Episode 656: The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs Part I - Serial Spree

There's no place to escape to. This is the last hot ass. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. Who's that? Alright, well, it's time for you all to come down with me. Into my world. Oh, whatever. Yeah. we've had too much nuance around here we've had too much political awareness too much growth yeah yeah yeah too much context now it's time to take it all the way back we're gonna regress that's right welcome it's the year 2010 no cares at all no cares Well, I had a hernia. Yes. I had a pretty bad breakup that year. That was rough, but besides that, it was utterly perfect. Ended up in an apartment with two holes in the ceiling and black mold. Didn't even have a kitchen. That was a really rough year. But the porthole of the internet. Oh, it did look out in a darker world. Yes, indeed it did. And that's why we need to set the tone today. Rob with my true crime music. Sometimes boys will be boys But some other times Boys, they be maniacs Hell yeah, man Now the term maniac is thrown around pretty loosely these days When we think of a maniac over here in the United States of America It brings up the image of a person driving about 5 miles an hour faster than us On the freeway Fucking maniacs or a loud man on a commercial absolutely gutting prices on mattresses so carelessly that you as a customer get worried about their bottom line. But I'm crazy! Crazy Eddie. But it seems over old ye old Eastern Europe, it means something else entirely. Maniacs aren't funny in Eastern Europe. Mm-mm. They murdered children with construction tools. No humor here. So are these the screwy screwdriver boys? Yeah, baby! Welcome to the last podcast on the left. Or were you going to take it? Welcome to the last podcast on the left. My name is Henry Zebrowski. I'm your narrator here today, and I'm sitting here with the comedic mastermind, Marcus Parks. Yeah, that's what I'm known for. My comedy. I'm excited because I've teed up Marcus to play the characters. Sure, yes, yes. I've been working on my Russian accent or Ukrainian accent, as it were. They're pretty much, they're very, very similar. Very similar, cannot hear that. I mean, it's like the difference between like a Georgia accent and a North Carolina accent. We could maybe tell the difference, but. Not over there. I would imagine a Ukrainian would not. I'm Ukrainian. I don't even know what we sound like. You sound like this. Oh! From what I can tell. I'm hungry, I'm hungry. Where's my dinner? Now, this is my attempt. I completely wrote this script. This is my attempt for Henry Zebrowski to tell the terrible tale of the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs. Ooh, very nice. I've been practicing it in the bathroom. Oh, yeah. Otherwise known as the Hammer Maniacs for our less Ukrainian incline. Hold on. These aren't the wretched wrenches? No, no, no. That's the softball team. The vicious vices? No, again, that's the ladies' soccer team. Now, named for the location of the majority of the crimes, Dnepropetrovsk is an industrial city in central Ukraine. In 2016, it was renamed Dnepro, which is great for me. Oh, Dnepro. Yes, because it was uncommunisted. Yeah. Because it was originally named after a Russian soldier. So then they did that. They took all, I guess, all the Soviet stuff out. Yeah, it happens a lot in this area of the world. Stalingrad, Leningrad, et cetera, et cetera. Make it short. Make it snappy. Now, 2007, two teenage bullets, sometimes with the help of a third, go on a month-long bludgeoning spree ending in 21 victims. What brought this case to international attention was due to the boys' propensity to pictorialize their crimes on a cell phone. The videos of some such crimes were shown in court and not intended for release. But one piece of evidentiary video would get leaked to the internet. No one knows how. The uploader named it Three Guys, One Hammer. And it depicted two thick-browed Eastern European youths giggling as they beat a man to death with a hammer and pulled his eyeballs out with a screwdriver. Oh, they did use a screwdriver. Yeah, they did. Yeah, no, they got one in there. Yeah, and it's more popping them out than pulling them. Well, I guess it... I'm the author here. Philip said it or flathead? I think it's whatever they could get. People shared it all over the world. fueled by the same morbid curiosity that birthed it. These maniacs would eventually get caught due to their own stupidity. Still, somehow this one video would go on to inspire a generation of edgelords on the internet, generate several copycat crimes, and eventually be used by Vladimir Putin to validate his current invasion of Ukraine. Yeah, it is. I mean, this case is surprisingly central to current world events. It's really weird. Once I pop the hood on it, I'm going to explain a bit of it. It's a bit complicated, but it's one of those where this was where when we see the term now as Americans that are maybe not up on the news, this idea of Putin saying we're going to denazify Ukraine. This is one of the examples he used as some of the run amok youth that just destroy the cities of Kiev and other such places. I thought we weren't going to learn anything today. Oh, you fucker! I slide it right in there. He caught the history bug many years ago. He cannot get rid of it. Actually, what's nice, though, is I am on a series of pills that keep Natalie from getting it. Now, this story has fascinated me since I first saw stills from Three Guys, One Hammer as a more evil young man. I'm certain I'm not the only one of you who saw as much of this video as I could handle as a young, morbid person. How many of us dared each other to look at an image that will forever be emblazoned in your mind? We didn't need to go to war. Not in 2009. All I needed was my PC to see a man's hand turned to SpaghettiOs by an industrial shredder. What is the image that comes up first for you guys? For me, it is a Rotten.com image. Do you remember the one where they cut the snake open and there was the dead guy inside? Yes. That's the one for me. Fascinating. That and also a guy getting his testicles and penis shoved into his mouth. Hey, something's got to be done with them. Eddie? Well, I always liked the, I liked a lot of Faces of Death and Traces of Death when I was a kid. And I remember Faces, I don't like- Do you remember that HGTV Spaces of Death? Amazing show. I liked, I think there was the one where the guy parachuted into the alligator pit. That one was always cool. That's fun. And then there was... Y'all wrote a sketch based on that, didn't you? Yes. I have poor, sweet, gay Michael. Yeah, now I remember. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. I forgot. And what was the other one that I always did? Oh, there's like the guys jumping off the building. There was the people cutting open the guys. There was a lot of it that just haunted me. And then I stopped it all. Like, I didn't even enjoy Rotten.com because I was already out at a very young age because I had killed my eyes. Honestly, I wonder why more people weren't like us. Because I know I went deep into this. I ended up seeing three guys, one hammer later on in life. I didn't even know this existed. This was one of those when we were hyper online at a certain time period from 2008 when this came out to 2010. When the formations of what made last podcast on the left jumped inside of our brains. This is a patch on that quilt. Very big one. And it also says a lot about the internet at the time. because we don't know who put the video online. We do not know. But the name definitely tells you that it was someone who was chronically online because it's a reference to Two Girls, One Cup. Actually, Marcus, that's where you're wrong because the video was actually entitled Hot Bitches. I learned that. It became Two Girls, One Cup, though. Packaging. It's called marketing. Yes, it became everyone. Two Girls, One Cup was called Hot Bitches? Hungry Bitches. Hungry Bitches. Yeah, it was because they were hungry. For poo-poo. Yeah, but it was yogurt, as we all know. And bitches are female dogs, and dogs eat shit. Thank you, Eddie. Good work. Except for my lovely girls. I had to stop my dogs, both of my dogs, from eating raccoon shit yesterday. Be careful. They got worms in it. Yeah, but have you tried it? Depends if it's local. Now, it's a natural childlike curiosity. Yeah, I stopped them. To look at gore. Right? It used to be flipping over rocks to see weird bugs or checking out a rotting animal skeleton. Yeah. That would eventually evolve to kids collectively looking at a weird porn magazine and maybe devolving into some kind of Okie Cookie-like situation. I feel like that was more our father's generation, the Okie Cookie. I feel like millennials put that to bed. I think that it happened once, one time, by the time we were all 11, and everyone was like, whoa. Whoa, this is some porkies. Yeah, we used muffins. Ew. Because none of you were, I guess that was before celiac disease was a thing. Yeah, yeah. Cinnamon rolls also catch everything. The little crevices. Exposure to extreme imagery increased exponentially once the millennial babies started surfing the world wide web in the family computer room. By the time our generation hit the age to start getting dark with friends, we were watching Tub Girl, 2001. Two Girls, One Cop, also known as Hungry Bitches, 2007. Torture videos of soldiers in Abu Ghraib. Behatious videos from Al-Qaeda. Love them. Piles of cartel leaders' heads. Yep. All the fun stuff. And eventually the Internet would accept and crown the new kings of gore, the hammer maniacs. Now, are you sure there were the leaders heads and not the guys underneath them? I feel like there was a bunch of heads. Those couldn't all be leaders. Once we get into the finer details of that, what