whole family.
The family of his formerteacher, Evgenia Zaichenko.
Heremembered that the teachers
had given him bad marks.
He decided to come back hereand take revenge on them.
Evgenia's
son, Vadim Zaichenko,
is downstairs with his wifeand three-year-old son, Boris.
Onoprienko shoots them dead.
He then find
three-month-old Oleg.
He smothers the helpless
baby with a pillow.
Then he steals what
little the family
and sets the house on fire.
The house was open.
My husband had run inside.
He thought there
might be someone alive
and started looking
for the young baby
who was three months old.
The baby was still
under the pillow.
Onoprienko claimed that killing
a stranger's child is more
difficult than killing
your own, because in
committing such an act,
you kill a completely
innocent being
about whom you know nothing.
It's very hard to kill
someone else's innocent child.
I consider these
murders to be a very
hard psychological experiment.
And I was specially
chosen for this role.
I feel like I was
accomplishing a very
serious experimental task.
While he beginsan unprecedented wave
of slaughter, Onoprienko
is living a double life.
In December 1995, he moves inwith a 34-year-old divorcee,
Ana and her two children
in the town of Yavoriv.
He pretends to be a
traveling businessman.
Onoprienko was
fairly charming.
Most people who have
that psychopathic lack
of emotional baggage
also can charm others
quite easily if they try.
He would make a bath
for her and pour a
bottle of champagne
on her head instead of shampoo.
He also put red
roses in the water.
He gave her
presents he took from
his victim's, rings,
earrings, gold chains.
He was a gentleman.
Onoprienko would
have definitely
been putting on an act.
He was doing this
instrumentally.
He wanted to stay
with this lady.
He wanted to use her as thebackdrop for his other life,
to be able to go out andhave a dual existence was
no difficulty for
him whatsoever.
From his base
in Ana's apartment,
Onoprienko is set to mercilesslycontinue his rampage.
Most serial
killers kind of stick
to the same modus operandi.
They don't particularlywant to change what works.
But the slaughterof his old teacher's family
establishes a new way ofworking for the Terminator.
This idea of actually
approaching a house
began a new template, whichwould lead to mass killings.
He would attack
houses in secluded
areas, knowing
no one would help his victims.
He saw it was effective
he wasn't concerned.
He would knock
on someone's door at night, orwould shoot out the windows.
Then he would enter the houseand shoot everyone dead.
Everyone, including children.
Covering
hundreds of miles
by train in the guise
of a traveling salesman,
the Terminator targets
households from one end
of the country to the other.
In a series of
brutal mass killings,
he slaughters 30 people
in just two months.
Chillingly, when
plotted on a map,
the Terminator's
murders form a cross
over the territory of Ukraine.
It will become known
as Onoprienko's Cross.
His modus operandi
meant that he didn't takeany risks for a long time.
He would cover his
tracks after attacks
by burning down the
houses and picking
up cartridges from his gun.
The
police are baffled.
The killings span the country.
Individual forces fail
to link them together.
Manypolice officers didn't believe
that one person
could kill so many
people across such a wide area.
On the 27th
of February, 1996,
Onoprienko returns
to the vicinity
of his orphanage in college.
He brutally slaughters
the Bondarchuk
family in their home in Malyn.
Neighbor, Vladimyr Dmitrenko,remembers the tragic aftermath.
It was an awful day.
The whole garden was
covered in blood.
He hacked Sergey's head
off with a hatchet.
His wife was laying
on the front doorstep.
He shot her in the chest.
He killed their littlechildren with a screwdriver
and cut their throats.
The headprosecution office of Ukraine
sends senior chief investigator
Ivandov Bishop to Malyn.
His mission is to examinethe multiple mass killings
and determine if
they are connected.
Westudied all the cases we had
and came to the conclusion
that they needed
to be amalgamated immediately.
Investigators
initially suspected
that a gang may be involved.
But looking at footprintsfound at the crime scenes,
they realize this
was not the case.
All the footprints
belonged to one person.
So we came to the
conclusion that this
was the work of one man.
People were scared to
go to sleep at night.
They demanded protection
from the army.
