On the early morning of January 31st, 1981, a man walking through a small park in Brno noticed a young woman lying in the snow. Her purse was nearby, her identification was inside, and her money was there, her jewelry was there, and even the watch on her wrist was there. Whatever had happened in that park, robbery was certainly not the point. The woman was Ivana Matlová.

Only a few hours before, she had been at a dance hosted by the Brno Zoo, laughing with a friend and making plans for the following night. Now, an examining doctor was looking at a body covered with almost forty shallow stab wounds. Her clothing had been cut away and parts of her body had been removed. And the person who did this had not thrown those parts into the river, buried them in the woods, or left them at the scene.

He put them in a plastic shopping bag, carried them onto a train, rode them all the way back to Prague, and stored them in his refrigerator. For roughly a week, he kept them there. He used them while reliving the murder. Then eventually, he boiled some of the tissue in salted water and tried to eat it with mustard and horseradish.

This is not an urban legend and it is not a detail invented years later to make an old case sound worse. It came out of the confession of a man who killed Ivana and it became part of one of the most grotesque serial murder investigations in Czechoslovak history. His name was Ladislav Hojer and by the time police finally got him into an interrogation room, Ivana was only one of the women he had left behind. Hojer’s crimes are often summarized with only one word: cannibal.

Because that is the detail that gets everyone’s attention. But if you reduce this story to just that, you miss what made him so dangerous. He was not a man who committed one bizarre killing. He was a roaming sexual predator who learned over several years that if he traveled far enough from home, chose women at random, and left almost nothing linking himself to them, he could simply get back on a train and disappear back into his ordinary life.

For a while, that worked incredibly well. His victims were killed in different cities, different settings, years apart: beside a river, inside moving trains, at a reservoir, and finally a few hundred yards from his own home. Over time, he got messy. What finally exposed him was not some brilliant piece of modern technology.

It was a mentally ill man repeating one tiny detail that had never been released to the public, and the realization that the person who told him that tiny detail was a quiet, awkward man named Ladislav Hojer. This is the story of five murdered women, one still without a name, and a killer whose most horrifying behavior was hidden behind one of the least intimidating personalities imaginable. Hojer was born on March 15th, 1958. Nothing in his early public record reads like a biography of a future monster.

In fact, the recurring description is almost the opposite. He was awkward, withdrawn, physically ungainly, not especially bright, and easy for other people to dismiss. His father died of cancer in 1969 when Hojer was still a boy. His mother remarried, but she also died of cancer in 1979 at only 47.

His stepfather eventually moved away after remarrying, leaving Ladislav and his brother Jaroslav in the family apartment in Prague’s Malá Strana district. Hojer had attended a special school and trained as a glazier. Later, psychological testing put his IQ at around 88. Co-workers remembered a man who was frequently broke, poorly dressed, hungry, and late for work.

He was socially clumsy. One woman who worked with him said he would buy an absurdly simple lunch, rolls and milk, and sometimes accepted food from her almost like a child. He was also physically stronger than people assumed. Glazing meant handling large sheets of glass day after day, and investigators later noticed the strength in his hands and fingers.

It also gave him a professional familiarity with sharp cutting tools. The knife eventually tied to his final murder was a curved, extremely sharp cutting knife associated with his trade. The other constant thing in Hojer’s life was his inability to form a normal relationship with women. He told investigators that he had never had a serious girlfriend and never had consensual sex.

Friends once tried to set him up with a willing woman at a party, but according to investigators, Hojer essentially panicked when the situation became genuinely intimate and fled the room. Another attempt at a date through a matchmaking service ended after only minutes. That is not to say that loneliness explains murder, because millions of awkward, isolated men never hurt anybody. But what it does help explain is the contrast.

Around women who could reject him, Hojer was timid and useless. But around a woman he had already overpowered, he suddenly had absolute control. That difference, fear versus control, became the center of his entire sexual violence. Before police even knew his name, specialists studying one of his crime scenes independently predicted a sexually sadistic offender: socially isolated, emotionally cold, unable to form normal relationships with women, probably young, lean or maybe a little muscular, and likely a manual laborer.

