At first sight he was a normal type of man. He had a wife and two daughters – one 6 and one 4 year old. His name was Štefan Svitek but he is better known in his homeland of Slovakia as Horehronsky Rozparovac, which translated to English as The Ripper of Horehronie, or The Horehronsky Ripper. Horehronie, and from it derived adjective Horehronsky is a name of a region in Central Slovakia, encompassing the upper River Hron and surrounding the Low Tatra Mountains.

On October 30, 1987 Štefan Svitek brutally murdered his pregnant wife and their two children. When his wife was dead, he ripped the unborn child out of her belly and cut it up with a disposable safety razor. He then proceeded to disembowel his daughters and threw their internal organs around the room, before sexually violating their wee, naked bodies.

For his exceptionally brutal murder, the Czechoslovakian court of law sentenced him to death by hanging. He was the last person to be executed in then communist Czechoslovakia, mere months before the Velvet Revolution ended the communist rule and abolished the death penalty.

Best Gore member Martin101 who provided me with the video which contains authentic crime scene images of this murder case was also kind enough to translate the narration of the video. The video is 25 minutes long and touches on all the details of the Horehronsky Ripper’s escape and eventual turn in so not all of it is translated, only the description of the murder as it exists in the police file:

On October 31, 1987 at around 8:40am, married couple Božena and Ivan Pokoš forcefully opened the front door to the residence on #9 Stromová Street in Brezno, Slovakia and found themselves at the scene of a brutal massacre. There was blood on the door. Next to a chair which lay on a two colored carpet lay a hiking boot, also sprinkled with blood. There was a doll without legs and children clothes in the kitchen sink. Next to the kitchen cabinet lay green pants stained with blood. Under a coffee table and next to a broken bench was a body of a child laid on her back. Her legs were pointed towards the doorway, her right arm was bent across the chest and her left arm stretched away from the body. Her internal organs lay at her right foot. Her entire torso is cut open and her head bears a sign of severe trauma. Male underwear sprinkled with dried blood covers the coffee table. To the left of the stove is another dead body of a female child. She is laid on her back, her legs point toward the kitchen cabinet. Her head bears a sign of severe trauma. There is a one human heart by her right foot and another one under her armpit. Next to it are human lungs and a kidney with a ribbon tied around it. 38 cm from the girl’s foot lies a body of a male unborn child. The fetus is cut lengthwise. Next to the fetus is a big hammer, next to it is a male hiking boot. Next to the boot is a severed female breast. A door on the opposite wall marks an entrance to the second room. The door is stained with blood. There is a bed with a blanket behind the door. The two pillows which lay on the bed are stained with blood and human intestines. Piece of human liver lies on the floor, about 28cm from the bed. Also on the floor, next to a TV stand is a human lung. To the left of the window there are two chairs. The one on the left is covered with human tissue. There is a female corpse on the floor between the bed and the chairs. Her legs are bent, arms wide open. Her head bears signs of severe trauma – the brain is removed, the eyes are removed, all internal organs have been removed too. Her genitalia have been cut off. Her body parts are spread about the room. The floor is covered with blood. The intestinal content is spilled across the bed.

After the description of the crime scene, the criminal investigation file contained the description of the events which lead to the murder:

On October 30, 1987 at around 10am, Štefan Svitek met up with Jozef Nováček to help him gather dry wood from the forest named Vagnar as fuel for winter. They were joined by Pavol Kolesár later in the evening. For their help, Jozef Nováček paid them with bottles of homemade wine. After finishing the wine they earned earlier, the two then went to the restaurant name “Pod Zeleným Stromom” (Under a Green Tree) where they continued drinking. At around 9pm they moved to a hotel named “Hron” where they drank some more before going home. Štefan Svitek was so drunk he could not walk and ended up having to spend an hour sitting on a bench. After an hour long breather, he resumed his drunken walk home which he reached just before 11pm. He entered his home but neither his wife, who was 4 months pregnant at the time, nor either of his two daughters – one 4 and one 6 year old were there. So he went to check the nearby summertime cabin. He knocked on the door. His wife – Mária Sviteková came out and told him to go back wherever I had been whole evening and locked the door. He went to the shed and picked up an axe which he used it to break in. He found his wife laying together with their daughters on the same bed. He was upset because she locked the door and hit her in the head with the axe. It disturbed the girls so he axed them too. First the one nearer to the wife, then the other one. He kept hitting and hitting. At one point he thought he heard his wife make wheezing sounds, so he hit her some more. He could not recall how many times he struck each of them. He then noticed kitchen knife on a table. He took it and proceeded to disembowel the bodies. First he disrobed his wife and cut her torso open from her vagina up to her neck. By doing that, he also accidentally cut his own hand. With her belly ripped open, he started to pull all of her internal organs out and just threw them around. He had no recollection of whether he cut the fetus while he was cutting up his wife or whether he cut it up after he pulled it out of her womb. Then he cut off her breasts. As he carried out the disembowelment, he experienced sexual arousal and relieved himself by violating his wife’s corpse. After he was done, he put bodies of his daughters in a sack and left. But soon after he felt aroused again, so he returned to the cabin, pulled the bodies of his daughters out of the sack and sexually violated them too. Traces of his ejaculate were found in both on them. He then played with the little girl’s genitalia by forcing his fingers inside.

Our translation stops at the 10:08 minute mark of the video. The file of the events which followed continues, but I’m not gonna bore you with it all. Eventually, the Horehronsky Ripper tried to cut off his testes and commit suicide, but failed at it twice. Once sobered up, he approached the first police car he could find and turned himself in.

His whole life prior to this murder had been a life of crime. He started by torturing animals when he was just 10 years old. When he was 15, he committed his first real crime by burglarizing a house he had broken into. As a 16 year old, he repeatedly raped and abused a 40 year old mentally challenged woman. At that age he was first imprisoned. Shortly after his release, he assaulted an elderly woman whom he beat up bloody.

By the time he committed the triple murder for which he was eventually sentenced to death – he was 27 at the time – he had spent combined 8 and a half years in prison, with never longer than 6 month to a year out of it at a time.

Mária Sviteková married him because he made her pregnant. Even with his child, she should have known better, though. After his hanging, Czechoslovakia (presently split into two sovereign nations of Czech Republic and Slovakia) abolished the death sentence. I’m pretty sure, though that when it comes to people like this Horehronsky Ripper right here, the former communist government was more than right to sentence him to death. The death sentence may seem like some form of medieval punishment, but there would simply be nothing more suitable for someone who commits crime like the Horehronsky Ripper did.

Many thanks to Martin101 for the pics, video and translation of this brutal murder case. Only on Best Gore. At least until such time when it is stolen from here:

Gallery of crime scene photos. The Horehronsky Ripper was sentenced to death by the court of Banska Bystrica and executed on June 8, 1989 in Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia: