Human Wreckage True Crime

Vlado Taneski — journalist, father, husband… and serial killer

• Thomas W

Share episode
SPEAKER_00:

This is human record stories about the moment when the human soul fractures, when trust becomes weaponized, and when truth itself gets rewritten. Today, we go to a quiet town in Macedonia Kaicho, a place where the streets close early, where people greet each other by name, and where, for years, one of their own wrote about the community's darkest crimes while secretly committing them. This is the story of Vladotansky journalist, father, husband, and serial killer. It's a story about words used as camouflage, and how a man who told the story of others suffering was, all along, narrating his own. Let's begin in the late 1990s. Kaichvo sits in the mountains of western Macedonia, a town surrounded by fields and forest, a population barely over twenty thousand. Life here moves slowly. There's one main square, a cluster of cafes, and a single local radio station. And there's Vladotansky. Born in nineteen fifty two, he's a man who blends in. Middle aged, polite, soft spoken, with neatly combed hair and glasses that give him a scholarly air. He's been a journalist for decades covering schools, town council meetings, crime. The kind of stories no one else bothers to write. Colleagues describe him as meticulous, always with a notebook, always chasing small leads. His editors say he's trustworthy. In a small town, being a reporter is a form of intimacy. You know everyone's tragedies, you write them down. But behind that familiarity, there's something closed off about him. He rarely jokes. He doesn't stay long after work. He writes, goes home, and takes care of his mother. That last part is important. His mother, Bladica, had worked for years as a cleaner scrubbing hospital floors, mopping school hallways. A proud woman, but controlling critical. Friends would later recall that Vlato seemed afraid of her even as an adult. He obeyed, he served, he never argued. When his father took his own life in twenty two, and his mother died soon after from what some called an accidental overdose, something in Vlato broke. He kept working. He kept writing. But grief had created a silence inside him one he would soon fill with horror. Between two thousand four and two thousand eight, Kaicho was shaken by a string of disappearances. Each victim was an older woman in her fifties or sixties poor, often working as a cleaner or janitor. The first was Mitris Simjanaska. November two thousand four. She leaves home to go shopping and never returns. Her body was found two months later, in january two thousand five, dumped near a local road. She's been raped, tortured, strangled. Police investigate. Nothing. No suspects, no leads. Three years later, it happened again. Lubika Lakoska, same profile. Disappears in november two thousand seven. Her body is found early 2008. Bound with cords, assaulted, strangled. And then a third Jovanna Temelkraska, sixty five years old, May 2008. She receives a phone call telling her that her son has been injured, that she should come quickly. She leaves home in a rush. She never comes back. Her body was found ten days later, wrapped in plastic, bound with a telephone cord. Three women, all cleaners, all killed with the same pattern tortured, raped, strangled. And the killer? Still unknown. The town panics. Women start walking home in groups. Men whisper about a maniac on the loose. And in the local papers, one journalist begins writing detailed, emotional stories about the murders of Vladotansky. He writes about the fear in Kaichvo. He writes about the victims' lives their families, their last moments. He writes with compassion. But also with detail, too much detail. When the article about Giovanna Temukoska's murder ran, investigators noticed something strange. The piece described the exact kind of cord used to bind her hands, a specific brand of telephone cable cut cleanly with scissors. But that information had never been released publicly. Only the killer and the police knew. At first, detectives assumed a leak inside the department. They looked inward, questioning officers. But then, as they read more of Tainsky's previous stories, a pattern emerged. In each article, he mentioned details no journalist could possibly know, the precise position of a body, what kind of plastic bag covered it, how the victims were dressed. Tainsky wasn't quoting police sources. He was writing like he'd been there. One detective would later say he wrote as if he had seen the bodies himself. That's when suspicion turned toward the man holding the pen. The police quietly began monitoring Tainsky. They didn't want to scare him off. They took samples of his articles, his notes, his call logs. Then, in june two thousand eight, the lab results came back from DNA testing on semen found on one of the victims. It matched Vlado Tansky. On june twenty second, police arrested him at his home in Kaispo. Neighbors watched as the quiet journalist was led away in handcuffs. Inside his house, investigators found phone cords, ropes, women's clothing, and pornographic material depicting violence and bondage. In his basement traces of blood. It was over. The journalist who covered the murders was the murderer. The question that haunts everyone, why? Psychologists would later call Tainsky's crimes a manifestation of deep resentment toward his mother a mix of anger, humiliation, and dependence that metastasized into violence. The victims weren't random. They were symbolic. They were his mother's doubles older, working class women who scrubbed floors and lived in poverty. By killing them, he wasn't just murdering strangers. He was reenacting a twisted drama with his