Across the country,households are terrified.
No family feels safe.
2,000 police are
put on the case.
The army is called out and3,000 troops patrol the streets.
Onoprienko
was watching them throughbinoculars and laughing.
He was just one kilometer away.
He thought they wouldnever catch him that way.
But Onoprienko's
next act of violence
is set to be his last.
He slaughters the
Novaset family in Busk
but fails to burn the evidence.
Fueled by his own
success, the Terminator
is becoming careless.
He leaves shotgun cartridgeslying where they fall.
And he steals a tape machinethat will soon become
key evidence for the police.
Anatoly Onoprienko,
the Terminator,
has killed 52 people overthe last seven years.
He's living a double
life with divorcee
Ana and her two children,in the town of Yavoriv.
When he was
living at his
girlfriend's place,
he barely left the house.
There were armored vehiclesdeployed in the villages
across the Laviv region.
The militia and thepeople were on the alert.
Onoprienko's first bigmistake was to actually escalate
his killing spree to the pointwhere police attention, even
military attention,
would be on him
and make it more
and more difficult
for him to move
around anonymously.
Onoprienko makesanother foolish error,
leaving evidence
behind at the scene
of his final attack in Busk.
Onoprienko's second
rather large mistake
was to start to
become overconfident
and becoming a little bitcareless about evidence
he leaves at crime scenes, whichwould include the cartridges
from the gun that he
was using, which could,
of course, be tied to him.
By the
end of March 1996,
the net is closing
in on the Terminator.
Weknew it was a 12 gauge shotgun
because we had the cartridges.
We got forensic test resultson the cartridges that had been
found at the crime scene Busk.
Police
investigate 72,000
gun owners across Ukraine.
They compare spentcartridges from their guns
with the spent
cartridges Onoprienko
carelessly left behind.
We foundthe person from whom a gun was
stolen, I identified
the same cartridges,
and learned that the stolengun was the murder's weapon.
So we only had to findout who stole the shotgun.
But for the centralauthorities can track him down,
local police in
Yavoriv get a tip off.
Neighbors reported astranger acting suspiciously.
In small villages,
people know each other.
And a stranger hiding in thehouse attracts attention.
Villagers got suspicious.
They hadinformation about his partner.
They knew that she wasseeing someone who went away
often and always
came back with stuff,
that he gave her a lot of goldrings and a stolen fur coat.
On Easter
Sunday 1996, police
go to Onoprienko's apartment.
His partner and her
children are out.
Onoprienko answers the doorwithout checking who is there.
It's a lucky break
for the police.
Hesaid, if I'd checked behind
the door and saw
police, I would have
used all my bullets on them.
They would not get me so easily.
But I didn't check, as Ithought my partner was back.
One of the
officers notices a tape
machine, similar
to the one stolen
from the crime scene in Busk.
He checks the serial number.
It's a match.
The terrible truth dawns.
Onoprienko is the Terminator.
They arrest him and take
him in for questioning.
On searching the
apartment, police find
the shot gun and cartridges.
Whenwe got the shotgun cartridges,
we compared them withthe cartridges from Busk.
And it became clear
that the cartridges
were shot from that same gun.
Onoprienko's
arrogance and greed have
caught up with him at last.
He confesses to a
total of 52 murders.
Defense lawyer Ruslan
Moshkovsky interviews
Onoprienko, probing for anymitigating circumstances.
I asked him
why he killed so many people.
He told me that he
wanted to earn money.
I asked him why he
killed poor people.
He told me that he
started with poor people
in order to learn how
to kill wealthy people.
As defense
attorney, Moshkovsky
is duty-bound to look afterOnoprienko's interests.
I told him that we had
to find an explanation as to whyhe had committed those murders.
I wanted people to believethat he had mental problems.
To escape
the death penalty,
Onoprienko begins todemonstrate signs of madness.
Theentire strategy of defense
Onoprienko used was to denythat he was responsible for his
actions, that it was
an external force
or voice that told him to kill.
Onoprienko's
trial begins
on the 23rd of November, 1998.
Hundreds of people turn upto see justice being done.