are we you know, what are we doing? What are we legislating? But my main question in this series is why do some kids get repelled? And why do some kids say very few kids? but why do some of them say what if we made some? I think it really does go back to It's a rhetorical question! It's a goddamn rhetorical question we can answer it at the end. Alright, alright. You finally asked a question then put a break in the script. Rhetorical question! Yeah! I assumed that you wanted me to answer that question. Just tee up. We were just getting in there. Now one of our main sources for today's answer. I had an answer! We'll get to save it. You save it in your back pocket. One of our main sources for today's episode is Psycho.com, Serial Killers on the Internet by Eileen Ormsby, which is a pretty thick 60 page section on the crime. That's the most we could find in the English language. Yeah. Rachel Burke, who is our amazing one of our fucking amazing new researchers. She's fucking crushing it. A research team. They did as much as they could looking at articles from the Ukrainian press coverage. Most of the direct information is inconsistent due to the inconsistent reporting around it. The Ukrainian police were secretive and some of the reporting wildly sensational. We also used the 2010 Chilean documentary Los Manayocos del Martillo. And our incredible researcher, Rachel, she filled my brains with context using a world of academic papers that I could not understand on my own. But she does. And that Chilean documentary, yeah, that one is in no way sensationalized. Oh my God. You know what? The thing about that one is that it's all in on the concept that they were hired by Ukrainian mafias to make snuff films. Yeah. Which isn't true. Those kids could meet a deadline if they wanted to. And what do we know about video editors? They meet deadlines. They have to. They have to. But I don't think it was edited. It was all one take, right? No, it was edited down for the internet. True. Someone took the original 30 minutes of it and edited it into eight. Really? They're like, there's too much here. You can cut this, lose that. Too much context. Yeah. Too much context. A lot of standing around. There literally is like 20. We'll get to this next episode, but there's like 20 minutes of them just hanging out. Oh, okay. The Tulane documentary was interesting. I watched most of that. But it was like, the funny part was, it was just, they would only like translate every other sentence. Sometimes it's like one sentence over the course of like four minutes. So you're just like, I'll guess what they're saying. But I'll say, you know, I was like happy with myself because there was some, I was like, I can understand a lot. I can understand some of the Spanish. Like, because they're saying like, maniacos. And Martí, they're like saying like, muerte. They're saying a bunch of stuff I understand. Yeah, I get those. Yeah, no, I know enough Spanish to understand what someone is talking about, but to not know exactly in what context they are speaking about it. Yes. They might have been saying the maniacos were awesome. I don't know. Well, I know that they're not saying that because they're frowning. It's a lot of low tones. It's a lot of like boom. Like, you know, but they really like this idea that what comes up again and again in this case, which I think is not too dissimilar from other serial murders, but I think it's very specifically a strong part of this case is people wanting there to be a reason. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There has to be something. There has to be a reason why, when I honestly think there doesn't. Yeah. Now, there are kids, right? Oh, yeah. Let's get right into it. Well, I mean, college kids, you know. Would you consider them tiny maniacs? No. Tiny maniacs, three foot and under. Tiny maniacs have a heart of gold. They just look rough. A tiny maniac, you don't want them to watch your dog, but you'd pet them like one. They're not like kid kids. They're, you know, they're, I guess, they're what, 19, 20? Let me get into it. All right. Let's meet our maniacs. Well, it's not so easy, is it? No, I do this fucking shit. You're answering before I get there. You're getting ahead of us. Get to it. Igor Suprunyuk was unfortunately born on April 20th, 1988. Fuck yeah, man. A fact that he would grow to be proud of and exploit for his own personal lore build. Teachers from his early years described him as a young Stephen Miller. The boy had a difficult character. Oh, yeah, actually, Marcus, you take this, please. The boy had a difficult character I had the feeling that he was constantly Defending himself Although no one had offended him He was very complex But tried not to show it I noticed his eyes They were blue and cold Like icicles They made my blood run cold A ten year old Igor and those looking to explain his behavior often blamed his many complexes on his inability to show up to class or engage in school society at all. But those around him noted his Svengali-like hold on a couple of fellow losers. One being his right-hand man in the Dnipro Hammer murders, Viktor Sayenko, born two months before Igor, another petulant offspring of a doting mother and a well-connected father. Viktor would grow obsessed with Igor, following him around like a puppy dog. These two boys shared a similar history. Both grew up in a world separate from many of their countrymen and didn't have to wait online for meager rations to pay for groceries with coupons issued by the state. Yeah, I mean, upper middle class by American standards, upper middle class to upper class, but definitely of the administrative class that was kind of a holdover from the Soviet Union, which, you know, in the Soviet Union, the administration holds all the power. And they got one. They were just like one or two steps above everybody else. And in that fact, they lived in an entirely different fucking world. They were born into a world just shy of a decade since Ukraine voted for independence and the fledgling state struggled to form its own identity. Now, I'm not going to do a full Marcus-style context tsunami to all of you, all right? Because you could just end up taking this all the way back to the hussars if you fucking want, right? And I know smash, smash, glub, glub, face-gun stuff way more than I understand geopolitics. But here's my little fucking sum up, okay? All right. If you play Risk and you plan to win, right? And you know some choke points are super crucial, right? But Jackie, she'd hold up in Australia because she was a fucking coward. She was afraid of a fight, right? Like kangaroos. Yes. Yeah, just like them. Fuck fake deer. But true home despots know that Ukraine is an extremely important base for closing off Europe, gaining entry into the Middle East. And this might actually be true, not even just for a rock-solid risk strategy. Ukraine has been fought over like a laundry bag of K-pop underwear since the beginning. And more often than not, it's people identify with surrounding nations like Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, depending on where your family is from. And it's also it's also geological as well. Like if you're more on the western side of the Ukraine, you identify more with Poland. And if you're on the eastern side, then you identify more with Russia. But even though the people in Ukraine, less of them identify as Russian than what the Russians want to make you think. Well, just the idea or and then also conversely works that there's so many people that are connected familially into Russia that when they come to invade them, they're like, I'm attacking my cousin. And Russia's and Ukraine is also a fucking massive country. Here's Rachel Burke's amazing breakdown that actually maybe makes sense. Many Ukrainian nationalists view Russia as a historical oppressor due to Russian domination in the 17th and 18th centuries and the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933, which killed millions of Ukrainians. Other Ukrainians feel close ties to Russia because of shared history, language, culture, and widespread intermarriage. Despite these differences, support for independence was broad. In the December 1991 referendum, more than 90% of voters supported independence, including majorities in every region. The Ukrainian state emerged quickly in 1991. Through agreements between nationalists and the existing political elite, nationalists agreed not to overthrow the government in exchange for a break from the Soviet Union, and because independence did not come through revolution or removal of the ruling elite, many Soviet-era power structures remained. This led to an ongoing political conflict, weak party systems, and policy stagnation. I didn't write it. That was her. Thank you, Rachel. Yeah, it does make a lot of sense, though. It does. Now, Bullsdown, corruption ruled the land during this time of chaos. And the closer you were to the governing body, the benefits were fucking great. Yeah, it's really not that complicated. No. It's the way it works in most countries around the world. just the way humanity works. The more connected you are, the more likely you are to avoid consequences and the harder it's going to be to actually bring you to justice. What Epstein told me and taught me is that it's really good to keep up with friends. What Epstein told you? I didn't realize you guys had a communication. I built an AI chat bot so I could talk to him after he died. I'm using Grok. I'm using Grok. I have my Epstein bot I talk to him every day and he encourages me to do all sorts of fucked up stuff I love him Does he do voice or does he write like little email missives to you like at the level of a 10th grader yeah it all misspelled but he does a great gilbert according to our american sources igor's father was a personal pilot to leonid kuchma in