mother's ghost. And yet, the most bizarre element remains his need to write about the murders. What kind of killer documents his own crimes in a newspaper? Their theories. Control. Writing the story allowed him to control not just the crime, but its public perception to become both killer and storyteller. Pride. His articles gained attention. He became the go-to reporter on the Kitchva murders. Every time he published, his status rose. Confession. On some level, maybe he wanted to be caught. Each article leaked a little too much like a subconscious admission. Whatever the reason, it was unprecedented, a journalist writing his own downfall. After his arrest, Tansky didn't speak much. He denied the killings. He said the DNA evidence was a mistake. But investigators were confident they had physical evidence, matching cords, matching details, matching DNA. He was placed in a detention cell in the city of Totovo. It was june twenty third, two thousand eight, just one day after his arrest. At three M, guards found him dead. His head was submerged in a bucket of water. The official report called it suicide. But many in Macedonia didn't believe it. How does a man drown himself in a bucket? Was he silenced? Was it guilt? Or just another act of control deciding how his story would end. Without a trial, the case closed overnight. The question stayed open. When the news broke, Keitvo went silent. People who had known him for decades couldn't reconcile the image, the polite journalist who drank coffee at the corner cafe, and the man who raped and killed three women. One editor wept when police told him. He said, Blato wrote about evil. We never knew he was it. The families of the victims were devastated not only by the crimes, but by the betrayal. They'd spoken to him. They'd trusted him to tell their loved ones stories. He'd sat in their kitchens, taken notes, nodded kindly, all while knowing exactly what had happened because he had done it. It was the ultimate violation. Tainsky's crimes expose something bigger than one man's pathology. They reveal how proximity and trust can become the perfect camouflage for violence. Serial killers often seek control not only over victims, but over narrative. Most manipulate the story after the act. They hide bodies, they send taunting letters. But Tainsky's control was absolute. He committed the crimes, then reported them, shaping how his town understood the danger. He was the killer and the chronicler, the monster and the messenger. That's what makes this case so haunting it blurs the line between truth and fiction, journalism and manipulation, storytelling and murder. Because Tainsky died before trial, much of what we know is speculative. How many victims were there? Police linked him to three, but suspected a fourth a seventy eight year old cleaner who vanished in two thousand three. Was she the first? The rehearsal? Did anyone help him? There's no proof, but some locals believe others may have known or suspected. And what about his death? Some point to irregularities. No suicide note, no witnesses, an unlikely method. Others believe guilt simply consumed him. Whatever the truth, his death robbed investigators and the victims' families of answers. Let's stop for a moment and speak their names again. Mitra Samjanaska sixty four. She had two children. She loved tending her garden. She cleaned offices for a living and dreamed of retiring soon. Lubika Lakoska fifty six, known for her laughter, her constant singing while she worked. Her daughter described her as sunlight in tired shoes. Jovanna Tamilkoska sixty five. She adored her grandchildren. She baked bread for the entire neighborhood every Sunday. Her kindness made her everyone's grandmother. They were ordinary women, invisible to most, and perhaps that's why Tainsky chose them because society looks away from the poor, the old, the cleaners. But here, their stories matter more than his. Their lives are the wreckage he left behind. True crime often asks us to look into darkness to make sense of what feels senseless. But the Tainsky case forces us to question the very tools we use to understand crime, storytelling, narrative, the act of writing. He weaponized those tools. He used journalism, the pursuit of truth as a mask for deceit. Every article he wrote blurred the boundary between confession and control. It makes us ask, how well do we know the voices we trust? What happens when the storyteller becomes the story? In an age where media mediates everything, Tansky's case remains a warning. The truth is only as clean as the hands that write it. When I think about Vlaotansky, I think about the layers of quiet. The quiet of a small town at dusk, the quiet of a man writing at his desk, the quiet of a woman walking home from work, not knowing someone is following her. And finally, the quiet of a jail cell where a bucket of water ends a life that took so many others. In the end, Kaichvo's story isn't just about murder. It's about how evil can live in plain sight dressed in the language of empathy, hiding behind the authority of a byline. It's about the way pain ripples through communities, across years, across borders. And it's about remembering the women who deserve far better than to become footnotes in the story of their killer. Because they were the human wreckage, the ones whose lives were erased so that one man could play God, author, and monster all at once. Thank you for listening to Human Wreckage. If you or someone you know is affected by violence, reach out, you don't have to face it alone. If this story moved you, share it not for the killer's notoriety, but for the victim's dignity. I'm Thomas. Stay curious, stay kind, and never stop questioning the stories you're told.