The Terminator has becomesuch a hated figure
that authorities must
take extra precautions
to prevent an attack on him.
A panel of five judges
would decide his fate.
Oleg Guzovsky was one of them.
In the courtroom,
he was calm and confident.
He might sit there and thendraw a cross on his forehead
with his finger.
There were moments
like that, oddities
from his side of the courtroom.
I was killing
because it was the formulaof life I had to follow.
I don't think about them now.
They are nothing.
They are dust to me.
The trial
ran for four months.
Overall, we
came to the conclusion
that killing
people gave him satisfaction.
Of course, there was
some mental disorder,
but not that strong that hecouldn't control his actions.
He was found to be
sane and could be held
responsible for his crimes.
In March
1999, Onoprienko
is sentenced to death
by a single shot
to the back of the head.
But before the sentence
can be carried out,
a moratorium on
the death penalty
was put in place in Ukraine.
Onoprienko's sentence waschanged to life imprisonment.
Maria Tsiptsyurainterviewed to him in 2012.
He says52 murders is not two murders,
and it's terrifying.
I am a phenomenon and I needto be studied by professionals.
He spoke in the
third person like it
was not him doing the killing.
After
a decade in jail,
the arrogant Onoprienko relishedthe attention of the press.
He continued to suggestthat he was driven to kill.
He explains
his murders as somethingthat voices told him to do.
It was hard for him.
And he didn't want
to hear these voices.
But he could not disobey them.
When he heard them, he knewhe needed to take a weapon
and kill.
He admits, if he
were not in prison
and if he heard those voicesagain, he would go and kill.
I'm Satan.
I'm Satan in human form.
On the
27th of August, 2013,
Anatoly Onoprienko,
the Terminator,
died in prison of
a heart attack.
In the Holy Bible it is
written that we should forgive.
I don't know whether toforgive or not to forgive.
I can't bring my children back.
As for him, let God judge.
free to kill and kill again.
But most are not the criminalmasterminds of fiction.
In their heads, theycommit the perfect murder.
In reality, it's their foolishmistakes that get them caught.
Ukraine, the 22nd of March 1996.
Outside the town of Busk, acold blooded serial killer
was on the loose and ispreparing for his next attack.
He's already killed 36 peoplein the past three months.
The terrified locals have cometo call him the Terminator.
Galina Novosad
puts her daughter,
nine-year-old Ludmila, to bed.
She and her husband,
Mikhail, are
downstairs as the Terminatorapproaches their modest home.
What happens next followsa ruthless pattern.
First,
the Terminator kills
all the adults in the house.
Then he murders the children.
He showed no mercy.
Ivan Dovbischyukis the chief police
investigator on the case.
It was unbelievable.
He killed everyone
standing in his way.
With the entirehousehold callously murdered,
the Terminator ransacks
the place, stealing
anything of value he can carry.
Then he vanishes into the night.
And murders in Busk
bring the killer's total
to seven familiesslaughtered in just 12 weeks.
It got to the stage wherethe whole country was paralyzed
by fear of the uncatchableserial killer, the Terminator,
who could strike at any time andany place within the country,
and then escape the authorities.
To catch
the killer, a team
of 2,000 police officers
from across the country
are called in.
And 3,000 troops
are sent to patrol
the streets to assist them.
The police realized
that they were helpless.
They could not catch the
killer by themselves.
So they decided to turn
to the army for help.
Pyotr Tarasyuk isan investigative journalist.
Soldiers carrying machine guns
were patrolling the streets.
It was like being at war.
Thousands of police andtroops on the streets searching
for this one person, it wasalmost like an entire country
against one person.
We worked 24/7, with no daysoff, without even going home.
Eventually, on Easterday 1996, the Terminator's luck
runs out.
Local police investigatingreports of suspicious activity
inspect an apartment
in the town of Yavoriv.
Here, they find 37-year-oldAnatoly Onoprienko at home
alone.
He opened the door to thepolice and got quite a shock.
The police askOnoprienko for his documents.
As he goes to get
them, the police
notice that he has a pistol.
They restrain him and takehim in for questioning.
