Nikolay Soltis – a serial killer and... a parishioner of Adam Bondaruk's church
Nikolay Soltis, a parishioner of Adam Bondaruk’s church, on August 20, 2001, at a family party, stabbed to death his pregnant wife, uncle, aunt, and two of their grandchildren, after which he fled, taking his three-year-old son with him, whom he stabbed to death a few days later. Soltis was a «believing» thug. Before the tragedy, they tried to «correct» him with the «pastor» of the «Bethany» church. The murders began because of a «long tongue» and a «tainted reputation» in the church.
Quote from the article:
Sacramento Police Chief James Lewis stated that this is one of the most terrible crimes he has ever encountered. According to experts, the criminal, who had been declared mentally unstable back in Ukraine, is «playing» with the police. Thus, the message found in the car was scrawled on the back of a photograph of Nikolay. And on the dust-covered windshield of the car, Soltis wrote: «Try to catch me.» The criminal has a panicky fear of firearms and committed all the murders using a huge homemade knife.
In prison, he committed suicide, while in isolation, under round-the-clock video surveillance, with millions of dollars worth of security equipment.
Melor Sturua
The «Bethany» church that day was filled to capacity. Here, in the northern part of the city of Sacramento, the capital of California, more than five thousand people came. And the security was unusual — troopers of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, state police, FBI agents, and other law enforcement agencies. According to eyewitnesses, the authorities take such precautions only during funerals of high-ranking officials. But in six open coffins lay not ministers, not senators, not millionaires, but very ordinary people who had recently come to America in search of a better life. Instead, they found death here. Next to the three coffins for adults stood three children’s coffins. In them lay the bodies of the victims of serial killer Nikolay Soltis: his wife Lyubov, 22 years old, his son — three-year-old Seryozha, his uncle and aunt — Pyotr and Galina Kukharsky, who were over seventy years old, and cousins — a boy and a girl, aged 8 and 9.
The funeral service lasted four hours. People wept and wailed. Among them were eight of Soltis’s remaining relatives, including his mother Varvara. All of them are under close police supervision. They are being kept in a secret location. But they were allowed to attend the funeral-farewell. That is why the church was guarded so carefully, especially since the authorities do not rule out that the killer may not have fled far, but stayed in the Sacramento area. Sheriff Lou Blanas reported this, saying that the authorities are dealing with a «cold-blooded, cunning killer, well-armed and dangerous.»
Most of the people who came to Bethany Church were evangelical Christians, refugees from the former Soviet Union who had settled in Sacramento over the past decade. Religion was what cemented these people together and became the main reason for the growth of their community, which now numbers around eighty thousand people.
Hailing primarily from Ukraine, they spread out across various neighborhoods of Sacramento. They include Pentecostals, Baptists, and members of other sects that were persecuted back home. Their main exodus took place at the end of the 1980s. These emigrants now have their own newspapers, directories—the so-called “Yellow Pages”—their own restaurants, grocery stores, and small businesses. And, of course, churches. The main languages are Russian and Ukrainian. According to school superintendent Dave Gordon, his school once had just a few children from the former Soviet Union, whereas now there are 130. “Most of them come to us not knowing any English,” he told a reporter from The New York Times.
Why did these people, representatives of religious sects, pick Sacramento in particular?
It is difficult to give a comprehensive answer to that question right now. Yet, according to local residents, a significant role was played by religious radio commentaries beamed into the Soviet Union over many years by the first wave of refugees and emigrants here. Among them, a certain Mikhail Loktev stood out; he became president of the “Slavic Community Center” of Sacramento. He was also a radio preacher. His program was called “A Word to Russia.” It had been on the air since 1972. Another magnetic factor drawing refugees to Sacramento was the local American churches that offered them shelter and work. In an interview with the same New York Times reporter, Loktev said, “We created a network of people who would receive the early refugees.” His own family had also been taken in by Americans when he fled to America in 1950.
Among the emigrants, one can easily detect a rift that has opened up between the Christian fundamentalists and the rest of the Slavic community. Take, for example, the “Northern California Ukrainian Heritage Club.” To some it is a club; to others it is a den of iniquity. The club has about 800 members. But religious fanatics and their flocks steer clear of it, because the club holds dances—both folk and secular. On that basis, club members are branded “godless sinners.”
That, in brief, is the community—incidentally, the largest Slavic-evangelical community in the United States—in whose midst a horrific mass murder took place. (The police still do not know its motives.) The perpetrator, Nikolai Soltis, came to America with his parents in 1998. The Soltises first settled in New York, then a year ago moved to Sacramento, where their relatives were living. Literally two months before his string of murders, Soltis moved with his wife and son into his own house. The house was in North Highlands, on the northeastern outskirts of Sacramento County. It was a shabby one-storey little house whose porch these days is buried in flowers brought by sympathetic neighbors.