office 1995 to 2005 Ukrainian second president. I know that. Yeah, you know. His time in office, it was shadowed by persistent allegations of government corruption and systemic censorship of the press. Says you. And my paper. And my papers. His presidency is most infamously linked to the 2000 murder of a journalist, Georgi Gungadza, who was an investigative journalist and founder of the online outlet Ukranska Pravda, known for exposing corruption among senior officials. Viktor's father worked as a communications liaison for the regional prosecutor's office, a powerful local arm of the prosecutor's general's office of Ukraine. This will definitely come into play later on in the aftermath of the crimes. All of this is to say, Igor and Viktor grew up special. And boy, were they upset about it. They were. There was a third maniac, but he was definitely the Zeppo of the group. Underrated. Yeah, I know. But that's what I'd say, too. Same, same. Alexander Hansa. He would be tried alongside the other two, but he did not participate in the actual murder of any humans in this case. He was different than the other boys. He grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and Soviet style block housing infested with rats the size of dogs. They're small dogs. I mean, they're cute. Sounds cute. They're like palms. That's cute. Fleas the size of rats and rats the size of cats. That's the size of dogs and dogs the size of man. Dogs the size of man. He was also raised by a poor single mother. Nice. We'll also see how this plays out in the aftermath of these crimes. Victor Sienko, Igor Suprunyuk, and Alexander Hansa met in elementary school and became close friends who did everything together. Some sources indicate they bonded together because they were afraid of bullies. No. Now, we see this narrative a lot when baby losers cause a lot of damage. Maybe because we want to believe there's a reason to kill 21 people with hammers and screwdrivers. Yeah, just like we wanted to believe there was a reason why two shitheads could kill 12 kids in Colorado. These are very much an entire Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, like, couldn't be closer. Oh, man, it's almost a one-to-one. They're just the Ukrainian version. Basically. I don't think Dylan and Eric could have done this. Well, I don't think they had the fortitude to go searching for fucking weeks. Episode two, we'd find out it's because these boys were desperate to get their hands on a gun and they just couldn't. Yeah, I think Eric Harris could have Dylan Klebold. I don't think would have got I don't think Dylan Klebold would have gotten his hands as dirty. But Eric Harris definitely could have. But he had it on him. This one's definitely they're both motivated. Victor likes to beg off later on saying that, oh, I was just in it for like the thrills and the money or basically just the money, all the practical side of it. But if you watch the videos or if you look at the pictures, you could see that's not the case. He's having too much fun. He's really enjoying himself. I mean, there are definitely stories in the past we cover like this where, you know, you got two people that are committing a bunch of murders. And, you know, one person certainly never would have committed like Caroline Fugit never would have committed a murder if she hadn't hooked up with Charles Starkweather. and Dylan Cle... I do not think that Dylan Klebold would have committed any murders had he not hooked up with Eric Harris. No, he probably, hopefully, would have just committed suicide. Yeah, but Charles Starkweather definitely would have murdered people without Caroline Fugate and Eric Harris definitely would have murdered someone without Dylan Klebold. But I would say it did not take much to have Igor push Victor into his world. No. It did not take much. Victor would have been someone who would have accidentally killed someone someday just being reckless. Also, I just think that they were a little leave of fuckers because what makes more sense to me is that a neighbor described Igor as he always had success with the girls. He was handsome and tall. As if Igor and Victor couldn't fit the borscht-flavored Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold profile more. The way our little evil fuckers put it, they were afraid of the bigger boys. They never got personally attacked by any of them. They just assumed that they would have problems with bigger, more aggressive boy men. I mean, Ukraine's full of them, too. Oh, yeah! And if you're a runt in the Ukraine, that's hard, right? You're a small one. I'm small. As far as Ukrainians go, I'm weak. Yes. Yeah. And you were the largest baby born in the state of Florida at the time. Yeah, but just Florida, though, not Ukraine. Over there, they're like 40, 50 pounds. Yeah, yeah. They split. A woman has to actually actively be split open to the sternum to give birth in Ukraine. Yeah. And then they slop it all together with just some kind of white cheese. Yeah, all Ukrainian babies have to be dehorned. I actually, I had to cut all this out of the context just because I just figured that this would lead to further discussion. I didn't want to do that to you. So it's like Igor then, he, I believe in turn, he became a bully to those smaller than him and taught Victor and Alexander to follow suit. In the fifth grade, the boys had their first known encounter with the law when they were caught throwing rocks at moving trains. Now, this sounds like innocent, childlike shenanigans. Sure. But I do think it's important to remember, and I don't mean to be the fun police here, is that all it takes is one rock through a moving train window to kill a person. What are the chances, though? It happens a lot. It happens a lot. As a matter of fact, in 2017, five teenagers in Ohio and Michigan played a game that they called overpassing, where they tossed large rocks from a highway overpass onto the road below. Hitting a vehicle was called a dinger. And in one week, they scored dingers that resulted in the death of two people. Their parents also tried to call it shenanigans, but the justice system did not see it that way. Put to death? Honestly, they were crushed. Old school. Salem style. There's a world of difference of, like, throwing rocks at a train and dropping rocks from an overpass. From the Hammer Maniacs? Yeah. Do you think that the difference is the fact for me, maybe, is that they were the Hammer Maniacs? And that maybe it wasn't that innocent when it's the hammer maniacs? Might not have been. That's what I'm saying, is that when it's other children. Yeah, because I've thrown plenty of rocks at trains when I was a kid. But in America, we don't really have that many passenger trains. You're just throwing rocks at industrial waste. See, that's the thing. You're throwing at just, that's what I'm fine with. If it's just piles of just steel or whatever going through, they're throwing them at passenger trains. Yeah, okay. Try to throw the fucking rocks at the Brightline, dude. Brightline will kill your ass. Yeah, dude, they'll come for the train is fucking angry there, man. And jumps the track. Back to the Ukraine. When the police knocked on Victor's door and demanded compensation for the damage to the damaged train, which I guess is something they could do in Ukraine, the Sankos, they just paid up and questioned their son about the incident. Their innocent son told them, Igor made me do it. You do it. All right. Wait, I'm sorry. I mean. You got to do the characters. I'm sorry. Ask me to do it. I'm sorry. Does it himself. Their innocent son told them, Igor made me do it and they said no more Igor Victor no more but I love it Victor I love Igor I am Victor I love Igor you're not a little maniac you're a little maniac I love you let us ask tub girl what she thinks that was my tub girl impression I don't know what tub girl is look it up Nah, we got tired. No, look it up. Do it right now. Why not? This is great for the episode. Marcus is doing it. Look up Tub Girl. You've never seen Tub Girl? I don't know who Tub Girl is. Look it up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you've got these. A diarrhea girl. That's different. Okay. Tub Girl. Okay, I didn't know she was called Tub Girl. That's her official title. Yeah, yeah. Diarrhea girl's too long. Yeah, that is true. I fell in love with the diarrhea girl. That's right. Victor didn't listen, though. He didn't listen to his parents because he was infatuated with the peculiar and charismatic Igor. And his parents didn't enforce the rule. I wonder if he was attracted to the unibrow. If you do look at pictures of Igor, he looks like the evil baby in The Simpsons. Like Maggie's nemesis. Yeah, he's got like the furrowed brow. He's fucking, he looks like a little grump. Igor and Victor had PCs from an early age. This is just another example of their privileged lives. Politically correct? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Colin Quinn came to the house. And then he would do Tough Crowd. And then Bill Maher would come over. And then they had to do PC. Most of their classmates, they didn't have regular internet access at the time. And they were not unlike a lot of kids from this time period where they loved surfing the net. Yeah. We don't know the exact websites that they first encountered. But we do know they were collectors of videos that circulated of murders committed by drug cartels and beheadings of journalists by terrorist organizations. We know this because during the investigation, it came out that Igor had amassed hundreds of them with Ukrainian news called episodes of sophisticated torture, abuse and murder taken from the Internet. It was in a folder he shared with Victor called murder. Mirror. Mirror. Man, my mom was so mad. I think about this, right? My mom was so angry about those lesbian schoolgirls I was looking at, and she had no idea I was being an ally. Yeah. No, that's right. I was being, it was like, that's the equivalent. Me masturbating lesbian schoolgirls when I was a kid was like the equivalent of me being at a pride parade. You were studying. Yeah. I just wanted to know how to love them. Yeah. Support them. That's nice. They're businesswomen. But you were also looking at the same stuff that these kids were looking at at the same time. Yeah. I'd just jerk off, right? And all the heat would leave and I'd go outside. And I hate to see what these guys think scissoring is. They show it later. In seventh grade, the boys started to level up. Igor wanted them to be stronger, fearless. He plumbed the internet for ways to overcome fear and figured they should face it head on. Both Victor and Igor were afraid of heights. And for some reason, they were like, bullies are going to know we're afraid of heights. And they're going to use that against us. I wonder if this is some sort of, like, if it has something to do with the switch over from Soviet rule into, you know, like, independent rule. If there was some sort of, like, classist thing going on where maybe they were listening to their parents, saying, you know, the lower classes are going to take over us all. We don't know. Like, the whole system is out of whack. There's no daddies anywhere. Yeah. Right. And all the daddies are super corrupt. Yeah. So all the daddies are gone. The police are hyper corrupt. They're basically non-existent. Massive social systems are falling apart. It's there's a lot of chaos. So we could see them being like, we need to be careful. Everybody's going to try to kill us. But also, sometimes, what do we know about the statement? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That's right. Also, you know, overcoming your fears is probably the most positive thing these guys ever did. I just wish that they had done it for something else, like public speaking. Because instead it led to this. So in a scene almost directly out of the 90s evil boy thriller, The Good Son. Great movie. Love that movie. Phenomenal film. Kid's name's Henry. Really? Yeah. The evil one? Yeah, the evil one. Nice. Yeah, it was awesome. And it was Macaulay Culkin, who we knew was evil. Igor convinced Victor to spend hours standing on a balcony of a 14th floor apartment, Leaning over the railing and gazing straight down until their vertigo subsided and their fear of heights diminished. Technically like an exposure in CBT. Yeah. They considered the face your fears method a resounding success. Does it work like that? CBT, that's what I do. Yeah. I write exposure things of like the worst thing you could possibly think of because I have OCD. One of the worst things that happens with OCD, honestly, is that you have a fretful thought. You have an upsetting thought. So then what you want to do constantly is comfort yourself saying that can't happen. You intellectualize why that can't happen. But actually what you're doing is starting the cycle of anxiety again instead of just sitting with the bad result, sitting with the worst possible extent of your bad thought. Yeah. Another thing that you can do is use a funny voice to say your bad thought out loud. And that kind of takes away. My wife doesn't really love me. Your dog babies is going to take my feet. Yeah, it works. Honestly, it does work. I'm going to be framed for a crime I didn't commit and spend the rest of my life in prison. See, it's fun to do. It works. That's my CBT voice. It really does work. It's really great. The next year, Igor beat up a kid, stole his bicycle, which he later gave to Victor. Although he caught the attention of the police, he wasn't charged, and the local rumor mill believed that this was due to his connected father. And as the story always goes, Victor's parents once again forbade him from being friends with Igor. But I love Igor! No, you're the bad, you're the bad maniac! You're a good maniac! Alright? Alright, but they still didn't supervise him closely or question his whereabouts. So the two boys continued to see each other. Secret lovers. Secrets! The three boys, they began to terrorize the school. They would begin to specifically target younger, smaller boys and older people for physical assault. This pattern would continue into the murders. They would vandalize property and openly huff glue on the street. Fuck yeah. I mean, this is the part I like. This is the only thing. I was like, this could have been fine. It could have stayed like this. No one called the police because of Igor's father's connections. Igor would actually overdose on glue in the eighth grade, and it's very sad to have such a near miss. A couple of Ukrainian glue huffers. It's fantastic. I think it made his eyebrows grow towards each other. Oh, maybe they tried to get rid of it and the glue is what kept it. Just stuck. Just stuck right there. It was all just him trying to shave his Hitler mustache off. Right? Now, this all came to a head in 2002 when a teacher accused the boys of committing hooligan acts against her. Don't know what that means. Hooligan acts? I would imagine throwing things. I think that's what hooligans do. But also there's a little bit of because one I found interesting with all of these crimes is there's there's no sexual component. No, none. None. And it's all just blatant murder. But I do feel like maybe in something in this or something about this reads to me because they almost got in very big trouble for this thing. And we don't know what the details are. I think it involves something like pinning her down or doing something to the teachers physically. Thumbtack on the chair. She did something. They did something to her, whatever it was. but Steedian faced charges. Igor was instead transferred to another school. Alexander was sent to another school. Now, has this problem, has this ever ended a problematic relationship between teens? Splitting the kids? Has it ever done it? Nope. Does it only ever make them worse? Yeah. I feel like that's, what do you do? Because you're not listening to the teenager. You are listening to the teenager and saying I'm going to kill everybody. What do you do? But literally, like, what do you do? What do you, how do you do? Were you asking me how do you deal with a homicidal, Not rhetorical. Now you want my answer? For one of the hardest questions to possibly answer? Let's go. Military school. Yeah, alright. That'll do it. Straight to war. I knew this Iranian fucking ground surge is really going to be good for something. We're really going to wipe out some losers. Every boy needs a war. They really do. Being exiled from each other did nothing to stop their star-crossed love. Igor, Victor, and Alexander quickly descended into total depravity. They began to systematically torture animals to death as a group activity. They would then film these torture sessions on Victor's phone. This is going to be real rough. A lot of animal violence coming up. So what do you think how long do you think this is going to last, the animal violence? Probably like five minutes if people wanted to skip ahead? Six weeks? No, we got just like going every five minutes. The reason why I'm describing this is so you can really understand the total depravity of where these guys got to. Yeah, because there's always a reason to kill a person. Pretty much, yeah. Got a couple of ten. One of the videos shown in court, to the horror of those attending, depicted Victor, Igor, and Alexander crucifying a kitten on a wooden cross they made in Victor or Igor's garage. They filled the kitten's mouth with glue to stifle its screams. taking turns shooting at it with pistols loaded with rover bullets. The boys laugh and swear throughout the video, enjoying the small creature's torment. Criminologist said that he could only evaluate the video with the sound turn off. I could not listen to the painful squeals of puppies and kittens that were gutted alive, burned, hung up, he said. There were many videos of this nature. maybe this newfound hobby gave igor the confidence to blossom into a capital n nazi now i remember when i first joined theater like i discovered theater and it was amazing but really that just led me to hawaiian shirts yeah not nazism no but yeah well that was again i was a character and at the time it was different i was our racial explorations into different forms of the worlds of theater was us embracing foreign cultures. That's why I played an Indonesian man. Yeah, you barely crucified cats. The only reason why I crucified him is with love. And we did it the way Jesus did it, the real way, where the other guys that weren't Jesus didn't get nailed in. They just tied him. Yeah. It's not about bleeding to death. It's about starving him to death. You're right. And letting him slowly suffocate. Thanks, Marcus. What ever happened to Barabbas? I remember his last words were just ouch ouch ouch ouch so Igor took selfies of him and his little buddies and he added Hitler mustaches and Microsoft paint this is true many pictures I guess and unlike many high schoolers whose deaths were covered in the coolest yeah the Slayer S Stussy S it's both I looked it up it's known as the Slayer S, Cool S and the Stussy S which is funny Igor and Victor like the uncool S known as Swatska it's a badass it is a horrible S worst S there is because there's two S's on top of each other we talked about it in the Himmler oh yeah that's right it's just so easy to draw that's the problem it's branding that's why Target's great these were not disciplined Hitler youths imagine Himmler's extreme disappointment looking down from heaven He apologized. They cobbled together a mean and lean version of hate ideology directly from the maw of racist troll dens on the Internet And this is incredibly important to this whole thing because these are not ideological Nazis These are