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He makes a left turn, then a right one. Then left, then right again. Left, right—his car marches through the streets of Kičevo, zigzags, as if descending an endless stairway. “Here he made a left turn, and here he made a right one,” Saša explains to me, but keeps his eyes fixed on the road in front of us, his hands busy on the wheel. Saša Dukosi is a longtime reporter for Macedonian radio and television, but today he is my tour guide. “And this is the kindergarten, next to which her cell phone was found,” he goes on. “A woman heard it ringing in the grass and picked up the call. ‘Who are you?’ the caller asked her, and she explained. They told her to wait right there; they were sending a police car.” Left, right. We are following his route, tracing the turns he took from his home in town to his secluded summer cottage five kilometers away. Even our car is the same as his: a white Opel Astra. We make a final left onto a highway out of town, and Saša steps on the gas. Soon the houses of Kičevo disappear behind us, magically transformed into fields of ripe wheat and corn. Yellow, green. Yellow, green. Beyond loom the darker shades of the surrounding mountains, clouds threatening to drench the valley. We get off the highway at a sun-bleached sign that shows the distance (4 km) to the village of Karbunica. Then Saša makes another sharp turn onto a dirt road and the whole car starts jiggling so violently that my breath escapes in gasps. After a few hundred meters he pulls over and kills the engine. Silence. Dust. Row upon row of bolt-straight cornstalks. Above, the blue pall of the sky. No exit. I unbuckle and jump out of the car. Saša exits the driver’s side. “This is the place,” he says and points. “Look, over there.” In the distance, nestled under the shade of several big walnut trees, is the summer cottage—a ramshackle thing. It has two stories and a red-tiled roof. With its pale pink stucco, it resembles a gingerbread house from some forgotten fairytale. I want to take a bite out of it. Saša leads me into the cornfield. I part the stalks like curtains in front of me, pulling on the occasional tassel. Before we reach the cottage we run into a barbed wire fence. We need to make our way around. In the back we find an opening, wide enough for us to slip through. The deep shade of the plums and walnuts keeps the yard cool, even at noon. There is a woodshed with a horseshoe hung on the door for good luck. A white aluminum pitcher hangs from a nail in the siding. I walk around the cottage. Another horseshoe. The owner must have been superstitious. I climb the exterior staircase that leads to the bedroom on the second floor. The landing is choked by thick vines creeping up the railing and the makeshift trellis. So this is the place. Gathering my courage, I try the door. Of course, the police have locked it. The monster is not at home. I try to peer through the little iron-barred window, but I can see nothing, just the reflections of sky and scraps of clouds floating by. Silence. Heat. So this is where the fairytale ends.

On a high mountain plateau in western Macedonia, just kilometers east of the Albanian border, the town of Kičevo lies in wait. It waits for the buses going north, to the capital Skopje; it waits for the buses going south, to the charming resorts of Lake Ohrid. It waits in vain. Travelers go through Kičevo—they don’t stop. There’s no reason to. Kičevo remains a minor provincial town like so many, where life runs slowly through the veins, and seventeen years into their independence residents still struggle to make the change. The past has not quite gone away and the future has not yet arrived. Drab apartment buildings painted with faded murals of victorious Communism slump next to cocky, new structures, their freshly poured concrete and red bricks bright in the July sun. The reflections of beat-up Yugos are caught momentarily in the tinted windows of slick Audis. Women in long florid skirts and headscarves stroll next to women in low-cut jeans and rock star shades. Everything is diametrical opposition, dichotomy, double lives. In the cafés, people sit across from one another, as if facing mirrors, and discuss the news, watching themselves. Not that there is much news to discuss. Kičevo is rarely mentioned on Macedonian TV; in travel guides it rates a mere half page. It seems a strange place for an ambitious journalist in search of exciting stories. But Vlado Taneski—a staffer for Nova Makedonija (New Macedonia), the largest national daily in the capital city of Skopje, and the three-time winner of the national award for best reporting—found Kičevo and its picturesque surroundings congenial to his romantic spirit. He longed for the idyllic pace of provincial life. Under headlines such as “Pictures from Life” and “Pictures without a Frame,” he wrote long essayistic paeans to the Macedonian countryside, where shepherds and plowmen labored against bucolic backdrops. “The sweat burned in their eyes, their faces were flushed like the faces of young brides,” Taneski wrote, “and their sinewy hands with wide palms resembled oak branches.” His occasional pieces were soaked with metaphors and similes, the spine of his prose cracking under the weight of unrealized literary ambition. True to the pastoral tradition, Taneski elegized rural life through the lens of his urban imagination and living. But he was no modern-day Theocritus. Though there was genuine emotion, talent even, his writing often unraveled into pathos inflected by cliché—simplifying the past into a prelapsarian world of affection, an Arcadia, locus amoenus. Coming upon the deserted village of Podvis, he observed: “No human foot ventures here anymore. All the houses have been abandoned. Dead silence. Only the water in the village fountain follows the quick passage of time. Everything