Thepolice return to the flat
and found a bag with
a sawed off shotgun,
bullets, and other weapons.
The shotgun fitsballistics evidence found
at the murder scene in Busk.
Alongside the gun,
police recover
122 items stolen from victims.
They realize that AnatolyOnoprienko is the Terminator.
Ruslan Moshkovsky isOnoprienko's defense lawyer.
I asked him,
what do you have
to say about all
52 killings you are accused of?
He raised his hands, coldlylooked at me and said,
my hands are covered in blood.
I did kill all those people.
News of the arrestbreaks around the world.
Well, tonight's
special report,
we look at the man
on trial in Ukraine
for a number of
horrifying murders.
Anatoly Onoprienko has admittedto 52 men, women, and children.
Journalists
are given access
to the Terminator
whilst he awaits trial.
I cancommunicate telepathically with
the outer world beyond
these prison walls,
or with the highest
powers that are
watching us at the same time.
Onoprienko
claims that he is
on a mission to punish Ukraine.
He says that hears supernaturalvoices telling him to kill.
He told me that he felt
a demon penetrate his body.
He felt there was another personin his body, who became a beast
and called himself a
beast in human form.
He callsit magic that he killed so many
people and that
the place could not
catch him for so many years.
Reporter
Maria Tsiptsyura
interviewed Onoprienko.
He implied that he
may have inherited
these so-called
supernatural abilities.
He told me about
his grandmother,
who was an extra sensory
individual, a witch.
He might have
inherited her abilities
and that's what people
never fought back.
To other journalists,Onoprienko described himself
as a machine, driven to kill byorders from beyond this world.
I thinkthat right now I'm something
between a human and a robot.
I've done a lot of jobs whichought to be done by robots.
He became what he
called a bio-robot,
half man, half
cyborg, that followed
the voices in his head.
Court officialswere not impressed
by Onoprienko's explanations.
Thesewere his protection tactics,
to pretend that he heardvoices and received a command
to commit these crimes.
Oleg Guzovsky is oneof five judges at the hearing.
My impression
was that he was very confident.
There was no remorse to be seen.
Life has treated
me harshly so I don't
think about being punished.
I'm a working man.
I'm an executioner.
And remember, punishment isup to the gods or the devil
and I don't think about it.
To determine
if he is sane enough
to stand trial, police delveback into Onoprienko's past.
Westudied Onoprienko's life,
from his childhood to
the day of his arrest.
What they discoverabout the Terminator
will stay with them for
the rest of their lives.
I feelabsolutely no pity for any
of those people I killed.
I am a much better
person than any of them.
Between December1995 and March 1996,
Anatoly Onoprienko, the serialkiller known as the Terminator,
rampages across Ukraine.
He has confessed to slaughtering52 in his reign of terror.
On the 7th of April
1996, police arrest
Onoprienko in an apartmentin the town of Yavoriv.
The Terminator is
finally behind bars.
To discover what drove himto commit such awful crimes,
investigators probe
back to his childhood.
Anatoly Onoprienko
was born in 1959
in the small Ukrainian
village of Lasky.
Onoprienko
had an unfortunate childhood.
His father
was supposedly a violent man.
He was also an alcoholic
who abused his family.
His parents got divorced.
And shortly after
that, his mother died.
Anatolywas very close to his mother
who was caring and good to him.
These things had a devastatingimpact on the child's life.
When he was
almost four years old,
Onoprienko went to live
with his grandparents
until they could no
longer support him.
Both his father and brother,who was 13 years his senior,
had new families to look after.
When he was six, Onoprienkowas sent to an orphanage.
Onoprienko had
already lost his mother
and that support, now hisgrandparents and that support.
He was now being parceled offand rejected in his own mind
by his own brother
and his own father.
This kind of rejection can havea profound and angering effect
on a child.
The orphanage
was a traumatizing
experience for the young
Anatoly Onoprienko.
Onoprienko told me that,
at the orphanage, the
teachers were cruel.
And the teenagers
with mental problems
started beating
him up every day.
They even tried to drown him.
That was why he
started hating people.
Within the orphanage,
Onoprienko's attitude
towards others, towards
society, basically
to anyone else on theplanet, was me versus you.
