Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
This is human record stories about the moment when
the human soul fractures, whentrust becomes weaponized, and
when truth itself getsrewritten.
(00:43):
Today, we go to a quiet town inMacedonia Kaicho, a place where
the streets close early, wherepeople greet each other by name,
and where, for years, one oftheir own wrote about the
community's darkest crimes whilesecretly committing them.
This is the story of Vladotanskyjournalist, father, husband, and
serial killer.
It's a story about words used ascamouflage, and how a man who
(01:05):
told the story of otherssuffering was, all along,
narrating his own.
Let's begin in the late 1990s.
Kaichvo sits in the mountains ofwestern Macedonia, a town
surrounded by fields and forest,a population barely over twenty
thousand.
Life here moves slowly.
There's one main square, acluster of cafes, and a single
local radio station.
(01:26):
And there's Vladotansky.
Born in nineteen fifty two, he'sa man who blends in.
Middle aged, polite, softspoken, with neatly combed hair
and glasses that give him ascholarly air.
He's been a journalist fordecades covering schools, town
council meetings, crime.
The kind of stories no one elsebothers to write.
Colleagues describe him asmeticulous, always with a
(01:48):
notebook, always chasing smallleads.
His editors say he'strustworthy.
In a small town, being areporter is a form of intimacy.
You know everyone's tragedies,you write them down.
But behind that familiarity,there's something closed off
about him.
He rarely jokes.
He doesn't stay long after work.
He writes, goes home, and takescare of his mother.
(02:10):
That last part is important.
His mother, Bladica, had workedfor years as a cleaner scrubbing
hospital floors, mopping schoolhallways.
A proud woman, but controllingcritical.
Friends would later recall thatVlato seemed afraid of her even
as an adult.
He obeyed, he served, he neverargued.
When his father took his ownlife in twenty two, and his
(02:32):
mother died soon after from whatsome called an accidental
overdose, something in Vlatobroke.
He kept working.
He kept writing.
But grief had created a silenceinside him one he would soon
fill with horror.
Between two thousand four andtwo thousand eight, Kaicho was
shaken by a string ofdisappearances.
Each victim was an older womanin her fifties or sixties poor,
(02:53):
often working as a cleaner orjanitor.
The first was Mitris Simjanaska.
November two thousand four.
She leaves home to go shoppingand never returns.
Her body was found two monthslater, in january two thousand
five, dumped near a local road.
She's been raped, tortured,strangled.
Police investigate.
Nothing.
No suspects, no leads.
(03:14):
Three years later, it happenedagain.
Lubika Lakoska, same profile.
Disappears in november twothousand seven.
Her body is found early 2008.
Bound with cords, assaulted,strangled.
And then a third JovannaTemelkraska, sixty five years
old, May 2008.
She receives a phone calltelling her that her son has
(03:34):
been injured, that she shouldcome quickly.
She leaves home in a rush.
She never comes back.
Her body was found ten dayslater, wrapped in plastic, bound
with a telephone cord.
Three women, all cleaners, allkilled with the same pattern
tortured, raped, strangled.
And the killer?
Still unknown.
The town panics.
(03:55):
Women start walking home ingroups.
Men whisper about a maniac onthe loose.
And in the local papers, onejournalist begins writing
detailed, emotional storiesabout the murders of
Vladotansky.
He writes about the fear inKaichvo.
He writes about the victims'lives their families, their last
moments.
He writes with compassion.
But also with detail, too muchdetail.
(04:17):
When the article about GiovannaTemukoska's murder ran,
investigators noticed somethingstrange.
The piece described the exactkind of cord used to bind her
hands, a specific brand oftelephone cable cut cleanly with
scissors.
But that information had neverbeen released publicly.
Only the killer and the policeknew.
At first, detectives assumed aleak inside the department.
(04:39):
They looked inward, questioningofficers.
But then, as they read more ofTainsky's previous stories, a
pattern emerged.
In each article, he mentioneddetails no journalist could
possibly know, the preciseposition of a body, what kind of
plastic bag covered it, how thevictims were dressed.
Tainsky wasn't quoting policesources.
He was writing like he'd beenthere.
(05:00):
One detective would later say hewrote as if he had seen the
bodies himself.
That's when suspicion turnedtoward the man holding the pen.