According to information obtained from relatives, Soltis was a shoemaker by trade, but he had no steady job in the States. He had no criminal record, but he had a violent temper, beat his wife, and engaged in extortion. According to Captain John McGuinness of the sheriff’s office, Soltis was a “bully” who, through threats and sometimes force, took money and welfare checks from people—mainly from the elderly, including relatives, among them the uncle and aunt he murdered.
His wife, who was afraid of him and whom he regularly beat, initially refused to leave Ukraine and join him. Only a year ago, to her misfortune, did she consent to follow her husband—her future murderer. “She came to America with great hesitation,” her older brother Anatoly Nakonechny said at the memorial service. According to neighbors, Lyuba looked depressed in her final days before her death. And on the day of her terrible murder she was supposed to start work as a cashier. She never got to stand behind the cash register. Her husband settled scores with her before that. Both Lyuba and the uncle and aunt Soltis killed were active members of Bethany Church.
The most horrific crime Soltis committed was the killing of his three-year-old son; the details are bloodcurdling. After murdering his wife and four relatives, Soltis sped away in his car, all bloody and disheveled, to his mother’s house, where his little son Seryozha was. Giving testimony to the police, the killer’s mother initially said that Soltis “looked perfectly normal,” but then she changed her story. She admitted that Nikolai was covered in blood and had to wash himself. After washing up, this monster forcibly took his grandson from his grandmother and left her house, leaving his car outside.
When police later searched the car, they found a photograph of Soltis’s wife and son attached to the windshield. On the back of the photograph, it indicated where Seryozha could be found. In addition, Soltis had scribbled in Russian: “За ее язык.” When the police translated the phrase into English — “For her tongue” — they were baffled. A common Russian idiom comes out as gibberish in English. Local Russian residents explained to the sheriffs that “For her tongue” meant “for her chattering.” Police found Seryozha’s body the next day at the location Soltis had indicated—on a garbage dump, inside a topless cardboard television box. Inside the box lay a three-year-old child with his throat cut and completely new toys. Investigators surmise that Soltis had lured the boy to the dump with these toys. Before death, Soltis had raped the three-year-old boy.
At the end of last week, the killer’s mother appeared on a Russian TV channel and called on her son to repent and surrender to the authorities.
Authorities brought in police officers who speak Russian and Ukrainian to help search for the serial killer. There are few such officers in the United States, and they had to be scraped together from all over the country, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. …After the memorial service, the bodies of Lyuba and Serezha were sent by plane to Ukraine. The others were buried in the promised land — at the “Tikhaya Gavan” cemetery near the “Vifaniya” church.
Moskovsky Komsomolets ; August 29, 2001 Melor Sturua
Sergey SOLODKY, “Den”
After a ten-day search, American police detained Soltis in the garden near his mother’s house, where he had been hiding. Soltis’s frightened brother Stepan called the police there. The Ukrainian immigrant offered no resistance during the arrest. Police reported that the first interrogation had already taken place and that the suspect had refused legal assistance. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s consul in the US, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, traveled to Sacramento to ensure the rights of the arrested man, Interfax-Ukraine reports. According to Serhiy Borodenkov, acting head of the press service of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nikolai Soltis is considered a citizen of Ukraine because he has not declared his intention to renounce Ukrainian citizenship. Soltis’s name was placed by the FBI on the list of the 10 most dangerous people wanted by US authorities. A reward of 120,000 US dollars was offered for help in his capture.
Ukrainian agencies continue to monitor the situation. According to Foreign Minister Anatoliy Zlenko, the Soltis case is under the personal control of the President of Ukraine. The latter set the following task for the foreign policy department: “to ensure objective and impartial treatment of our citizens by the authorities of foreign states.” In this regard, a consular representative was sent to Sacramento. The minister reported that the consular representative was instructed to assist relatives, in particular with the transport of the coffins with the bodies of the deceased (Soltis’s wife and 3-year-old son) to the Ternopil region for burial.
Ukrainian emigrant Nikolai Soltis, accused of murdering six members of his family, was found hanged in his prison cell on Wednesday morning (evening Kyiv time). The 28-year-old Soltis was arrested on August 30 last year after a ten-day police search. Since then, he had been in the prison’s psychiatric ward three times. He spent four days undergoing evaluation right after his arrest. Three days after he injured himself with a pencil in October last year. Investigators at the time denied a suicide attempt. In November, he jumped from the second floor of the Sacramento prison building and broke his leg. After that, he spent 17 days in the psychiatric ward, but then returned to his cell again.
Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas could not name the reasons for Soltis’s suicide, although he noted that he was in a “state of constant depression.” The sheriff said that the defendant’s cell was under constant surveillance, equipped with a video camera, and that an hour before the Ukrainian hanged himself, prison guards had visited him, Reuters reported. Soltis’s attorney, Tommy Klinkenberg, expressed concern: “I want to hear the version of what happened. How could a person who is in isolation, under video surveillance, with security systems worth millions of dollars, end up dead.”