When he
was 15, Anatoly
Onoprienko enrolled
in a forestry college
in the town of Malyn.
It was a chance for
him to try to establish
a normal life Evgenia Zaichenkowas a teacher at the college.
I taught this boy.
He was a smart child.
I can't say he was stupid.
He got B and C
grades in my lessons.
He was a normal, smart
boy, deprived of love.
They say that if a child
is treated with love,
that love warms.
Even ice melts from warmth.
Children's souls also
become warm if they
are treated with love.
For the firsttwo years of his studies,
Onoprienko was a good student.
But things changed and hebegan to go off the rails.
He didn'tdo so well in the third year.
He stopped working.
When he was 18,Onoprienko joined the army.
Thiscould have been a chance
to change his fate,
to find himself
in a new environment
and take responsibility
for his future actions.
But for
Onoprienko, he army
provided a darker stimulus.
He caught the glimmer of theuse of weapons, and the power
that weapons can give
to one individual.
And this was very
important looking
back across the path
of Onoprienko's life
where he'd been--
power had been
taken away from him.
He now saw a way
of gaining it back.
Discharged from the
Army, Onoprienko
joined the Merchant Navy.
He gained a prize position,working on board cruise ships,
plying the Black Sea.
He began to
supplement his income
by stealing and smuggling.
He became very arrogant.
He brought home
presents and he said
he was treated withrespect, like a proper man.
He began to see and realize anew kind of life, which kind of
gave him higher status thanhe could have ever anticipated
back in the orphanage.
Whilst working atsea, Onoprienko met a waitress.
They became a couple and
had a child together.
But on board the cruise ship,sinister forces were at work.
Onoprienko claims
it was here that he
was inspired to become
the murderer soon
to be known as the Terminator.
He
told me that once he was
standing on the ship's deck.
He saw lightning in the sky.
At that moment, he felt
like some other creature
possessed him.
He started hearing an innervoice saying, kill, kill, kill.
In 1986,Onoprienko's luck ran out.
Suspected of smuggling,
he was forced out
of the Merchant Navy.
It was difficult for him,
not just because
of the humiliation,
but because of the
cut in his income.
This coincided with thedisintegration of his marriage.
So Onoprienko, now without afamily or a well-paid job that
funded his pension, and withoutany income from smuggling,
had to start afresh.
Onoprienko at
that point, decided
he was going to move towardsstraightforward robbery.
He was going to use force.
He was going to use weapons.
Ukraine,
14th of June 1989.
Anatoly Onoprienko,working with an accomplice,
sets out to commit
armed robbery.
A couple are parked
by the side of a road
near the town of.
Without warning,
Onoprienko shoots
and kills the two of them.
He takes what little money theyhave and sets the car ablaze.
Onoprienko has taken the
first step on his road
to becoming the Terminator.
Suddenly, there was
a breaking point in his life.
He crossed a boundary.
And this boundary
was his first murder.
Despite
the meager takings,
Onoprienko shows no remorse.
They didn't make much,
400 rubles maybe.
They realized thateverything went smoothly.
So they decided to continue.
Onoprienko, by
killing immediately,
had gone through that barrier.
And there was now no
point of return to being
an ordinary thief again.
Just weeks
after his first murders,
on the 16th of July
1989, Onoprienko
and his associate, Rogozin,strike for a second time.
They attack two
newlyweds in their car.
Once again,
Onoprienko shows no mercy.
He kills both of them
then torches the car.
But the Terminator's killingspree is only beginning.
Just weeks later, the
pair attack again,
this time a family of
five who were driving
back from their holidays.
Onoprienko takes the fivebodies to a secluded spot
and piles them up.
After taking any
valuables he can find,
he pours petrol over hisvictims and sets them alight.
It's the pair's third attack.
But this time, Onoprienko
has killed a child.
He went through
yet another barrier,
another point of no return, inthat he killed an 11-year-old
child within that car.
Heexplained that in killing
the parents of those
children, he had to kill
them as well so that
they wouldn't end
up in an orphanage like him.