else is a memory from the past. There is no trace of a person here haunted by nostalgia for the heaps of polished stone, where once upon a time people lived and died, where days were filled with joy and sorrow, with hard labor and pain, with rituals and revelry, where generations saw the passing of their childhood, their youth. The village square has disappeared. The hearths are cold. There is only the warmth of memory.” Like the eighteenth-century English poet Oliver Goldsmith recalling his own deserted village (“Sweet Auburn! loveliest village on the plain / Where health and plenty cheer’d the laboring swain”), Taneski was a person “haunted by nostalgia,” obsessed by his losses to the point of anguished pleasure. But, the occasional flights of poetic fancy aside, Taneski was a daily reporter first and foremost. The bulk of his work focused on what little national news Kičevo could muster. In short daily items, he reported on rising unemployment, illegal logging, corrupt politicians, the commemoration of patriotic events, petty crime, and, occasionally, homicides. Mostly, he complained about “the wretchedly chosen local officials.” Taneski was a socially engaged journalist, who did not shy away from taking controversial, albeit conservative, positions. His articles were shot through with yearning for the time before Yugoslavia disintegrated, and he came to view capitalism as a lethal incursion into his country, new ways strangling the old. His was a form of political nostalgia, born of a personal fixation on the past. In his prose, as in his daily routine, he favored the familiar over the daring. His articles were textbook examples of solid writing, but they never took chances, never deviated from traditional journalism. Even his methods were conservative: still working on a typewriter, phoning in his copy rather than sending by fax. Little wonder then that he preferred interviewing old-timers for his essayistic pieces to reporting the dull daily news. But when the elderly women of Kičevo began to go missing, it presented an opportunity for Taneski to wed his thoughts on the declining culture of Macedonia to a steadily unfolding whodunit. It seemed the story he was born to write.

In November 2004, Mitra Simjanoska, a sixty-one-year-old, retired custodian—and, as some people characterized her, “woman of loose morals”—went missing. Maybe a jealous lover lost his temper. Maybe she was on the run from someone. Theories proliferated, but nothing was confirmed. Then, on January 12, 2005, a scrap collector poking around the abandoned construction site of an athletic facility on the edge of town came upon a naked body dumped in a shallow hole in the ground. By the advanced decomposition, police determined that Simjanoska had been murdered some weeks before. She had been brutally raped and then strangled, her body bound with phone cable and then stuffed into a plastic bag. Kičevo was in shock. Nothing like this had ever happened there before. Even during the 2001 war, when Albanian separatists from Kosovo had crossed into Macedonia and started a campaign of chaos and violence in the nearby town of Tetovo, Kičevo had remained relatively quiet. Luckily, after a swift investigation, the local authorities announced that the culprits had been arrested. Kičevo could sleep easy. Two men, Ante Risteski and Igor Mirčeski, both in their twenties, were charged with the murder of Simjanoska and that of Radoslav Bozhinoski—an old man who was robbed and killed in December 2004 at his house in the neighboring village of Malkoetz. Bozhinoski had suffered a terrible death at the hands of his tormentors, who forced objects in his anus and squeezed his penis and testicles with hot fire tongs before finishing him off. Because Simjanoska had been abused in a somewhat similar fashion, the prosecution established a link between the crimes and decided to treat them as a double homicide. It was reported that during the pre-trial interrogation Risteski and Mirčeski had admitted to murdering both Simjanoska and Bozhinoski, but in the courtroom they insisted they had killed only the man and had nothing to do with Simjanoska. Vlado Taneski reported on the courtroom proceedings for Nova Makedonija. He sat in his pew and listened to the prosecution, to the witnesses and the defense. In an article entitled “Surgical Gloves for a Monstrous Murder,” Taneski wrote: “In handcuffs and with searching eyes, 28-year-old Ante Risteski and his friend Igor Mirčeski, accused of a horrible double homicide in Kičevo and Malkoetz, walked into the courtroom. They stared vacantly at the ceiling and from time to time whispered, as if to themselves: it’s all over and now we’ll pay for our crimes.” Risteski and Mirčeski were sentenced to life in prison for the murders. But there was a troubling piece of incongruous evidence. The postmortem examination had uncovered traces of semen in Simjanoska’s body, which, it was later revealed, matched the DNA of neither Risteski nor Mirčeski. Was there a third assailant? Did the court lock up the wrong men? Could it be that the murderer of Mitra Simjanoska was still a free man? There were no answers. Then, in November 2007, exactly three years after the disappearance of Simjanoska, another woman from Kičevo went missing. Fifty-six-year-old Lubica Ličoska was, like Simjanoska, a custodian, and she also lived in the same section of town. When the similarities were noted, locals suddenly remembered Gorica Pavelska. She was seventy-three, a retired custodian who went missing in May 2003. No one had thought much of it at the time. She might have suffered a stroke in some remote place, they had speculated, or gone to work in Skopje. No trace of her was ever found and the whole business had been forgotten. But now it appeared that little Kičevo was home to a serial killer, and Vlado Taneski’s editors smelled a big story.

