After three years of covering a string of murders in Macedonia, police realized that journalist Vlado Taneski was actually the killer.
YouTubeVlado Taneski, the Macedonian serial killer.
For 20 years, Vlado Taneski was a journalist in the small town of Kičevo, Macedonia, covering topics like community news and municipal affairs. But then, in 2005, he got a big story. A woman had gone missing, a local cleaner. Her body was found a few weeks later, wrapped in plastic bags, and investigators determined that she’d been raped before her murder. Taneski covered the story, and received praise for his engaging, informative articles.
He went on to write about the murders of two other women, but by 2008, investigators had started to grow suspicious. Taneski’s articles were filled with details that only the killer could know. And, looking back, investigators realized that he’d pitched articles about the murders surprisingly quickly.
To their horror, they soon realized that Vlado Taneski knew so much about the murders because he was the killer. The journalist was arrested for the crimes, but died by suicide in prison before he could go to trial.
This is his disturbing story.
The Quiet Life Of A ‘Gentle’ Journalist
Born in 1952, Vlado Taneski grew up in Kičevo, where he purportedly had a strained relationship with his mother, a local cleaner. Their relationship soured even further in 1990, when Taneski’s father died by suicide.
Still, Taneski lived a fairly normal life. He married and had two children, and his ex-wife later described their relationship as an “ideal marriage.” She stated that he had always been “quiet” and “gentle,” though she had observed the deep resentment he felt toward his mother.
Zero/Wikimedia CommonsThe small town of Kičevo, Macedonia, where Vlado Taneski committed at least three murders.
“The only time I ever saw him get aggressive was when we were living with his parents,” Taneski’s ex-wife told a local TV station.
Meanwhile, he established a career as a journalist in Kičevo. Taneski wrote for local papers Nova Makedonija and Utrinski Vesnik, mostly covering the day-to-day news of the town, subjects like education and municipal affairs.
This all changed in 2005.
How Vlado Taneski Reported On His Own Murders
In late 2004, a 64-year-old woman named Mitra Simjanoska vanished. Then, in January 2005, her body was discovered wrapped in a plastic bag. Simjanoska had been brutally tortured, raped, and strangled — and Vlado Taneski began to report on the murder investigation.
Over the next three years, two more women vanished: 56-year-old Ljubica Licoska, who disappeared in November 2007, and whose body was found in February 2008, and 65-year-old Zivana Temelkoska, who disappeared in May 2008, and was found roughly a week later. Like Simjanoska, Licoska and Temelkoska had been raped and murdered, then wrapped in plastic and dumped around Kičevo. And all the murders were covered by Taneski.
Indeed, Vlado Taneski seemed to have a special intuition into the string of murders. He was able to report about them in surprising detail, and when Temelkoska’s body was found in May 2008, he showed surprising speed in pitching the news of her murder to Nova Makedonija.
Yet those who worked with him had little inkling that something was wrong.
“He was very quietly spoken but also very persuasive,” Goce Trpkovski, a reporter at Nova Makedonija, told The Guardian in 2008.
A crime reporter who worked with Taneski, Ognen Cancarevik, seconded Trpkovski to The New York Times that same year. “He was a nice and educated guy who seemed completely normal,” Cancarevik said.
But while his colleagues didn’t suspect a thing, police began to question how Taneski had gotten his information.
The Arrest And Death Of Journalist-Murderer Vlado Taneski
As they investigated the murders of Simjanoska, Licoska, and Temelkoska, as well as a 78-year-old woman who went missing in 2003, local police read Vlado Taneski’s articles about the brutal crimes. And they began to notice that the journalist had surprisingly good information on details of the murders — details that only the killer would know.
“We read his stories and it made us suspicious,” police spokesman Ivo Kotevski told The New York Times. “He knew too much.”
In 2008, police were able to definitively tie Taneski to the murders. They found that his DNA matched semen found on the victims, and a search of his house turned up items which had belonged to the victims, as well as telephone cords similar to the one that had been used to strangle the women. They also found a large collection of pornographic material.
Vlado Taneski was arrested on June 22, 2008.
YouTubeVlado Taneski was arrested for the murders when his DNA was found on one of the victims.
Police had enough evidence to charge him for two of the murders. They were also hoping to charge him for the third murder, and to see if Taneski knew anything about the woman who had vanished in 2003. But before they could ask the journalist-murderer questions about his crimes, Taneski died by suicide by drowning himself in a bucket of water in his cell.
Though he never confessed, police were confident that Taneski was guilty.
“All these women were raped, molested and murdered in the most terrible way and we have very strong evidence that Taneski was responsible for all three,” Kotevski stated following his death. “In the end there were many things that pointed to him as a suspect and led us to file charges against him for two of the murders. We were close to charging him with a third murder, and hoped he would give us details of a fourth woman who disappeared in 2003 – because we believe he was involved in that case, too.”
But while Taneski’s involvement in the murders was obvious to police, his former newspaper colleagues were still shocked to learn that the journalist had killed the women he’d written about.
“When the police rang me to say, ‘Your reporter is the murderer,’ I could barely believe my ears,” Cancarevik, the crime reporter who worked with Taneski, exclaimed. “[Taneski] was so calm when he was discussing the murders. All of these women lived only meters away from his house.”
Why did Vlado Taneski turn from a mild-mannered journalist into a serial killer? While his suicide means that police will never know for sure, they’ve theorized that his violence had something to do with his resentment toward his mother. Before her death, Taneski’s mother was a cleaner, like his victims.
In fact, all his victims had known Taneski’s mother.
After learning about the crimes of journalist-murderer Vlado Taneski, read about the still-unsolved Cleveland Torso Murders. Then, read about Hans Schmidt, the only priest ever executed in the U.S.
