Here’s the thing that still keeps me up at night. Fifty-two people. Gone. In ninety-three days. Entire families were shot while they slept. Kids executed right next to their parents. And the man who did it looked the police in the eye and calmly said, “If I get out, I’ll kill three hundred and sixty more. Give or take ten.”
That man was Anatoly Onoprienko. They called him The Terminator. And twenty-eight years later, people in rural Ukraine still leave their porch lights on because of him.
A Childhood Nobody Fixed
Anatoly Onoprienko was born in 1959 in a tiny village in Zhytomyr Oblast. His mom died when he was four. His dad, a war hero, couldn’t handle two little boys alone. So he dumped them in an orphanage.
Cold dormitories. Hundreds of kids nobody wanted. Beat for bed-wetting. Beat for crying. Beat for breathing too loudly. Onoprienko wet the bed until he was twelve. He stole food to survive. He learned early that nobody was coming to save him.
By his teens, he was drifting. Sailor training. Forestry school. Army. Everywhere he went, people wrote the same thing: “psychologically unstable.”
They discharged him.
They never followed up.
They just let him disappear into the collapsing Soviet Union.
December 1995: The Voices Start Talking
Onoprienko always said the voices began after a botched burglary in 1994. He killed a family who caught him. For the first time, he felt “power.” After that, the voices never shut up.
The real spree started on 26 December 1995. He walked into a house in Gamarnya village. Shot the father, the mother, and the two little boys. Burned the place down. Nine days later, he did it again. Then again and again.
Ninety-Three Days of Pure Terror
From December to March, Anatoly Onoprienko murdered 52 people across six regions.
He picked isolated houses. He struck after midnight. He killed everyone inside. No survivors. No witnesses.
Worst single night: 8 January 1996, Bratkovychi village. He shot the Zaichenko family while they slept. Then he shot a man who knocked on the door. Then the neighbour came to check the noise. Nine dead before breakfast.
He used a sawed-off shotgun and a .22 pistol. He took jewellery and watches as souvenirs. He told police later: “I was cleansing the world of unworthy people.”
How They Finally Caught The Terminator
By March 1996, the whole country was on lockdown. Villages formed night watches. People slept with axes under their pillows.
A 10,000-man task force hunted him. Still, he killed.
The break came by accident. On 1 April 1996, police raided his cousin’s flat in Zhytomyr looking for stolen goods. They found a pistol. Ballistics matched the murders. Onoprienko was wearing a victim’s jacket.
He confessed immediately. He led them to 42 graves. He described every murder like he was reading a grocery list.
Trial, Life Sentence & the Threat That Never Died
Zhytomyr court.
Onoprienko smiled for the cameras.
He told the judge he was “a robot programmed to kill.”
Guilty on all 52 counts.
Death sentence.
Then, Ukraine wanted to join the Council of Europe.
They banned the death penalty.
His sentence became life.
He died in prison in 2013 from heart failure. But not before giving one last interview: “If I get out, the killing will be much worse. Especially for people who insulted me. I always said 360. Give or take ten.”
Even dead, he still scares people.