It was the crossing of anotherboundary for his criminal.
Local farmers see thesmoke from the burning bodies
and alert the police.
Thepolice were very efficient.
They quickly
identified the victims.
They took all necessary measuresto track down the killer.
Onoprienko and
his associate split up.
Onoprienko decides that withthe police hot on this trail,
the safest place for him
is out of the country.
He crosses the border
illegally and heads
to Western Europe
and stays there for six years.
Onoprienko liveson the margins of society,
moving between Germany,Austria, and Scandinavia,
stealing and doing
menial jobs to survive.
It's a hiatus in his
murderous career.
But in 1995, he is
deported from Germany
as an illegal immigrant.
Fearful that he's wantedfor his previous murders,
on arrival in Kiev
he feigns insanity.
Hestarted to behave crazily.
And when he got off theplane, his strange behavior
attracted the attention
of airport security.
Onoprienko is takento a psychiatric hospital,
where he is diagnosed withparanoid schizophrenia.
To be diagnosed as
paranoid schizophrenic,
he would emulate symptomssuch as pretending he's
hearing persecutory voices.
And he would pretend thathe was having ideation,
that he was thinking thatthe world was talking
to him through the
TV or that people
were out to get him
at every corner,
every junction in his life.
And perhaps the doctors
and psychiatrists
were plotting against him.
When he realizesthat the police are
not looking for him,
Onoprienko feigns
recovery and is discharged.
But he has no money and no job.
He is forced to rely on thehospitality of his family.
It's a humiliating situationfor the arrogant Onoprienko.
He had great financial
expectations and
needs, and so decided
to return to a life of crime.
Onoprienko
steals a shotgun
from a friend of his brother.
He cuts it down to a sizethat can easily be concealed.
The Terminator,
now acting alone,
is armed and ready to
begin a killing spree
of unprecedented savagery.
Ukraine, 24th of December, 1995.
Anatoly Onoprienko is aboutto earn the title, Terminator.
Outside the village
of Garmarnia,
within half a mile ofhis old forestry college,
the killer waits for nightfall.
Onoprienko decided
that cars were
fairly limited when
it came to loot
and began to be more ambitious.
Onoprienko is
about to begin a killing
spree of unimaginable savagery.
He's set to exterminate
a whole family.
The family of his formerteacher, Evgenia Zaichenko.
Heremembered that the teachers
had given him bad marks.
He decided to come back hereand take revenge on them.
Evgenia's
son, Vadim Zaichenko,
is downstairs with his wifeand three-year-old son, Boris.
Onoprienko shoots them dead.
He then find
three-month-old Oleg.
He smothers the helpless
baby with a pillow.
Then he steals what
little the family
and sets the house on fire.
The house was open.
My husband had run inside.
He thought there
might be someone alive
and started looking
for the young baby
who was three months old.
The baby was still
under the pillow.
Onoprienko claimed that killing
a stranger's child is more
difficult than killing
your own, because in
committing such an act,
you kill a completely
innocent being
about whom you know nothing.
It's very hard to kill
someone else's innocent child.
I consider these
murders to be a very
hard psychological experiment.
And I was specially
chosen for this role.
I feel like I was
accomplishing a very
serious experimental task.
While he beginsan unprecedented wave
of slaughter, Onoprienko
is living a double life.
In December 1995, he moves inwith a 34-year-old divorcee,
Ana and her two children
in the town of Yavoriv.
He pretends to be a
traveling businessman.
Onoprienko was
fairly charming.
Most people who have
that psychopathic lack
of emotional baggage
also can charm others
quite easily if they try.
He would make a bath
for her and pour a
bottle of champagne
on her head instead of shampoo.
He also put red
roses in the water.
He gave her
presents he took from
his victim's, rings,
earrings, gold chains.
He was a gentleman.
Onoprienko would
have definitely
been putting on an act.
He was doing this
instrumentally.
He wanted to stay
with this lady.
He wanted to use her as thebackdrop for his other life,
to be able to go out andhave a dual existence was
no difficulty for
him whatsoever.
From his base
in Ana's apartment,
Onoprienko is set to mercilesslycontinue his rampage.
