Ondrej Rigo

Ondrej Rigo (17 December 1955 – 14 June 2022) was a Slovak serial killer and necrophile who targeted women in Bratislava, Munich and Amsterdam from 1990 to 1992.

He served a life sentence until his death for nine murders and one attempted murder in Leopoldov Prison in Slovakia.

Rigo was diagnosed with a schizoid personality disorder and an antisocial personality disorder as well as necrophilia, finding pleasure in having intercourse with women with mutilated heads.

Rigo remains the Slovak murderer with the highest number of victims and he is also the most prolific serial killer in modern Slovak history.

Ondrej Rigo has a daughter.

According to an article in the Slovak newspaper SME, Rigo was of Roma ethnicity.

Even as an adult, Rigo was a man of short stature.

When he was 14, he, along with his siblings, was taken into a youth corrective institution and later into an orphanage.

They stayed there for a year, having been taken from their mother after their father's arrest.

The last time period he was in police custody in Slovakia (at that time Czechoslovakia) was from 28 September 1989, to 9 December 1989, because of unauthorised leaving of the Republic, which was illegal under communist rule.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of communism in Czechoslovakia, people were allowed once again to travel freely in Europe; Rigo then continued with his crimes abroad.

On 9 December 1989, the same day he was released from prison (and three weeks after the start of the Velvet Revolution), he traveled to Vienna without any valid passport.

There, he acquired a fake Yugoslavian passport in the name of "Nedo Ikic".

Later, he traveled to West Germany to meet his brother.

In Bavaria, he asked for asylum, using his fake passport.

He was, however, sentenced by the German authorities to two months in prison for forging documents.

He spent his sentence in a prison in Bad Reichenhall.

After his release from prison, Rigo escaped from a refugee camp and traveled to Munich, where he continued his burglaries and started his killing spree.

An important factor in Ondrej Rigo's conviction was his consistent modus operandi:

After arriving at Munich, Rigo murdered twice in three months.

His first victim, Helena S. (40), probably surprised Rigo while he was burglarizing her apartment.

"He killed her and got aroused sexually," recalled Anton Heretik, author of Rigo's psychological evaluation during investigation.

On the night from 7 June to 8 June 1990, he sneaked through a partially open window into the ground floor bedroom of Helena S. at an unspecified location in Munich.

Rigo smashed her head with a 2.5 kilogram metal pipe, wrapped the upper part of her body in a blanket, and raped her corpse.

Before leaving, he may have stolen some easily portable valuables.

He disposed of the murder weapon directly beneath the bedroom window.

On the night between 31 July and 1 August 1990, Rigo snuck through the partially open balcony door and into the Munich apartment of Ilka Z. (27), murdering her, again using a metal pipe.

Rigo's mother died in 2000 after being hit by a car.

Learning of her death is the only time Rigo recalls ever crying in his life.

His father died during a burglary.

Rigo claimed he liked both parents.

(My) parents were good, they didn't beat me.

He was married two times.

His first marriage was during his military service (compulsory in Czechoslovakia at that time), but "when we returned to Bratislava she started to become jealous. You know, an Easterner [meaning from Eastern Slovakia, a culturally and linguistically distinct region of the country], so she returned to Poprad. I went with her to say goodbye at the station," recalls Rigo.

Little was known about his second marriage.

The woman he was with in the movie theatre on the night of his last murder is being referred to as his "partner".

In Bratislava, Rigo worked in Hotel Carlton, where he was arrested.

Before that, he worked as a fireman in the boiler room for the Pravda newspaper, a hospital on Bezručova Street as well as a hospital on Šulekova Street, having also completed his gasman certification (plynárske skúšky in Slovak).

Before committing his first murder, Rigo had already been convicted of crimes 11 times.

He was a criminal from an early age, focusing mainly on home burglaries.