In a very strange and bizarre case out of the Balkans, Vlado Tanevski, 56, a married father of two and a respected crime reporter/journalist from Macedonia, was arrested late on Friday, June 20, 2008 at his home in Kicevo after police recovered material evidence that tied the veteran crime writer to homicides that he had investigated and subsequently written about. Additional evidence related to the cases being investigated was discovered inside his car, and DNA testing determined the presence of his sperm on at least two of his alleged victims. The police also found a large collection of pornographic material at his home, as well as weapons.
According to a number of European published reports, the murders that Tanevski is accused of committing and then writing about were committed between 2003 and 2008. His alleged victims were all elderly women between the ages of 56 and 79, and Tanevski resided in the name neighborhood as the victims. Tanevski has been accused of the rape, torture, and strangulation deaths of the four women. Police have alleged that he used telephone cable to strangle the women, after which he purportedly wrapped their mutilated bodies in plastic bags after cutting them into pieces and discarding them at several waste disposal locations on the outskirts of this western Macedonian city. Following each of the murders, Tanevski went to each victim's home and interviewed family members for his written reports, which his editors said "were rich in details."
"He came to my house to get a statement and took (with him) a picture of my sister," said a relative of one of the victims.
No one, at first, including the investigators and prosecutors with whom he kept in close contact, suspected that Tanevski might have been the killer.
"All the victims were found naked, strangled, wrapped with phone cables," said a police spokesperson. "The women were sexually and physically abused. For example, the last victim, a 65-year-old female, was found with 13 deep wounds on her skull and multiple rib fractures."
Traces of Tanevski's sperm were found on the bodies of Zhivana Temelkovska, 65, the latest victim who was killed in May 2008, and that of Mitra Siljanovska, 61, who was killed in 2004. Two people were convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2005 for Siljanovska's murder, and Tanevski—yes, you guessed it—covered their trial and wrote stories about it for his newspaper. Due to the evidence in that case and Tanevski's arrest for Siljanovska's murder, authorities have indicated that the case will receive an appropriate judicial review to look at the likelihood that two innocent people may have been convicted for a crime that they didn't commit.
Tanevski is also being investigated for the murder of Ljubica Lichoska, 56, whose body was found earlier this year, and for the presumed killing of Gorica Pavlevska, 79, who disappeared in 2003. Pavlevska's body has not been found.
"He came to our house and asked many questions, and some of them were so detailed that we did not want to answer," said a relative of the last known victim, Zhivana Temelkovska. "Later, when we would meet on the street, he would express his condolences and ask me how I was and how the family was doing."
"The victims were killed with a monstrous brutality," said Ivo Kotevski, a police spokesman, who spoke with a reporter for The Times. "Their bodies were butchered with knives and their skulls were shattered…he tortured his victims in most horrible ways and then visited their homes…he would insert blunt objects in their genitalia—in one case it was a bottle of after-shave…Traces of his sperm and DNA were found on two of the victims, while the third one was killed in the same way. The body of the fourth suspected victim has not yet been found. The ribs of the last victim were fractured as he sat on her back pressing with his knees while strangling her with a telephone cable."
A possible motive for the killings, according to Kotevski, could be a poor relationship that Tanevski had with his mother, now deceased, who had worked as a cleaning person in a hospital. Tanevski's mother apparently had been promiscuous and this, according to Kotevski, had been the source of their conflicts and poor relationship.
"All the victims appear to have fit the profile of his mother," Kotevski said, "and they all were working as cleaners in hospitals."