edgelord Nazis. The only reason why they like Nazis and swastikas and Hitler and all that is because it's the worst thing there is. They read all this shit on the internet, and they read about all of the horrible things the Nazis have done, because it was out there back then. Of course. well it's like when I was as a boy right I loved villains sure I loved the empire I loved all this and I remember being a little boy and being interested in history and there are you could see as a little kid that type of imagery so it's so powerful and clear that when you're a weak little shithead you could see it I do a little bit of a run-up and later on in the script about this But I do, I can see it's a childish impulse. Well, it's like fascism is childish, too. Oh, very much. No, well, fascism is all about daddy, daddy taking care of you and telling you what to do. Yeah. But I think with these kids, it's more just that, you know, the UK punks kind of went through something similar is that Nazi imagery. It is the worst, most offensive thing there is. And in Ukraine, like especially like a former Soviet territory is like when the Nazis did. I mean, we talked about in the Himmler series. They did so many horrible things. So it's sticking a finger in. It's sticking this fucking finger into it. Now, Alexander, I call him the Mati of the group. What's Mati? From Captain Planet. The fucking pussy one. Oh, come on. No, I'm being silly. Is that the guy Hart? Yes. Leave him alone. I know. He talks to animals. He's the best one. That's why I put him as Alexander. Mati, okay. I actually thought it was a Dune thing, but that's Mati. Yes, yeah, Mati. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, Alexander, he had a professed aversion to blood. They said he was so sensitive, he couldn't even wash a new baby kitten in case he scalded it with the water. In this friend group, that shit wasn't going to fucking play. Also, it just touched the water beforehand. You know, it's just like you can tell if it's too hot for a kitten. It's Soviet Russia, water touches you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember one time I was working at the 99 Miles of Philly, the cheesesteak restaurant, and we had this guy. He wasn't that smart. And he worked in the basement, but he was really nice. And there was one day we caught a bunch of mice from the glue trap, you know, and he's like, I came downstairs and he was just crying. And I was like, what happened? He's like, I tried to feed the mouse, but he put boiling water on him because he was too stupid. And so because he was trying to dissolve the glue, but he didn't realize he just cooked the mice and he was just crying downstairs because he killed the mice. He accidentally became the hammer maniac. This man's by, was his name Lenny by any chance? I just wanted to see them run. He tried. He did. He honestly did. I tried to take it back. I tried to take it back. I tried. I just want to be like, damn, man. I don't want this to be comical, but it's kind of funny. Thank you for this. It's been a hard day, and I want to say thank you. So Igor extrapolated his fear-destroying techniques to include animal torture. He suggested capturing and dismembering the many stray dogs in the forest near Alexander's house. The group began capturing and slaughtering dogs and cats with regularity to get used to it. They skinned them alive and hung them from trees and disavowed them, where they would bleed to death slowly. Many of the photographs that came out in the investigation documented the animal torture and the boys posing with the corpses, zig-hiling, making funny faces. You know, boy stuff. I mean, yeah, I mean, you make a joke, but that's what it looks like. Oh, yeah. It looks like they're on vacation. They took pictures of themselves with dogs hanging from nooses in the background. The walls covered in swastikas drawn in animal blood. Phrases written on the forest rock walls. Kill everyone. Take everything. The lower you fall, the higher you will fly. Killing is just a tough way of making money. The pictures are haunting. You see two dead-eyed boys in mid-Zig Heil with Hitler mustaches drawn on their hairless lips, giving off a vibe of a Halloween costume taken way too seriously in front of surreal violence. There will be no more animal murder. Just so you know, there will be no more animal murder mentioned in this episode. I just want to let you know what type of maniacs we're dealing with. Just know what happened a lot. Nah. All of the Nazi imagery the boys use really helped experts to try to explain away their behavior. It makes it much easier to say in response to bullying at school, these disaffected young men found confidence in fascist ideology as if they have a brain in their head to fucking choose. Then you wouldn't have to say the more likely reason. They thought it made him look badass. Yeah, it's about self-esteem. That's the whole thing's about self-esteem. Being frightening. Yeah. And being frightened. Because that's where it all comes from. Yeah. Fly from your grave. It wasn't long before the killing extended to human beings. They have been preparing for this for almost four years. One classmate was certain the goal of murder was intended from the balcony training days. As far back as seventh grade, a classmate, Nikolai Parchuk, said that Igor developed a... New nonsense. Back in seventh grade. He decided to check whether he had enough mental strength to kill. In 2005, when the trio were around 17 years old, they attacked two 15-year-old boys. This one was not caught on video, and there has been no motive discerned other than what the police called pure sadism. The three boys mercilessly beat the two smaller boys, leaving them with concussions, broken bones, and permanently disfigured faces. See, I was thinking it was just a little fun. No, they beat them almost within an inch of their lives. The parents of the beaten boys tried to bring charges against the three. In a total shocker, Igor's father intervened. The police decided not to pursue charges due to their age. They were set free, but received a stern talking to by their parents. And isn't their disappointment enough? Yeah. Right? It's so much worse than when they're angry. I'm so glad this episode ends like this. Yeah. Wow. And completed. He would go on to become, the Igor would go on to become a stand up in Ukraine and eventually the president. then came high school graduation as we go on to wherever all the time we've spent together remember the vitamin C song I was more of a third eye blind cannot graduate well you didn't graduate I graduated high school with a 2.0. But I did it. Yeah, you did it. High school, I made it happen. I'm proud of you. Hell yeah, man. You're on the same level as the new Department of Homeland Security. Hell yeah. Wow, that's it. Yeah. That's cool. So they drifted off with no destination, likely knowing their time as quote-unquote normal citizens would soon come to an end. Victor enrolled part-time the Dnipropetrovsk Iron and Steel Academy. He dabbled as a rent-a-cop. The Iron and Steel Academy? Yeah, but he went to learn, it's like metallurgy. I think that's literally like welding. Yeah, I know. It's just a very... Iron and steel. Welcome to the... Where they make Colossus. Yes, that's where he's from. I just want to be normal man again. I've got to make me some kind of wood man. Or some kind of fluffy man. Alexander, he drifted between odd jobs, briefly working as a pastry chef, a construction worker, but remained unemployed for most of the time. I wonder why. Construction worker, he probably should have been great at. I mean, unfortunately, no, he was undisciplined. Igor became immediately, would be known, I think on the internet we call them a neat, right, because he just showed little interest in work or school, in any form of urgency in finding a job. But his parents did buy him a Daewoo Lanos as a birthday present. Known for its fuel efficiency, Daewoo shuttered its doors in 2002, more like it's sort of absorbed into Chevy, according to Grok. Glad you asked Grok about Day World. That's all I do. They're fine cars. They were fine, and then they seem to be, again, very good fuel efficiency. And I love a green car. My mom had a Yugo. Sucked. Yeah, I bet. Yugo slow. So this is when Igor and Victor began to inhale gore videos on the internet. In 2006 to 2007, websites like Gornet.com, Rotten.com, that's my hat, BestGore.com, SnuffX.com were to use a phrase, crushing it. These websites hosted videos going from household and industrial accidents all the way to leaked torture videos from spheres of war. Homemade cartel movies depicting pyramids of bloody heads. And in my opinion, Igor had the long-term plan. Victor thought the gore was cool and all, but Igor watched it like it was instructional. Igor was inspired. He saw the unemotional way people were tortured and murdered. He saw the flatness of the human body as a glistening, bubbling mechanical pile of meat. He saw the limp way the body fell. Spirit gone. Not dramatic in the movies. Subtle. And so, so quick. You know who does death scenes better than anybody in media? South Park. Oh, yes! The immediate dead. Yeah, there's just that little... And then they're dead. Done. That always scared the fuck out of me. Yeah, and South Park does it better than anyone. Private Ryan does it occasionally. And just so you see him get shot three times and they're just like not a human anymore. That shit's fucking terrifying. Good acting. But he saw that viciousness, that meaninglessness, and felt strong. Just like other shitheads before him, Igor looked into the black mirror of the laptop screen, saw baby Nazi, and embraced it. That's what black mirror thinks. Yes! Fascism and childlike violence go hand in hand. But he needed a sheep to make himself a shepherd. And Victor was the perfect spineless