They did not get every detail right, but they came extremely close. On November 1st, 1978, Hojer was twenty years old and, as far as the police were concerned, completely clean. He had no murder record, no serious criminal history, and nothing that would make an investigator looking at a dead woman in Děčín think of a young glazier from Prague. He had gone to Děčín specifically to look for a woman.

That night, he found twenty-nine-year-old Eva Řeřichová. She had gone to the cinema with her husband. Their marriage was troubled, and after a long argument around the end of the movie, Eva deliberately lost him in the crowd outside. She walked off alone toward the area near the Elbe River.

The attack was fast. Hojer grabbed at her. Eva tried to get away. He chased her down, knocked her to the ground, and moved her further away from view.

He stripped away her clothing and strangled her. The body was left in a grassy area on Labská Street, right on the bank of the Elbe, only about fifty meters from the nearest home. The autopsy found death by strangulation. Police had no useful witness placing Hojer there.

There was no obvious link to Prague. And because Eva had a complicated personal life, investigators had plenty of people much closer to her to examine first. All of that work went nowhere, because the actual killer was already back in Prague. Eva Řeřichová was his first proven murder and nothing about the investigation connected it to what would come next.

By February 1980, Hojer was serving his compulsory military service. During leave, he returned to Prague and then decided to travel north again toward Děčín. That same night, twenty-five-year-old medical student Ivana Springlová had reason to feel good about her life. On February 8th, she had passed one of the most difficult examinations of her second-to-last semester.

Later, she attended a dance at Prague’s Hotel International with her husband, a military officer. They did not yet have a home of their own. Ivana divided her time between a student dormitory in Prague and her parents’ home in Děčín. After the dance, her husband escorted her to the 2:30 a.

m. overnight train. He stepped into the carriage with her, stayed for a few minutes, then stood on the platform talking to her through the window until the train pulled away. When it left Prague, Ivana was alone in the train.

Hojer noticed her. He admitted that he moved through the train looking for a carriage with fewer people and eventually saw Ivana sitting by herself reading. He lingered in the corridor and watched her. About half an hour into the journey, Ivana got up and walked toward the restroom and Hojer followed.

Using a key, he manipulated a simple lock from the outside. He entered the cramped compartment and attacked her. He strangled Ivana with her own white scarf and forced himself upon her after she was no longer able to resist. Then he locked the restroom again so it appeared occupied, left the carriage, and eventually got off the train at a random stop.

Roughly two hours later, he caught a train back toward Prague. Ivana’s body stayed inside that restroom until the train reached Děčín and was taken out of service. Around eight in the morning, a member of the railway cleaning crew opened the compartment and found her. This murder generated an enormous investigation.

Police reconstructed the train’s passenger list and identified forty-six of an estimated forty-seven passengers. The missing forty-seventh traveler was a soldier who never responded to public appeals. That soldier was Hojer. The third murder is the one that still feels unfinished.

In August 1980, while still in the military, Hojer traveled east to visit a friend in Košice. From there, he went toward the Ružín Reservoir, which is now Slovakia. The weather was poor and the shoreline was quiet. There he encountered a woman walking alone.

She was probably between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, and her name has never been established. Hojer attacked her, forced her to the ground, and forced himself upon her while choking her. When she became unresponsive, he left her for a moment, searched the area, found a length of wire, and returned. He bound the body tightly and fastened a stone to it.

Then he pushed the body out into deeper water until it sank. Afterwards, in one of those details that tells you how completely disconnected he was from what he had just done, Hojer actually used the opportunity to go for a swim before getting dressed and walking back toward the train. The body was not discovered until October 11th, 1981, more than a year later, when someone in a small boat noticed what initially looked like a large tire floating in the reservoir. By then, decomposition was very advanced.

The head and parts of the hands were no longer attached. Importantly, the forensic description did not suggest that Hojer had deliberately moved them. Investigators attributed that loss to decomposition and the pressure of the wire. The woman’s clothing and shoes did suggest she may have been Czechoslovak, but Ružín attracted visitors from neighboring countries too.

Police compared her against missing women across the country and never found a match. So one of Hojer’s five proven victims entered the case file without a name and decades later still has none. What eventually linked Hojer to her was not DNA or fingerprints. It was his own memory.

