Two 19‑year-olds, Viktor Sayenko (Віктор Саєнко; Виктор Саенко), born 1 March 1988, and Igor Suprunyuk (Ігор Супрунюк; Игорь Супрунюк), born 20 April 1988, were arrested and charged with 21 murders.
A third conspirator, Alexander Hanzha (Олександр Ганжа; Александр Ганжа), born February 1988, was charged with two armed robberies that took place before the murder spree.
2007
The Dnepropetrovsk maniacs (Дніпропетровські маніяки; Днепропетровские маньяки) are Ukrainian serial killers responsible for a string of murders in Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipropetrovsk) in June and July 2007.
The case gained additional notoriety because the killers made video recordings of some of the murders, with one of the videos leaking to the Internet.
The first two murders occurred late on 25 June 2007.
The first victim was a 33-year-old woman, Yekaterina Ilchenko, who was walking home after having tea at her friend's apartment.
According to Sayenko's confession, he and Suprunyuk were "out for a walk".
Suprunyuk had a hammer.
As Ilchenko walked past, Suprunyuk "spun around" and hit her in the side of the head.
Ilchenko's body was found by her mother at 5:00a.m. Within an hour of the first murder, the two men attacked their next victim, Roman Tatarevich, as he slept on a bench near the first murder scene.
Tatarevich's head was smashed with blunt objects numerous times, rendering him unrecognizable.
The bench was located across the street from the local public prosecutor's office.
On 1 July, two more victims, Yevgenia Grischenko and Nikolai Serchuk, were found murdered in the nearby town of Novomoskovsk.
On the night of 6 July, three more people were murdered in Dnipro.
The first was Egor Nechvoloda, a recently discharged army recruit, who was bludgeoned while walking home from a nightclub.
His mother found the body in the morning by their apartment building on Bohdan-Khmelnytsky Street.
Yelena 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 toward them, Suprunyuk struck her with the hammer he had been hiding under his shirt and hit her several more times after she fell.
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 with a disabled husband.
The next day, 7 July, two 14‑year-old boys from Pidhorodne, a nearby town, were attacked as they went fishing.
One of the two friends, Andrei Sidyuk, was killed, but the other, Vadim Lyakhov, managed to escape after hiding in the woods.
Later, on 12 July, 48‑year-old Sergei Yatzenko, disabled by a recent bout with cancer, went missing while riding his Dnepr motorcycle.
His battered body was found four days later, with signs of a savage attack visible even after four days in the summer heat.
Just days later, on 14 July 45‑year-old Natalia Mamarchuk was riding her scooter in the nearby village of Diyovka.
As she was passing through a wooded area, two men approached her and knocked her down.
They then bludgeoned her to death with a hammer or pipe and drove off on her scooter.
Local witnesses gave chase but lost sight of the attackers.
Thirteen more murders followed, often with multiple bodies found on the same day.
In addition to the earlier sprees, two victims were found each day from 14 July to 16.
Victims were seemingly selected at random.
Many were vulnerable to attack, including children, the elderly, vagrants, or people under the influence of alcohol.
Most victims were killed using blunt objects, including hammers and steel construction bars.
Blows were often directed at their faces, leaving them unrecognizable.
Many victims were also mutilated and tortured; some victims had their eyes gouged out while they were still alive.
One pregnant woman had her fetus cut from her womb.
2009
On 11 February 2009, all three defendants were found guilty.
Sayenko and Suprunyuk were sentenced to life imprisonment, while Hanzha received nine years in prison.
The lawyers for Sayenko and Suprunyuk launched an appeal, which was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Ukraine in November 2009.