shit stain to volunteer. That's right. It took me like five years before I realized, like, oh, black mirror. Yeah, it's the phone screen. I didn't realize. That's cool, though. Yeah, right? British people are right sometimes. I see what they're thinking. Every once in a while. However, enterprising young man, Igor used his new gift from mommy to make money as an unlicensed taxi. His green day woo? His green day woo. Now, I do find interesting. I've had Rachel look up the concept of unlicensed taxis in Ukraine, and it's very, I guess, extremely easy. It's like, it's very run of the mill. It's a part of their lives. Not many people have cars, so it's more often for people to carpool within small towns. And actually picking up an unregistered taxi is a thing that people do quite often, because there's no regulatory boards. And the ones that were official were extremely expensive, so they kind of reverted to taking care of themselves. But an unlicensed taxi, not a fake taxi. It's an unlicensed taxi, but it's still a fake taxi. Yeah, it's just some guys like, hey, I'll give you a ride. But 95% of them weren't the Hammer Maniacs. Sure. Yeah. They're the guys hanging outside the Hollywood Bowl. It was like... Locking all the Ubers. Yeah. It happened enough. They can't even get out of there. It was like enough a part of their lives. Yeah, because at first I was like, what does that even mean? And then I was like, oh, no, it actually was a very regular part of their lives. Yeah, it's the guys that bother you when you go off the plane at JFK. Yeah. Yeah. Now, it might have been a response to his get a job or else ultimatum, but his parents were really never all that serious. Igor's new job provided perfect cover for their favorite pastime, robbing and beating people. It became a nightly ritual, attacking strangers and stealing their phones, wallets, and jewelry. Often they'd pick up a passenger in Igor's car, pretending to be a taxi cab, drive them out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, rob them, beat them, and then leave them stranded. Imagine how much money they would have made if they had a nicer car. I mean, they could have done a lot. If Victor got a car, They made enough money for them both to have a car, and then both of them are pooling the money, and then they buy a truck, and the next thing you know, that's a transpo unit. Next thing you know, they're working for the brand new show business entity that have taken over Romania. I don't think these guys had foresight. No. I don't even think they had twosight. So Igor and Victor, they didn't need the money, as their parents were willing to provide them with whatever they desired. They did it for fun. Alexander, on the other hand, he began to get cold feet. He didn't come from wealth or family connections. Or else he would have had shoes to keep his feet warm. Right? Is this been always the problem? I'll kill you. He was lower class than Igor or Victor. If he got caught, his life was over. He would not get his get-out-of-jail-free card like the other boys. After two brutal armed robberies on March 1st, 2007, and Alexander finally felt extremely uneasy enough about all the reckless assaults that he would later admit. He finally broke away from them before the murders officially began. I had a bit of a hard time and researchers tracking down what the actual very first murder was. It's always a problem with serial killers. Well, not always, always, but a lot of times, yeah, you just don't know. Because it's hard because one side is there's some official stuff. There's a bunch of chaotic stuff in the reporting. And then also, like, you have to listen to these two maniacs fucking version of the story. Yeah. That's the whole Ted Bundy thing, like the only living survivor. You know, you have to trust them or you choose to trust them. Can I ask a weird technical question? Please. Are these guys serial killers or spree killers? Well, that's a very good question. Honestly, it's a very good question. I would go straight up to serial killer because of how long it was. But the style, it's like a serial killers that used spree killing. Yeah. Well, I mean, the definition of a serial killer... Normally has a sexual component sometimes. Not always, but it's two or more murders with a cooling off period in between. Yeah. And these guys, they did have cooling off periods. Well, they got caught in basically their only cooling off period. So we don't know whether or not it was just going to go right back to it or not. Yeah. Also, it's like if they would have been able to get guns, they probably would have been spree killers. Probably. Because they would have just been a one-in-gun situation. Well, yeah, it's funny, technically, what you just said. But also, they talked about how easy it would have been for them if they had guns, and they were really very lamented. They were very sad they couldn't get their hands on some stuff. They should have came to America. Yeah. So the first murder that would become their standard method occurred early in June of 2007. Igor and Victor picked up a young man and a woman in their makeshift taxi. It was the middle of the day. Most of their other crimes were done at night. They took them way out of town, outside where they normally operate. Driven by what they call the sets of complications, Igor and Victor freaked out. After robbing and beating them within an inch of their lives in broad daylight, they worried that victims had had a clear view of their face or the car. Things that they could have planned for, unless the plan was to murder them from the beginning. Eliminating the witnesses was the next logical step, they claimed. They were found beaten to death on the side of the road. Due to haphazard investigation, these would not be included as part of the official kill count. I'll get into the issues with the local police later on. There are many. Many. During the pretrial phase, the boys would actually claim that there was a previous murder. They said that they were sitting on a fence near a branch of McDonald's the previous November when they decided to rob a drunk guy. Igor hit him in the back of the head with a rock and went through his pockets. I felt the skull burst. He said, he died. He died. He died like filthy. You know when you bite the pierogi? The filthy Polish pierogi. Now we see it just like the sea. It's like the fucking sea. Ukrainians got pierogies too. But Polish ones are filthy. They are. That I agree with. It's filled with dirt, literally. But it's good. It's good dirt. The first. I do love Ukrainian food. I do. I honestly, I do too. Shout out to Vasilika. Yeah, Vasilika. Also, Karkzma. Karkzma's Polish. But how different is the foods? Not much different. I... What? Side stories, L-P-O-T-L at gmail.com. The first, what they call the counted murder, was a policeman named Vadim Bodam. He had taken his girlfriend to a recreational center on the evening of June 24th, 2007, in Soviet Ukraine. Lucratiation centers, you... needing a taxi he hailed igor's green day woo death can we call it a sleigh woo yeah okay thank you yes yes clock it and how do people know is it like did they paint taxi on the sign well what they do is like honestly i guess they watch for you driving and they'll pull over and ask you do you want to drive yeah people just standing on the side of the road the world's different over there yeah it's very loose and they also it's extremely small town and everybody knows each other. And it's also because I think the time, because things had fallen apart on the top side, like on the federal level, things were falling apart. Yeah. On the local level, people were sort of forced to take care of each other. Also, I imagine it's horrible because how many people got bludgeoned to death and were just left out in the middle of nowhere and they couldn't find who did it. It makes me feel like there's probably just happened occasionally. The thing is that so many were found in this single run, so many bodies were found, that it's I don't know if they could have killed more, like literally I don't know if the boys could have killed more people even in the time period they had. Yeah. Because they killed so many people in such a short amount of time. At first police treated this as a car accident and not that he had been robbed. Because he wasn't robbed. He still had his wallet in his pocket. His skull was deformed and he was right next to a road, making it possible he was struck many times by a tiny car directly on his face. After a more... Yes, very similar. After a more thorough investigation of the scene, bloodstains were found on the grass and it became clear that it was a homicide. Detectives rounded up Vadim's friends, got his timeline for the night, minus 20 minutes. They also heard about the Green Daewoo for the very first time. this clue would sit unread in a report until after igor and victor got arrested there were lots of issues with the local police i can clumsily sum them up or i can insert our brilliant researchers explanation clumsy oh fuck okay i'll do it clumsy oh brev schnev all right lack of funding truly is lack of funding because of the up top right which which created a brain drain it's because they couldn't pay the cops so the good cops left took over by corrupt cops and the corrupt cops came into play because they would take money on the side to do crimes while also being a police officer So it was like a whole thing because you not paying them enough to be good cops Yeah And I think another thing with the corrupt cops is if they find a murder like this a very violent murder, I think it's a lot of times it is in their best interest to not pursue it because if they start pursuing it, who knows where it's going to lead? Of course. It might lead them directly to, say, a mob boss, you know, someone who they're on their direct