Hojer identified landmarks other investigators did not know about and demonstrated the way he had bound and sunk the body. Czech television’s archive still preserves footage from that reconstruction. There is something especially bleak about this victim. Hojer eventually got a name in books, documentaries, and court records, but she never did.

Then came Brno. On the night of January 30th into the 31st, 1981, Brno was busy with winter dances. Three formal events were happening around the city. One of them was the Brno Zoo’s dance at a restaurant called Havelská.

Ivana Matlová was a young woman from Brno, the daughter of a locally known musician and performer. She attended with her friend Anna. They danced, talked, turned down invitations to keep the night going elsewhere, and eventually left shortly before three in the morning. The two friends rode the tram together until they reached a point where their routes home separated.

Before saying goodbye, they made plans for Saturday, probably a disco. Then they waved, the tram moved on, and Ivana started the remaining walk home. Hojer had been roaming Brno for hours. He saw Ivana near a tram stop and approached her.

According to his later account, he tried to engage her and suggested going somewhere for the night. She refused and the interaction turned threatening. He forced her toward a park near Jánská Street, not far from where she lived. Ivana resisted him.

Hojer pulled her down, cut at her clothes with a knife, tried to force himself upon her, and then strangled her. Once she stopped moving, he stayed with the body. What happened after that is where the crime went beyond the pattern police had seen in his other murders. Using a knife with a blade around twelve centimeters long, Hojer inflicted close to forty shallow stab wounds across Ivana’s body.

The wounds were not what killed her, though. The later behavioral profile interpreted them as part of the sexualized destruction of the body rather than an efficient attempt to cause death. He then removed both breasts and genital tissue. He put what he had taken into a plastic shopping bag and boarded a train back to Prague.

At home, Hojer placed the tissue in the refrigerator. He later admitted that for about a week he used it while pleasuring himself and replaying the murder in his mind. Eventually he boiled some of it in salted water and tasted it with mustard and horseradish. He said he was curious but he did not like the result and he threw away what remained, including the cooking pot.

That confession was difficult for even Hojer to give. During questioning, he initially lied about what he had done with the missing tissue. He claimed that he just threw it away. Later, with his head in his hands and long pauses between answers, he admitted he had taken it home and consumed parts of it.

Meanwhile, back in Brno, Ivana’s murder had become a nightmare for investigators. Her bag, money, jewelry, and identification had been left near the body, so robbery did not make much sense. The mutilation was so unusual that police brought in psychiatrists and psychologists to create a behavioral profile of the unknown killer. That is quite advanced for that time.

They concluded they were looking for a dangerous sexual sadist, someone likely isolated and emotionally cold and poor at relationships with women, but physically capable enough of overpowering a victim. Ivana’s killer remained free. And if Hojer had kept following his old pattern, traveling away from Prague, attacking a stranger, and immediately going home, there is a real possibility that he would have remained undetected for much longer. Instead, on October 3rd, 1981, he hunted almost in his own backyard.

Anna Stašná was fifty-one years old and lived in Prague’s Malá Strana district. She enjoyed classical music. That Saturday, she attended concerts, including an evening performance that ended shortly before 9:30. She took the tram home and a little after ten walked toward the small bridge over the Malostranský stream.

Hojer had been lurking in that area for around an hour. He later said that he watched women pass and waited for one who was alone. When Anna approached, he apparently assumed from her figure that she was much younger. He spoke to her briefly.

The entire conversation, including the greeting, amounted to only a few sentences. Then he attacked. Hojer used his razor-sharp work knife to slice through Anna’s clothing with an unusually clean cut. He dragged her from the path, forced himself upon her, and strangled her.

Clothing was pulled over her head and neck, hiding the ligature beneath it. Several people in nearby homes heard a woman scream. It was nighttime. Television was on and no one understood what the sound meant.

Roughly eighteen hours later, somebody passing by found Anna’s body in the bush. Her son had been looking for her. He arrived at the sealed-off scene and identified his mother. This murder appeared to bother Hojer in ways that others had not.