Earlier it was reported that on August 20, Soltis stabbed his 23-year-old pregnant wife Lyubov in a Sacramento suburb, then, having driven 24 kilometers to another suburb, he similarly killed his uncle and aunt and their two minor children, who were swimming in a pool. After that, according to the investigation, he took his three-year-old son Sergey from his mother’s house, whose body was later found in a cardboard box. The FBI subsequently listed Soltis as one of the ten most dangerous criminals. Only a week and a half later, he was found in his mother’s garden. Soltis explained his beastly murders in a note, which stated that his relatives had “poisoned” his reputation.
The preliminary hearings in the Soltis case were scheduled for March 19. It was expected that the prosecution would seek the death penalty or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
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Bloodthirsty California maniac Nikolai Soltis was sewing shoes in Ukraine three years ago
Dimitry BABICH, Irina RYBINSKAYA “FAKTY”
August 23, 2001
Yesterday, the police and the FBI found another victim of the killer — his three-year-old son Serezha. The whole world is anxiously following the events unfolding in the US state of California. As “FAKTY” already reported, on Monday, 27-year-old Ukrainian emigrant Nikolai Soltis went on a rampage in a Sacramento suburb, killing his pregnant wife, uncle, aunt, and their two grandchildren. The entire California police force was mobilized to search for Soltis, who, having kidnapped his own son, fled the crime scene in a car.
Unfortunately, the police failed to prevent another murder. When they found the car abandoned by Soltis, the three-year-old boy was already dead. There was a note in the car in which Nikolai indicated where the child could be found. Serezha’s body was found in a cardboard box not far from an abandoned substation in a neighboring town.
Sacramento Police Chief James Lewis stated that this was one of the most horrific crimes he has ever encountered. According to experts, the criminal, who had been declared mentally unstable back in Ukraine, is “playing” with the police. For instance, the message found in the car was scrawled on the back of a photograph of Nikolai. And on the dust-covered windshield of the car, Soltis wrote: “Try to catch me.” It is curious that even experienced psychologists cannot predict Soltis’s further actions. It is only known that the criminal has a panicked fear of firearms and commits all his murders using a huge homemade knife.
The tragedy could have happened three years ago — in Ukraine
Ukrainian sources do not yet provide precise information on Soltis. However, FAKTY managed to meet Igor and Maria Nakonechny, the parents of the brutally murdered 22-year-old Lyuba Soltis: they were trying to obtain a U.S. visa to attend their daughter’s funeral in the United States.
— Unfortunately, we will not be able to bring our daughter’s body home because it is very expensive, — said Igor Vladimirovich. — When we learned that Lyuba had been killed, our last hope was that our grandson Seryozha had survived. We wanted to take him to our home in Shumsk (Ternopil region), because we had raised him from the age of one and a half months. And today we learned that our grandson is dead.
According to Lyuba’s father, this bloody drama could have played out three years earlier, in Ukraine, when an enraged Nikolai Soltis attacked his wife with an axe. At that time the young family, together with Nikolai’s parents, was living in the village of Orishkovtsy not far from Shumsk. One evening Lyuba phoned her parents in Shumsk: “Come, or he’ll kill me!” Two of her brothers went to help their sister (the Nakonechnys had five children, Lyuba being the second youngest), but Nikolai lunged at them with the axe too. The police had to be called. The conflict was settled then, but Lyuba and one-and-a-half-month-old Seryozha moved in with her parents.
— In due time we begged our daughter not to marry him (Nikolai — Ed.), — laments Igor Vladimirovich. — She had always been obedient and accommodating, but for the first time in her life she went against her parents, firmly saying: “We love each other, and I will live with him.”
Even before the wedding, people around noticed oddities in Nikolai. He was rather abrupt in conversation, loved to drive recklessly, and kept an axe in a closet in his own house — for self-defense, as he explained. He and Lyuba lived together for only five years.
Soltis’s Uncle and Aunt Wanted to Return to Their Homeland
Nikolai Soltis left for America three years ago to be with his gravely ill father, who was on his deathbed. By the way, according to Lyuba’s relatives, Nikolai also mistreated his own parents. The Nakonechnys say that Nikolai was not taken into the army because of flat feet, not because of mental illness, as the Western press claims. In Ukraine, Nikolai made shoes that were very popular among his fellow villagers. But in America he turned out to be unneeded. There he lived not only on welfare but also on money left by his late father. Lyuba came to the USA only a year ago, yielding to the persuasion of her husband’s American relatives, and was due to give birth to their second child the following January. Soltis’s uncle and aunt planned to return to Ukraine that winter: the Kukharsky couple wanted to die in their homeland.
Yesterday, the military joined the search for Nikolai Soltis. The U.S. Air Force provided several helicopters and state-of-the-art tracking systems to assist the police. A reward of $10,000 has been offered for the capture of the criminal, but according to some reports, members of the so-called Russian mafia have already doubled the reward.
Incidentally, Americans claim that Soltis had no reason to commit the crimes: he was planning to enter college and had even successfully passed several exams.
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