payroll, they see a murder of someone, oh, this guy got beat to death with a hammer. Who usually kills people like that? Who usually kills people really brutally? It's like an angry man who's going to kill me and my family. Exactly. So let's just say tiny car. It's interesting because you bring that up because there's a great Chris Rock bit that I always go back to when I hear about this. He always talks about how he thinks cops should be paid more because we get what we pay for. Yeah, sure. And it's like, of course they're fucking corrupt and doing everything because they need to be yeah i mean it's they needed to survive in this world in their own perverse way and it's also there's a lot of blown out here they also there's kind of like a soviet concept of the ideology of communism also puts this whole thing on top of the investigation because they believe that serial murder is impossible in a socialist society they think that it only happens in capitalism because then you got to kill everybody that's yeah he was a brat but that's like well it's why andre Chikatilo got a body count of, what, 53? Yes. Because for so long, they refused to believe that this man was murdering people in the Soviet Union, and they just didn't investigate it. They didn't put it together. This is all of these things make it super fucking complicated of what's going on. You know, this is not Soviet, like this isn't Soviet era anymore, but still that thought is in there. Nothing really changed because, I found it interesting because Rachel showed me, it was because it was a nonviolent revolution. Because it was an actual election and they also had no way of kicking out all the bad guys that were in charge. So yeah, sure, we changed everything. We changed the flags and we changed the uniforms, but it's the same guys. And these killers, they were Ukrainian, but the way they killed people, it almost seemed like they were Russian. Have you look at the schedule? But then shouldn't people take more time with what they like? The night of June 25th, 2007 would mark the beginning. of their highly concentrated reign of terror. The first victim of the night was 33-year-old professor named Yakaterina Ichilchenko. After dinner with her mother and her best friend at home, Yakaterina offered to walk her friend the short distance home. Her mother would do the dishes and go to sleep. When she awoke at 4 30 a.m., her mother checked Yakaterina's bed only to find it empty. That's when she came upon a group of older women standing outside her home around her daughter's body. Yekaterina lay in a pool of blood, her hands up as if protecting herself from something. But as Natalia told reporters, There was no face. Only parts of it. There's nothing funny about that. There's nothing funny about it. There was no face. After walking her friend home, Yekaterina had returned immediately. She was less than 100 meters from home when she came upon the two young men hiding amongst the trees. Igor spun around, struck her on the side of the head with a hammer he had hidden in a plastic bag. The blow killed her instantly, but Igor continued to hit her with the hammer until there was practically no face left at all. They stole her cell phone and ran away giggling into the night. Pumped with adrenaline, the boys wanted to kill again as soon as possible. Two hours later, they saw 35-year-old Roman Tatatrovich drunkenly passed out on a park bench right across the street from the local prosecutor's office. Igor attacked him, bringing the hammer down on him over and over again until every bone in his face was crushed. He would be discovered by unsuspecting early morning walkers. The worst kind of walkers. All right. Keep your head in a swivel, walkers. After Roman, they attempted one more murder to round out the night. 58-year-old Viktor Pertsev was standing outside his housing estate. They began hitting him. But a woman saw through the window of a nearby hair salon and started screaming. This scared the boys away. So Pertziv was left in a pool of blood, but alive. The giggling is what's interesting to me. They give off very much a vibe, almost like a Beavis and Butthead vibe. But of course, they've never seen Beavis and Butthead, which is that's what's fascinating about it, because they have no idea what Beavis and Butthead is. When I rewatched Three Guys, One Hammer, the thing that really does stick with me, and I started with the second episode, is the idea of, like, it's the joy. Yeah. It's the joy they have. It's the true, utter, total excitement. They were just, this is their favorite thing. They are living their dreams. Yeah. Like, this wasn't a Jeffrey Dahmer thing. They didn't have to psych themselves up. This was the fun part. Yeah. I just imagine they had to have been covered in blood. There's a whole thing on that. There's a whole thing on that. Oh, yes. Yes. They were. Six days later, July 1st, 2007, the second full night of hammer murders. They drove 20 miles out of town to Novomuskovsk for a change in scenery. There they found their next two victims, Yevgenia Grishchenko and Nikolai Sershuk. Very little is known about the victims or direct details of the incident itself, but they were bludgeoned so brutally with a hammer or pipe that their skulls were split open. Five days later, July 6th, 2007, three victims in one night, all in close proximity. During the day, Victor, he had spent some QT with an unnamed girlfriend until Igor called him for their murder date. This is one of the factors that shows me that they were not fucking helpless little nerds. No. All right. Because at this time, they're like, they're 18, 19. And just like their American prototypes, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they were somehow, They were nerds, right? But somehow they had girlfriends and money and all of this shit. Now, Harrison Klebold, they were into things that nerds enjoy, but that does not make one a nerd. No. No. So you're telling me the Hammer Maniacs had girlfriends? Yeah. That's crazy to me. Honestly, that's wild. I think that when I was looking at that. Imagine just going on a date to the mall, buying your girlfriend something, and then later that night dropping her off at home, and then going in your day to pick up your boy and then just bludgeoning people to death all night, pretending like it didn't happen, and then kissing her again tomorrow at school? Hey, he was at work. Yeah. I mean, the distance between these murders, I mean, it's kind of a combination of spree killing and serial killing. Yeah. But for them, it's like, it really, like, I don't even know if, like, spree killing really applies because they just want more. They just want more all the time. Give it to me again. Give it to me again. Yeah. And I think. Spree killing normally has like a point. Yeah. There's usually like there's there's they're doing it for some reason. And I think it really is the difference between like one person being a serial killer and two people being a serial killer together. Because if you got a buddy turning and going, you want to do another one? Like a person alone might say no. They're daring each other. Yeah. First. It's like being in a bar. I mean, a buddy saying your buddy says one more drink. Yeah. And you're like, yeah, fuck yeah. So first was a young soldier recently discharged from the military. Jäger Nötschelvold. He came home late after a night with friends. His mother found him in the morning, his body lying in the front of the door, his face unrecognizable with the rest of his skull in pieces. Right around the corner from that, they found their second victim almost immediately after the first. Security guard Yelena Schramm was walking home after finishing her shift early. She was almost home when Igor smacked her with a hammer he had hidden under her shirt as soon as she was within striking range. As with the other victims, Igor continued to hammer her while she was on the ground. Igor and Victor took the clothes from the bag Yelena was carrying to clean the hammer of her blood. Later, Yelena's mother would say, There was not a part of her that was not destroyed. When we arrived at the morgue, we could not recognize her. Thank you, Smeagol. Yelena's sister had to rely on her clothes hands and her hair to identify her and directly down the street would become victim number three, Valentina Hansa no relation, Valentina would befall the same exact fate as Yelena. So alright, so what are we up to now? Like that's like ten kids, like ten murders almost? Right now, this is at, this will be seven murders This will be seven over three nights And not including the first person that they later, not the drunk guy at McDonald's. No. Or the other two. So technically it could be 10. Wow. Yes. No, it is, it's a lot. And it's like, that's a part of why this, as soon as I started getting into this case, I think at first we all thought maybe the three guys, one hammer thing was just like a moment. Yeah. I think that's how I thought of it. I thought of it too. Until we started getting into it, I didn't know that they killed any more than just one person. Same. I didn't know it was a massive serial. I did not know that it was a whole life of it, a young life of it. Did they film all of them or just a couple of them? It seems that what they did was a lot of pictures. And then the ones that we know that there were videos of were shown in court. So they did mostly pictures of animal torture, that kitten video. There's apparently a couple of other videos. Most of that was pictures. Then there's the famous video. And then they think there's at least four more videos. but some of them were attacks and not murders. One of them was that will be shown in court. They did video of a woman that survived the attack. There was also another video of a murder that they showed in court as well. It was on that Chilean