Most serial
killers kind of stick
to the same modus operandi.
They don't particularlywant to change what works.
But the slaughterof his old teacher's family
establishes a new way ofworking for the Terminator.
This idea of actually
approaching a house
began a new template, whichwould lead to mass killings.
He would attack
houses in secluded
areas, knowing
no one would help his victims.
He saw it was effective
he wasn't concerned.
He would knock
on someone's door at night, orwould shoot out the windows.
Then he would enter the houseand shoot everyone dead.
Everyone, including children.
Covering
hundreds of miles
by train in the guise
of a traveling salesman,
the Terminator targets
households from one end
of the country to the other.
In a series of
brutal mass killings,
he slaughters 30 people
in just two months.
Chillingly, when
plotted on a map,
the Terminator's
murders form a cross
over the territory of Ukraine.
It will become known
as Onoprienko's Cross.
His modus operandi
meant that he didn't takeany risks for a long time.
He would cover his
tracks after attacks
by burning down the
houses and picking
up cartridges from his gun.
The
police are baffled.
The killings span the country.
Individual forces fail
to link them together.
Manypolice officers didn't believe
that one person
could kill so many
people across such a wide area.
On the 27th
of February, 1996,
Onoprienko returns
to the vicinity
of his orphanage in college.
He brutally slaughters
the Bondarchuk
family in their home in Malyn.
Neighbor, Vladimyr Dmitrenko,remembers the tragic aftermath.
It was an awful day.
The whole garden was
covered in blood.
He hacked Sergey's head
off with a hatchet.
His wife was laying
on the front doorstep.
He shot her in the chest.
He killed their littlechildren with a screwdriver
and cut their throats.
The headprosecution office of Ukraine
sends senior chief investigator
Ivandov Bishop to Malyn.
His mission is to examinethe multiple mass killings
and determine if
they are connected.
Westudied all the cases we had
and came to the conclusion
that they needed
to be amalgamated immediately.
Investigators
initially suspected
that a gang may be involved.
But looking at footprintsfound at the crime scenes,
they realize this
was not the case.
All the footprints
belonged to one person.
So we came to the
conclusion that this
was the work of one man.
People were scared to
go to sleep at night.
They demanded protection
from the army.
Across the country,households are terrified.
No family feels safe.
2,000 police are
put on the case.
The army is called out and3,000 troops patrol the streets.
Onoprienko
was watching them throughbinoculars and laughing.
He was just one kilometer away.
He thought they wouldnever catch him that way.
But Onoprienko's
next act of violence
is set to be his last.
He slaughters the
Novaset family in Busk
but fails to burn the evidence.
Fueled by his own
success, the Terminator
is becoming careless.
He leaves shotgun cartridgeslying where they fall.
And he steals a tape machinethat will soon become
key evidence for the police.
Anatoly Onoprienko,
the Terminator,
has killed 52 people overthe last seven years.
He's living a double
life with divorcee
Ana and her two children,in the town of Yavoriv.
When he was
living at his
girlfriend's place,
he barely left the house.
There were armored vehiclesdeployed in the villages
across the Laviv region.
The militia and thepeople were on the alert.
Onoprienko's first bigmistake was to actually escalate
his killing spree to the pointwhere police attention, even
military attention,
would be on him
and make it more
and more difficult
for him to move
around anonymously.
Onoprienko makesanother foolish error,
leaving evidence
behind at the scene
of his final attack in Busk.
Onoprienko's second
rather large mistake
was to start to
become overconfident
and becoming a little bitcareless about evidence
he leaves at crime scenes, whichwould include the cartridges
from the gun that he
was using, which could,
of course, be tied to him.
By the
end of March 1996,
the net is closing
in on the Terminator.
Weknew it was a 12 gauge shotgun
because we had the cartridges.
We got forensic test resultson the cartridges that had been
found at the crime scene Busk.
Police
investigate 72,000
gun owners across Ukraine.
They compare spentcartridges from their guns
with the spent
cartridges Onoprienko
carelessly left behind.
We foundthe person from whom a gun was
stolen, I identified
the same cartridges,
and learned that the stolengun was the murder's weapon.