The scene was only about three hundred meters from his apartment. He walked through the area routinely. There was a small memorial near the bridge and neighbors talked. The murder followed him into the pub where he drank, and Hojer did something almost unbelievable.

He started telling people he had done it. Friends later remembered him pointing out the site and joking that he was the killer. He warned another acquaintance to carry a knife in Malá Strana because people were being murdered there. And at the same time, he sometimes acted genuinely frightened of the unknown killer and slept at friends’ homes rather than stay alone.

The break in the case came months later through a man named Jiří Slavomír Donát, a psychiatric patient who had told police that he had killed Anna. The confession sounded serious for one reason. Donát knew Anna had been strangled with her own clothes, a detail the press had not been given. There was one problem.

Donát had been securely confined on the night that Anna died. He eventually explained that a friend had shown him the murder location, told him the victim’s age, and described the hidden strangulation detail. That friend’s name was none other than Ladislav Hojer. On February 11th, 1982, detectives went into the glazing shop on Újezd Street where Hojer worked.

He walked out into the street with them like one more routine suspect among thousands. He was twenty-three years old. Within hours, the routine suspect had confessed to murdering Anna. The first major interrogation under investigator Jiří Markovič lasted about eight hours, from ten at night till around six in the morning.

Markovič later remembered Hojer as painfully slow. He would stop for long stretches, blink repeatedly, twitch, shake his head, and then continue. The investigators did not need to scream at him. They drank coffee and just waited.

More importantly, they did not rely on the confession alone. Microscopic fibers recovered from Anna’s clothing matched fibers from clothes Hojer had worn. Fibers from Anna’s garments were found on his jeans and jacket. His biological blood group characteristics matched material recovered from the victim.

And he identified the specialized curved knife that he had used to cut her clothing; experts concluded that it could have produced the unusually clean slices seen at the scene. Markovič was satisfied that they had Anna’s killer. He was not satisfied that Anna was Hojer’s first victim. So instead of asking Hojer to confess to a specific unresolved case, he gave him paper and told him to think about anything else that he had done.

About a week later, Hojer returned it with a handwritten list. Most of it was sexual misconduct, exhibitionism, and attempted assaults. But next to a line for Brno, he had drawn a cross. That cross opened Ivana Matlová’s case.

Months later, he admitted the murder of Ivana Springlová on the night train. In November, he added the Ružín woman and Eva Řeřichová. He did not simply give police names from newspapers. In some cases, he did not even know the victims’ names at all.

He gave routes, physical details, actions, and locations that could be checked against old files and then reenacted during reconstructions. The irony is brutal. Hojer’s geographical strategy had protected him for years. The same thing that made his crimes difficult to connect, his habit of traveling around Czechoslovakia, also gave investigators a powerful test once he confessed.

Could this man from Prague really walk them to a five-year-old murder site in Děčín? Could he reproduce the lock trick inside the exact type of railway restroom? Could he guide officers around Ružín and describe a defunct railway stop? Again and again, the answer was yes.

By the end of 1982, investigators were no longer looking at one murder in Malá Strana. They were looking at a serial killer whose confirmed crimes stretched across the entire country. The surviving photographs and film from the reconstructions are among the strangest visual records in this case. Police took Hojer back to the places where the women had been attacked.

In the train case, they recreated the carriage arrangement and even put him in military clothing. At Ružín, Markovič himself had to act as the stand-in during part of one demonstration because the local team had not provided a suitable participant. And investigators learned very quickly that using a real woman as a stand-in around Hojer was a very bad idea. During one reconstruction, Hojer became sexually aroused while demonstrating how he had strangled a victim.

The procedure had to be stopped. After that, mannequins were used for the most dangerous portions. At other times, the reconstructions had the opposite effect. Hojer became visibly shaken.

His hands trembled and he had to sit down. Whatever was happening to him internally, the reenactments forced him to stand in the exact places where the fantasy had become reality. Markovič’s relationship with him became bizarrely close over the two-year investigation. Hojer seemed to attach himself to the detective as a substitute parent.

On the ride back from one reconstruction, he rested his head on Markovič’s shoulder and actually fell asleep. He sent the investigator little notes and sought praise. Sometimes he behaved less like a man accused of five murders than a neglected kid thrilled that an adult was finally paying attention to him. That dynamic never meant Markovič excused him.