documentary. Yes, yes. Yeah. It's almost like they needed the third person to hold the camera. Well, they did a selfie. Well, part of it was them talking about how difficult it would be to murder with one hand. Yeah, and by this point, the third guy is already fucked off. Yeah, he's gone. Yeah, he's out of it. But who knows? Maybe they were looking for a third, truly. The following day, July 7th, 2007, two children, 13-year-old Andrei Sudyik and 14-year-old Vadim Layakov, woke up extra early to go fishing. It was 3 a.m., still dark outside, when they sat out on their bikes. As they pedaled along the Dnieper River, a Green Day Woo taxi stopped. Slew. What? Slew. I think. Sorry. The Slew. Yes. It stopped at short distance ahead of them. And Victor and Igor got out of it, standing to the side of the dark road with their backs to the approaching boys. The two young boys decided to try and pedal past the menacing figures as quickly as possible. But as they approached Victor and Igor, they turned and swung heavy pipes filled with sand, knocking them off their bikes. Andre was immediately knocked unconscious, but 14-year-old Vadim quickly got up and started running. Vadim knew these woods. He'd been playing in them since he could walk. he managed to hide amongst the trees even while being frantically searched for by Victor. Eventually, Victor returned to Igor, still pounding the prone boy's body with the pipe. He got Igor to leave the scene, albeit reluctantly. Vadim lay in the dirt until he was sure his attackers were gone, and he went to his young friend's side. Andre was still breathing. He was trying to talk, but it came out as unintelligible gurgling. They had him try to stem some of the bleeding with his t-shirt and placed his jacket under Andre's head for comfort before heading to a busier road to try and flag someone down for help. Finally, a car stopped for the blood-spattered kid and agreed to take the boys to the hospital. Andre was pronounced dead on arrival. Can't believe it. Finally, the police are here. They could go and they could chase these maniacs because they're fresh off the case. They're right there. But no. Instead, they immediately pinned the murder on 14-year-old Vadim. God damn it. Oh, man. So this is the thing. They immediately took this child, right? Because they were just like, you did it. You're the one. They pulled him into an interrogation room for days. They threatened him with detention in a notorious Ukrainian child prison. Child prison? A child prison. I looked it up. I was just like, because they tried to call it like a juvenile center, and then you look at it, and it's just a castle. It's an evil castle. They finally let him go when they couldn't beat a confession out of the child. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Vadim provided the police with descriptions of the two hammer-wielding teenagers and was finally released to his mother only after she threatened to go to the public prosecutor. No, no, no. Hammers are for building things. You do not kill people with hammers. Nobody does. Obviously you are murder. What are these French foam kind of piece of wood? These French foam kind of cantaloupe? we all know how crazy fishermen are now you figure by this point there would have been a major investigation eight people murdered same method all within 20 kilometers of each other another two weeks but there wasn't authorities refused to link the crimes together essentially boiling it down to a series of wrong place wrong time incidences the problem was their faces were there when the hammers were swinging down. And yes, I understand that it is their fault. Yeah, it's the problem with Ukraine. There's always just hammers flying through the air at all times. What am I supposed to do? Keep faces out of all my hammers? I will say they were there. Usually if you're looking for like someone like they all have the same type of victim, right? Like it's always like a woman or a gay guy, you know, it's always. But this is like they're just killing randomly. It's crimes of opportunity. But there really was there is a through line in the fact that it is vulnerable people. It is people alone. It's people old. Yeah, it's not big guys that could take them. No. And all of their faces are smashed. There's a hint. And they're attacking them by surprise. Yeah. I guess there was like a military guy and a cop. Yes, but they got him by surprise. He was hammered. Both of them were hammered, too. They look for drunk guys as well. Double hammered. Yeah, wow. See, there was no announcement about the murders or the potential dangers of spree colors still on the loose. But word spread among the locals that two psychos were running around hammering people to death with total impunity. It was the community that coined the title the Denebropotrovsk Maniacs. However, it looked like the pressure finally had built up enough that the police could no longer ignore what was happening in Dnipro. I think it was because literally he started killing kids. And once they killed a kid and they went through all of this shit and tortured a kid and beat the fucking shit out of a kid in order to try to extract a confession from them, they realize we might want to do something about this. Not in America, though. We love when kids get killed. It's our favorite. It's our favorite. I say, just throw them at guns. Throw them at the guns. See, the similarities of the crimes, the close proximity, and the new details from Vadim describing two young men with hammers and a green Daewoo started to turn up the heat. Fakti, a Polish news organization, was actually the first to report on similar crimes in Donopropetrovsk on July 17th. they didn't go all the way to call them serial killings yet that would take the big premiere and that's where we'll pick up next week with an incredible behind the scenes look at the making of Igor and Victor's number one hit three guys one hammer we'll put them on the map and into the hearts of minds and children everywhere with the conclusion on our series about the hammer maniacs thank you Casey Casey and that's the baby of Igor and Victor's number one hit Three guys, one hour Put them on the map and into the hearts And minds of children everywhere Well, it's taken way back when All the way to 2008 Where those three guys And now one, silly little hammer And later we have a ticket giveaway For Better Than Ezra Well, thank you for letting me lead this No, this has been great This has been really fun It's interesting Yeah, it's given me an opportunity To really work on the next No Dogs in Space series and our new head on Mount Rushmore of Evil. Oh, God, yes. And what a famous head it is. Oh, it is an interesting shaped one, isn't it? Yes, it is, indeed. But, you know, it's nice that we got the little bit of synchronicity that we had with this one is I don't have to worry about who clavicular is. You know about this whole thing? Have you heard about this? Do you know about this? Oh, no, you need to get back to work. You need to be writing scripts. You should be on social media. No, I'm not on social media. This is just something that, it's been a huge story. Isn't he just a model? He's the look-smaxing guy. It's a model. He's been smashing his own face with a hammer recently. I haven't read any of the stories, and I don't know what any of it's about. I just know that a man named Clavicular is smashing his own face with a hammer. Why doesn't he finish the job? Clavicular manslaughter. Cute. That could be his fucking album, dude. It also makes this topical. Yes, it does. And that's all we do here. All we do here, accidental Synchronicities, it doesn't matter dude Go to patreon.com slash lastpodcast on the left Pay for ad free episodes And to see last stream on the left Live every Tuesday 5pm BST Ah, and we have changed the time Officially to 5pm If you want to watch the stream live, yeah It's a little better for you east coasters out there And it's better for us old fucks We get to eat earlier Because we're sick of being hangry during the streams Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a fucking bastard so we're ready to come and go and eat I'll eat your fucking shit at LP on the left on your fucking stupid social media and go tell Clavicular to pump her shell and go to youtube.com for all the horror shit someplace underneath LPN Romanticy No Dogs in Space podcast, LPN TV The Foreign Report, Who's the B and then come see us on tour lastpodcastonleft.com for tickets that's right, tonight we're gonna be in Indianapolis at the Egyptian Room come on out you fuckers And one slippery noodle is going to be inside of you and me, my friend. Really? That sounds like you're going to take me. Only at the slippery noodle. Then after that, April 25th, Cincinnati, May 29th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, July 18th, Oklahoma City. And then tomorrow, tomorrow night, we're going to be in the wonderful Urbana, Illinois. I can't fucking. That's going to be Henry and I doing side stories to the Canopy Club. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to get chubby. We are. We are. I made sure that they were going to get food for us. I also got us a big old steakhouse reservation in Indy as well. And then I got us more steak there and stuff. I'm supposed to get my blood done and stuff, but I'm just going to keep pushing it off every single time there's a good restaurant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the thing. So let us know where all the best restaurants in all your horrible towns are. We can't wait to eat them. We're going to eat. Yes. Well, hail sweet Satan, everybody. Oh, no. King. Hail, uh, you know what? Hail Rob. Wow. Yeah. You know, Rob, I don't think I've ever hailed you before. Yeah, yeah, you deserve more hails. Yeah, you hailed him like an unlicensed taxi cab. Yes. You're my little sleigh woo. Aww.