The police quietly beganmonitoring Tainsky.
They didn't want to scare himoff.
They took samples of hisarticles, his notes, his call
logs.
Then, in june two thousandeight, the lab results came back
from DNA testing on semen foundon one of the victims.
(05:23):
It matched Vlado Tansky.
On june twenty second, policearrested him at his home in
Kaispo.
Neighbors watched as the quietjournalist was led away in
handcuffs.
Inside his house, investigatorsfound phone cords, ropes,
women's clothing, andpornographic material depicting
violence and bondage.
In his basement traces of blood.
It was over.
(05:44):
The journalist who covered themurders was the murderer.
The question that hauntseveryone, why?
Psychologists would later callTainsky's crimes a manifestation
of deep resentment toward hismother a mix of anger,
humiliation, and dependence thatmetastasized into violence.
The victims weren't random.
They were symbolic.
They were his mother's doublesolder, working class women who
(06:05):
scrubbed floors and lived inpoverty.
By killing them, he wasn't justmurdering strangers.
He was reenacting a twisteddrama with his mother's ghost.
And yet, the most bizarreelement remains his need to
write about the murders.
What kind of killer documentshis own crimes in a newspaper?
Their theories.
Control.
Writing the story allowed him tocontrol not just the crime, but
(06:27):
its public perception to becomeboth killer and storyteller.
Pride.
His articles gained attention.
He became the go-to reporter onthe Kitchva murders.
Every time he published, hisstatus rose.
Confession.
On some level, maybe he wantedto be caught.
Each article leaked a little toomuch like a subconscious
admission.
Whatever the reason, it wasunprecedented, a journalist
(06:50):
writing his own downfall.
After his arrest, Tansky didn'tspeak much.
He denied the killings.
He said the DNA evidence was amistake.
But investigators were confidentthey had physical evidence,
matching cords, matchingdetails, matching DNA.
He was placed in a detentioncell in the city of Totovo.
It was june twenty third, twothousand eight, just one day
(07:11):
after his arrest.
At three M, guards found himdead.
His head was submerged in abucket of water.
The official report called itsuicide.
But many in Macedonia didn'tbelieve it.
How does a man drown himself ina bucket?
Was he silenced?
Was it guilt?
Or just another act of controldeciding how his story would
end.
Without a trial, the case closedovernight.
(07:33):
The question stayed open.
When the news broke, Keitvo wentsilent.
People who had known him fordecades couldn't reconcile the
image, the polite journalist whodrank coffee at the corner cafe,
and the man who raped and killedthree women.
One editor wept when police toldhim.
He said, Blato wrote about evil.
We never knew he was it.
(07:53):
The families of the victims weredevastated not only by the
crimes, but by the betrayal.
They'd spoken to him.
They'd trusted him to tell theirloved ones stories.
He'd sat in their kitchens,taken notes, nodded kindly, all
while knowing exactly what hadhappened because he had done it.
It was the ultimate violation.
Tainsky's crimes exposesomething bigger than one man's
(08:14):
pathology.
They reveal how proximity andtrust can become the perfect
camouflage for violence.
Serial killers often seekcontrol not only over victims,
but over narrative.
Most manipulate the story afterthe act.
They hide bodies, they sendtaunting letters.
But Tainsky's control wasabsolute.
He committed the crimes, thenreported them, shaping how his
(08:35):
town understood the danger.
He was the killer and thechronicler, the monster and the
messenger.
That's what makes this case sohaunting it blurs the line
between truth and fiction,journalism and manipulation,
storytelling and murder.
Because Tainsky died beforetrial, much of what we know is
speculative.
How many victims were there?
Police linked him to three, butsuspected a fourth a seventy
(08:58):
eight year old cleaner whovanished in two thousand three.
Was she the first?
The rehearsal?
Did anyone help him?
There's no proof, but somelocals believe others may have
known or suspected.
And what about his death?
Some point to irregularities.
No suicide note, no witnesses,an unlikely method.
Others believe guilt simplyconsumed him.
(09:19):
Whatever the truth, his deathrobbed investigators and the
victims' families of answers.
Let's stop for a moment andspeak their names again.
Mitra Samjanaska sixty four.
She had two children.
She loved tending her garden.
She cleaned offices for a livingand dreamed of retiring soon.