So we only had to findout who stole the shotgun.
But for the centralauthorities can track him down,
local police in
Yavoriv get a tip off.
Neighbors reported astranger acting suspiciously.
In small villages,
people know each other.
And a stranger hiding in thehouse attracts attention.
Villagers got suspicious.
They hadinformation about his partner.
They knew that she wasseeing someone who went away
often and always
came back with stuff,
that he gave her a lot of goldrings and a stolen fur coat.
On Easter
Sunday 1996, police
go to Onoprienko's apartment.
His partner and her
children are out.
Onoprienko answers the doorwithout checking who is there.
It's a lucky break
for the police.
Hesaid, if I'd checked behind
the door and saw
police, I would have
used all my bullets on them.
They would not get me so easily.
But I didn't check, as Ithought my partner was back.
One of the
officers notices a tape
machine, similar
to the one stolen
from the crime scene in Busk.
He checks the serial number.
It's a match.
The terrible truth dawns.
Onoprienko is the Terminator.
They arrest him and take
him in for questioning.
On searching the
apartment, police find
the shot gun and cartridges.
Whenwe got the shotgun cartridges,
we compared them withthe cartridges from Busk.
And it became clear
that the cartridges
were shot from that same gun.
Onoprienko's
arrogance and greed have
caught up with him at last.
He confesses to a
total of 52 murders.
Defense lawyer Ruslan
Moshkovsky interviews
Onoprienko, probing for anymitigating circumstances.
I asked him
why he killed so many people.
He told me that he
wanted to earn money.
I asked him why he
killed poor people.
He told me that he
started with poor people
in order to learn how
to kill wealthy people.
As defense
attorney, Moshkovsky
is duty-bound to look afterOnoprienko's interests.
I told him that we had
to find an explanation as to whyhe had committed those murders.
I wanted people to believethat he had mental problems.
To escape
the death penalty,
Onoprienko begins todemonstrate signs of madness.
Theentire strategy of defense
Onoprienko used was to denythat he was responsible for his
actions, that it was
an external force
or voice that told him to kill.
Onoprienko's
trial begins
on the 23rd of November, 1998.
Hundreds of people turn upto see justice being done.
The Terminator has becomesuch a hated figure
that authorities must
take extra precautions
to prevent an attack on him.
A panel of five judges
would decide his fate.
Oleg Guzovsky was one of them.
In the courtroom,
he was calm and confident.
He might sit there and thendraw a cross on his forehead
with his finger.
There were moments
like that, oddities
from his side of the courtroom.
I was killing
because it was the formulaof life I had to follow.
I don't think about them now.
They are nothing.
They are dust to me.
The trial
ran for four months.
Overall, we
came to the conclusion
that killing
people gave him satisfaction.
Of course, there was
some mental disorder,
but not that strong that hecouldn't control his actions.
He was found to be
sane and could be held
responsible for his crimes.
In March
1999, Onoprienko
is sentenced to death
by a single shot
to the back of the head.
But before the sentence
can be carried out,
a moratorium on
the death penalty
was put in place in Ukraine.
Onoprienko's sentence waschanged to life imprisonment.
Maria Tsiptsyurainterviewed to him in 2012.
He says52 murders is not two murders,
and it's terrifying.
I am a phenomenon and I needto be studied by professionals.
He spoke in the
third person like it
was not him doing the killing.
After
a decade in jail,
the arrogant Onoprienko relishedthe attention of the press.
He continued to suggestthat he was driven to kill.
He explains
his murders as somethingthat voices told him to do.
It was hard for him.
And he didn't want
to hear these voices.
But he could not disobey them.
When he heard them, he knewhe needed to take a weapon
and kill.
He admits, if he
were not in prison
and if he heard those voicesagain, he would go and kill.
I'm Satan.
I'm Satan in human form.
On the
27th of August, 2013,
Anatoly Onoprienko,
the Terminator,
died in prison of
a heart attack.
In the Holy Bible it is
written that we should forgive.
I don't know whether toforgive or not to forgive.
I can't bring my children back.
As for him, let God judge.