“Lubica was a quiet and gentle woman. She fought poverty and worked as a janitor of apartment buildings to feed her family,” relatives of Ličoska told Taneski. For his article he also interviewed her son Duko: “Two days after the disappearance of my mother, I informed the police. I talked to the residents of the buildings where my mother used to work and searched around a bit for clues, but I couldn’t find any traces of her. The police told me they are on the case.” The town was once again in a frenzy, brought to the verge of a nervous breakdown. The worst fears were confirmed when Ličoska’s body was found discarded by the Strazha ridge on the Gostivar-Kičevo road, near a Lukoil gas station. She had been slain in an identical manner to Simjanoska: raped and strangled, bound with cable and stuffed in a plastic bag. According to the coroner, the deed had been committed just days before, which meant that the woman, who had been missing for three months, had been kept somewhere as a hostage during all that time, fed and kept alive, repeatedly tortured and raped. “The new crime is Kičevo’s top story,” Taneski wrote with much fanfare in an article for Utrinski Vesnik (Morning Herald) on February 6, 2008. “Rumors abound. While the police are working on the case, the majority of people in Kičevo think that this murder is related to the double homicide in Malkoetz and Kičevo, when two older citizens were killed for a very small sum of money.” But how could that be, when the criminals convicted of Simjanoska’s murder were already behind bars? In the same article Taneski suggested that Ličoska might have been hit by a car, and the driver, instead of taking her to the hospital, had decided to take advantage of her in the most hideous manner. The police knew better but kept their own council. “The Kičevo police have not announced a suspect yet, but, according to our sources, the investigation is on its way to solving the case,” Taneski reported. But before the police could make an arrest, yet another body, that of Živana Temelkoska, was found raped and strangled, bound with cable and stuffed in a plastic bag. The pattern was painfully familiar, as was the profile of the victim: a sixty-five-year-old woman who had once worked as a custodian at the local primary school and lived in the same section of town as the other victims. She had disappeared on May 7, 2008, but unlike the previous women, was found dead just a week later. Her mutilated corpse, naked under a peignoir, had been thrown on a rubbish heap outside of town, next to an open field that was the home of the local soccer team, Vlazrimi. The autopsy showed numerous external and internal injuries, including five broken ribs and thirteen cuts on the skull. Cruelty and outrageous perversion had guided her executioner, who had violated his victim with a glass bottle, a vial of aftershave, cotton, and gauze. Semen was also extracted from her body, as in the case of Simjanoska. By chance, the victim’s cell phone was discovered near a kindergarten on the other end of town, apparently thrown out of a moving car. Terror gripped Kičevo. Older women were afraid to go out alone and mothers would not let their children play in the streets. On May 19, Taneski wrote in Nova Makedonija, “The people of Kičevo are living in fear and panic after another butchered body of a woman from town was found over the weekend. The local police, as well as the town populace, see the mysterious disappearances and terrible deaths of Živana Temelkoska and Lubica Ličoska as the work of a single person—a serial killer.” And most troubling of all, though his victims fit a clear profile, no one knew for sure how the killer selected his targets. “The motives of the Kičevo monster,” wrote Taneski, “are still unclear.” To see if he could uncover what investigators might be withholding, Taneski interviewed police detectives working on the case. He reported, “Officials from the Ministry of Interior say that they have several suspects, all of them from Kičevo. They were interrogated and released. There is confirmation that traces from the murderer have been found on both victims, and those are now being analyzed.” Taneski also wanted to interview Temelkoska’s relatives, asking them for specific details about the case. When did they last see her? What were their versions of the events? Did they suspect anyone? It would be easy, he told his editors, because the Temelkoski family resided just a few houses down from him on 11th of September, the name of Taneski’s street (so called for the first time Kičevo was liberated from the fascists in 1943). The Temelkoskis were his neighbors. In fact, all of the victims had lived in his neighborhood.