Lubika Lakoska fifty six, knownfor her laughter, her constant
(09:41):
singing while she worked.
Her daughter described her assunlight in tired shoes.
Jovanna Tamilkoska sixty five.
She adored her grandchildren.
She baked bread for the entireneighborhood every Sunday.
Her kindness made her everyone'sgrandmother.
They were ordinary women,invisible to most, and perhaps
that's why Tainsky chose thembecause society looks away from
(10:04):
the poor, the old, the cleaners.
But here, their stories mattermore than his.
Their lives are the wreckage heleft behind.
True crime often asks us to lookinto darkness to make sense of
what feels senseless.
But the Tainsky case forces usto question the very tools we
use to understand crime,storytelling, narrative, the act
of writing.
He weaponized those tools.
(10:25):
He used journalism, the pursuitof truth as a mask for deceit.
Every article he wrote blurredthe boundary between confession
and control.
It makes us ask, how well do weknow the voices we trust?
What happens when thestoryteller becomes the story?
In an age where media mediateseverything, Tansky's case
remains a warning.
The truth is only as clean asthe hands that write it.
(10:46):
When I think about Vlaotansky, Ithink about the layers of quiet.
The quiet of a small town atdusk, the quiet of a man writing
at his desk, the quiet of awoman walking home from work,
not knowing someone is followingher.
And finally, the quiet of a jailcell where a bucket of water
ends a life that took so manyothers.
In the end, Kaichvo's storyisn't just about murder.
(11:08):
It's about how evil can live inplain sight dressed in the
language of empathy, hidingbehind the authority of a
byline.
It's about the way pain ripplesthrough communities, across
years, across borders.
And it's about remembering thewomen who deserve far better
than to become footnotes in thestory of their killer.
Because they were the humanwreckage, the ones whose lives
were erased so that one mancould play God, author, and
(11:32):
monster all at once.
Thank you for listening to HumanWreckage.
If you or someone you know isaffected by violence, reach out,
you don't have to face it alone.
If this story moved you, shareit not for the killer's
notoriety, but for the victim'sdignity.
I'm Thomas.
Stay curious, stay kind, andnever stop questioning the
stories you're told.
This is human record stories about the moment when
the human soul fractures, whentrust becomes weaponized, and
when truth itself getsrewritten.
(00:43):
Today, we go to a quiet town inMacedonia Kaicho, a place where
the streets close early, wherepeople greet each other by name,
and where, for years, one oftheir own wrote about the
community's darkest crimes whilesecretly committing them.
This is the story of Vladotanskyjournalist, father, husband, and
serial killer.
It's a story about words used ascamouflage, and how a man who
(01:05):
told the story of otherssuffering was, all along,
narrating his own.
Let's begin in the late 1990s.
Kaichvo sits in the mountains ofwestern Macedonia, a town
surrounded by fields and forest,a population barely over twenty
thousand.
Life here moves slowly.
There's one main square, acluster of cafes, and a single
local radio station.
(01:26):
And there's Vladotansky.
Born in nineteen fifty two, he'sa man who blends in.
Middle aged, polite, softspoken, with neatly combed hair
and glasses that give him ascholarly air.
He's been a journalist fordecades covering schools, town
council meetings, crime.
The kind of stories no one elsebothers to write.
Colleagues describe him asmeticulous, always with a
(01:48):
notebook, always chasing smallleads.
His editors say he'strustworthy.
In a small town, being areporter is a form of intimacy.
You know everyone's tragedies,you write them down.
But behind that familiarity,there's something closed off
about him.
He rarely jokes.
He doesn't stay long after work.
He writes, goes home, and takescare of his mother.
(02:10):
That last part is important.
His mother, Bladica, had workedfor years as a cleaner scrubbing
hospital floors, mopping schoolhallways.
A proud woman, but controllingcritical.
Friends would later recall thatVlato seemed afraid of her even
as an adult.
He obeyed, he served, he neverargued.
When his father took his ownlife in twenty two, and his
(02:32):
mother died soon after from whatsome called an accidental
overdose, something in Vlatobroke.
He kept working.
He kept writing.
But grief had created a silenceinside him one he would soon
fill with horror.
Between two thousand four andtwo thousand eight, Kaicho was
shaken by a string ofdisappearances.