But it did mean he understood that keeping Hojer talking was the best chance of finding the truth. Markovič later said he suspected there may have been additional murders, but the investigation never proved them. They were also wary of creating the opposite problem with Hojer. Once he understood that confessing kept the investigation going, they did not want him claiming crimes that he had not committed simply to prolong the attention.

But the five murders were not Hojer’s entire pattern of violence. On his handwritten notes, he admitted to eighteen rapes, attempts, or other related sexual attacks. He was not ultimately convicted for those eighteen incidents, in part because several victims could not or would not identify him later. One surviving woman’s account showed just how close some of those attacks came to becoming murder number six.

In August 1981, only weeks before Anna Stašná was killed, a twenty-one-year-old woman was attacked near a tram stop in Prague. She described being dragged into a park, strangled until she faded in and out of consciousness, beaten, raped, and threatened with death. At one point, she managed to get back toward the street. Hojer caught her, slammed her head against the pavement, and continued hitting her.

Voices from nearby finally interrupted the attack, so she ran and Hojer did not follow. Details Hojer later gave police matched the woman’s original statement, but when it came to identifying him formally, she did not. Markovič said he understood why women might refuse to relive a deeply stigmatizing assault and public prosecution. That leaves an uncomfortable reality around this case.

The five women who died are the visible center of Hojer’s record, but there was a much wider range of women who survived him and then had to keep living with what he had done. Hojer underwent extensive psychiatric and psychological evaluation. The experts did not find psychosis that prevented him from understanding reality. They concluded he knew what he was doing, could control his behavior, and took practical steps to avoid being caught.

In interviews, he could talk about murder and mutilation with shocking emotional flatness. Staff noted that he often seemed cheerful in custody and showed little visible concern about the crimes. He could feel embarrassment about describing certain sexual details, but embarrassment alone is not remorse. Markovič was explicit on that point.

He saw shame in Hojer, but he did not see genuine regret for the women. The experts also rejected the idea that Hojer’s slightly below-average intelligence excused him. He was capable of planning, delaying gratification, traveling to distant locations, choosing isolated victims, and returning home after the crimes. In other words, the same man who appeared socially helpless could become frighteningly highly functional when the goal was violence.

By then, Hojer had started to understand what five murder confessions could mean in a country that still had the death penalty. He had spent much of the investigation talking, writing lists, guiding police through reconstructions, and supplying details that solved old murders. Then, once the court process became real, he tried to pull it all back. At the Prague Municipal Court, Hojer withdrew his confessions and claimed he had been exhausted and psychologically pressured during questioning.

He insisted he could not have done some of the things he had described. The court rejected the recantation. On November 9th, 1984, Ladislav Hojer was sentenced to death for five murders. The Czech Supreme Court upheld the sentence in April of 1985.

A further review found no violation of law later that year. On July 4th, 1986, President Gustáv Husák refused clemency. On August 7th, 1986, Hojer was executed by hanging. He was twenty-eight years old.

Jiří Markovič was not there. The day before the execution, the investigator who had spent years extracting the story from Hojer suffered a cardiac event and was in intensive care when the sentence was carried out. Ladislav Hojer is remembered because the details of his crimes are almost impossible to forget: a woman murdered inside a moving train, a woman weighted into a reservoir, body parts carried home in a shopping bag and stored in a refrigerator only to be eaten. It is the kind of case where the offender’s behavior can swallow the entire story.

But these women were people. They were somebody’s wife, mother, friend, daughter, and most of them were young women. They were twenty-five, twenty-nine, twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and a lot of them had been studying medicine, dancing, married, passing difficult exams, or just riding the train after a fun night. These are completely ordinary things we all do all the time, and ordinary reasons to be outside.

A movie, a train ride home, a walk beside a reservoir, a dance or a concert. Hojer turned ordinary moments into crime scenes because he learned that strangers were easier to hunt than people who knew him. For years, distance kept those women from being connected to one another. In the end, the thing that finally broke the protection was his own need to talk and brag about what he had done.

He had spent years making sure his victims did not know his name, and then he could not stop telling people his.