Each victim was an older womanin her fifties or sixties poor,
(02:53):
often working as a cleaner orjanitor.
The first was Mitris Simjanaska.
November two thousand four.
She leaves home to go shoppingand never returns.
Her body was found two monthslater, in january two thousand
five, dumped near a local road.
She's been raped, tortured,strangled.
Police investigate.
Nothing.
No suspects, no leads.
(03:14):
Three years later, it happenedagain.
Lubika Lakoska, same profile.
Disappears in november twothousand seven.
Her body is found early 2008.
Bound with cords, assaulted,strangled.
And then a third JovannaTemelkraska, sixty five years
old, May 2008.
She receives a phone calltelling her that her son has
(03:34):
been injured, that she shouldcome quickly.
She leaves home in a rush.
She never comes back.
Her body was found ten dayslater, wrapped in plastic, bound
with a telephone cord.
Three women, all cleaners, allkilled with the same pattern
tortured, raped, strangled.
And the killer?
Still unknown.
The town panics.
(03:55):
Women start walking home ingroups.
Men whisper about a maniac onthe loose.
And in the local papers, onejournalist begins writing
detailed, emotional storiesabout the murders of
Vladotansky.
He writes about the fear inKaichvo.
He writes about the victims'lives their families, their last
moments.
He writes with compassion.
But also with detail, too muchdetail.
(04:17):
When the article about GiovannaTemukoska's murder ran,
investigators noticed somethingstrange.
The piece described the exactkind of cord used to bind her
hands, a specific brand oftelephone cable cut cleanly with
scissors.
But that information had neverbeen released publicly.
Only the killer and the policeknew.
At first, detectives assumed aleak inside the department.
(04:39):
They looked inward, questioningofficers.
But then, as they read more ofTainsky's previous stories, a
pattern emerged.
In each article, he mentioneddetails no journalist could
possibly know, the preciseposition of a body, what kind of
plastic bag covered it, how thevictims were dressed.
Tainsky wasn't quoting policesources.
He was writing like he'd beenthere.
(05:00):
One detective would later say hewrote as if he had seen the
bodies himself.
That's when suspicion turnedtoward the man holding the pen.
The police quietly beganmonitoring Tainsky.
They didn't want to scare himoff.
They took samples of hisarticles, his notes, his call
logs.
Then, in june two thousandeight, the lab results came back
from DNA testing on semen foundon one of the victims.
(05:23):
It matched Vlado Tansky.
On june twenty second, policearrested him at his home in
Kaispo.
Neighbors watched as the quietjournalist was led away in
handcuffs.
Inside his house, investigatorsfound phone cords, ropes,
women's clothing, andpornographic material depicting
violence and bondage.
In his basement traces of blood.
It was over.
(05:44):
The journalist who covered themurders was the murderer.
The question that hauntseveryone, why?
Psychologists would later callTainsky's crimes a manifestation
of deep resentment toward hismother a mix of anger,
humiliation, and dependence thatmetastasized into violence.
The victims weren't random.
They were symbolic.
They were his mother's doublesolder, working class women who
(06:05):
scrubbed floors and lived inpoverty.
By killing them, he wasn't justmurdering strangers.
He was reenacting a twisteddrama with his mother's ghost.
And yet, the most bizarreelement remains his need to
write about the murders.
What kind of killer documentshis own crimes in a newspaper?
Their theories.
Control.
Writing the story allowed him tocontrol not just the crime, but
(06:27):
its public perception to becomeboth killer and storyteller.
Pride.
His articles gained attention.
He became the go-to reporter onthe Kitchva murders.
Every time he published, hisstatus rose.
Confession.
On some level, maybe he wantedto be caught.
Each article leaked a little toomuch like a subconscious
admission.
Whatever the reason, it wasunprecedented, a journalist
(06:50):
writing his own downfall.
After his arrest, Tansky didn'tspeak much.
He denied the killings.
He said the DNA evidence was amistake.
But investigators were confidentthey had physical evidence,
matching cords, matchingdetails, matching DNA.
He was placed in a detentioncell in the city of Totovo.
It was june twenty third, twothousand eight, just one day
(07:11):
after his arrest.
At three M, guards found himdead.
His head was submerged in abucket of water.
The official report called itsuicide.
But many in Macedonia didn'tbelieve it.
How does a man drown himself ina bucket?
Was he silenced?
Was it guilt?
Or just another act of controldeciding how his story would
end.
Without a trial, the case closedovernight.
(07:33):
The question stayed open.
When the news broke, Keitvo wentsilent.
People who had known him fordecades couldn't reconcile the
image, the polite journalist whodrank coffee at the corner cafe,
and the man who raped and killedthree women.
One editor wept when police toldhim.
He said, Blato wrote about evil.
We never knew he was it.
(07:53):
The families of the victims weredevastated not only by the
crimes, but by the betrayal.
They'd spoken to him.
They'd trusted him to tell theirloved ones stories.
He'd sat in their kitchens,taken notes, nodded kindly, all
while knowing exactly what hadhappened because he had done it.
It was the ultimate violation.
Tainsky's crimes exposesomething bigger than one man's
(08:14):
pathology.
They reveal how proximity andtrust can become the perfect
camouflage for violence.
Serial killers often seekcontrol not only over victims,
but over narrative.
Most manipulate the story afterthe act.
They hide bodies, they sendtaunting letters.
But Tainsky's control wasabsolute.
He committed the crimes, thenreported them, shaping how his
(08:35):
town understood the danger.
He was the killer and thechronicler, the monster and the
messenger.
That's what makes this case sohaunting it blurs the line
between truth and fiction,journalism and manipulation,
storytelling and murder.
Because Tainsky died beforetrial, much of what we know is
speculative.
How many victims were there?
Police linked him to three, butsuspected a fourth a seventy
(08:58):
eight year old cleaner whovanished in two thousand three.
Was she the first?
The rehearsal?
Did anyone help him?
There's no proof, but somelocals believe others may have
known or suspected.
And what about his death?
Some point to irregularities.
No suicide note, no witnesses,an unlikely method.
Others believe guilt simplyconsumed him.
(09:19):
Whatever the truth, his deathrobbed investigators and the
victims' families of answers.
Let's stop for a moment andspeak their names again.
Mitra Samjanaska sixty four.
She had two children.
She loved tending her garden.
She cleaned offices for a livingand dreamed of retiring soon.
Lubika Lakoska fifty six, knownfor her laughter, her constant
(09:41):
singing while she worked.
Her daughter described her assunlight in tired shoes.
Jovanna Tamilkoska sixty five.
She adored her grandchildren.
She baked bread for the entireneighborhood every Sunday.
Her kindness made her everyone'sgrandmother.
They were ordinary women,invisible to most, and perhaps
that's why Tainsky chose thembecause society looks away from
(10:04):
the poor, the old, the cleaners.
But here, their stories mattermore than his.
Their lives are the wreckage heleft behind.
True crime often asks us to lookinto darkness to make sense of
what feels senseless.
But the Tainsky case forces usto question the very tools we
use to understand crime,storytelling, narrative, the act
of writing.
He weaponized those tools.
(10:25):
He used journalism, the pursuitof truth as a mask for deceit.
Every article he wrote blurredthe boundary between confession
and control.
It makes us ask, how well do weknow the voices we trust?
What happens when thestoryteller becomes the story?
In an age where media mediateseverything, Tansky's case
remains a warning.
The truth is only as clean asthe hands that write it.
(10:46):
When I think about Vlaotansky, Ithink about the layers of quiet.
The quiet of a small town atdusk, the quiet of a man writing
at his desk, the quiet of awoman walking home from work,
not knowing someone is followingher.
And finally, the quiet of a jailcell where a bucket of water
ends a life that took so manyothers.
In the end, Kaichvo's storyisn't just about murder.
(11:08):
It's about how evil can live inplain sight dressed in the
language of empathy, hidingbehind the authority of a
byline.
It's about the way pain ripplesthrough communities, across
years, across borders.
And it's about remembering thewomen who deserve far better
than to become footnotes in thestory of their killer.
Because they were the humanwreckage, the ones whose lives
were erased so that one mancould play God, author, and
(11:32):
monster all at once.
Thank you for listening to HumanWreckage.
If you or someone you know isaffected by violence, reach out,
you don't have to face it alone.
If this story moved you, shareit not for the killer's
notoriety, but for the victim'sdignity.
I'm Thomas.
Stay curious, stay kind, andnever stop questioning the
stories you're told.
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