Ep. 16: The Slovak Cannibal

Hello and welcome to Crime on the Clarkfork, the true crime podcast that covers cases that happened in areas with populations of 15,000 or less. This month, Mackenzie tells you the case of Matej Curko, the Slovakian cannibal. 

Transcript

Hi and welcome back to Crime on the Clarkfork, the true crime podcast where I tell you about big crimes that happen in small places with each case having occurred in areas with populations of 15,000 or less. My name is Mackenzie Spence and I am your host. If you listen on Spotify, can you do me a huge favor and turn on automatic downloads? This will help the algorithm recommend the show to others! If you want to be notified every time an episode goes live, you are also able to click the little bell button on the shows page and it will send you a notification! 

The sources for this episode are: Wikipedia, City Population, The Slovak Spectator, The Daily, The Daily Mail, PLUS 7 DNI, Italian Life, Serial Killer Database Wiki, Murderpedia, and Medium.cz

Kysak, Slovakia. 2011. Population: 1,257.

in 2011, Marcus Dubach, a man from Switzerland was planning on committing suicide due to problems he was facing at work, but for him, suicide was too hard for him to complete. One day, he was perusing the internet and he came across an article about cannibalism, which led him to a website where someone was looking for people who were planning to commit suicide. When he came across this, he decided that instead of killing himself, he would try and find someone on the internet that would kill him instead, so, he posted an ad looking for his future killer. 

It didn’t take long for Dubach to receive a message from someone with the username, Kanibm. The person told him that he was really interested in his advertisement and that they would gladly kill him if they would then be able to eat parts of his body. At first, Dubach was taken aback by the message, but his curiosity had the better of him, so he began the conversation with Kanibm. 

At one point, early in the communications, Kanibm wrote, “Are you willing to travel to Slovakia? I am really interested in eating you, no kidding, it’s not a game, it’s a fact,” to which Dubach responded, “Hey, great that a real cannibal is calling! I promise that my body is muscular, fresh, and the meat is tender. How will you cut me into steaks, meat soup, and other delicacies? Do you have experience preparing human flesh? Traveling to Slovakia is no problem. Tell me what I should do..." Kanibm took some time to respond to this message, so Dubach messaged them again, saying that if they took too long to respond, someone else might eat him instead and even sent them pictures of his legs, commenting on how in shape he was and that Kanibm would have meat for weeks if they killed him. Kanibm eventually responded with a date and information on what Kanibm would do to Dubach when he arrived in Slovakia. The date was planned for May 10, 2011. 

Kanibm messaged Dubach the following information about how the day would go, “We'll meet at the train station in Kysak at about 9:00 in the morning, most of the express trains arrive there. We'll go to the forest, where I'll kill you and cut the meat out of your body. I especially want the muscles from your legs, arms, back and buttocks. Sure, I'll try the penis and testicles too. I'll take the meat home in my backpack and then bake it and eat it. I'll bury the rest of the body. No one will find it.” Kanibm had even gone as far as sending pictures to Dubach of a severed foot or breast, even meat in a pan, cooking. Kanibm explained to Dubach that human meat needed a lot of bbq spices to, and I quote, “get rid of the unpleasant smell of oil that human flesh has.” They then told him that the body parts that they were preparing were from a young woman who they had helped die. 

Now, at this time, the Swiss man thought that Kanibm was not being serious about the plan, but when he realized they did really want to kill him and eat him, he reported the communications to the Swiss police. At first, the police didn’t believe Dubach’s story. It was arguably insane. But, after Dubach showed them the communications he had had with the unknown online person, the police began to take it seriously. The Swiss police reached out to their colleagues in the Slovak police. The two agencies began working together, along with Marek Gajdos, who was an investigator that worked in the Office for the Fight Against Organization Crime. When interviewed, Marek spoke about how his boss had a sense of humor because Marek was known as the only vegetarian in the office. 

The international team began the investigation immediately. They started by attempting to figure out the identity of Kanibm and then send out an agent to pretend to be Markus Dubach. With the May 10th deadline looming, just three days from when the investigation opened, they knew they had to work quickly. Kanibm had managed to communicate with Dubach in such a way that tracing them was incredibly difficult. The agent did get in contact with Kanibm who solidified the plan to meet with the agent on the morning of Tuesday, May 10, 2011, just as they had originally planned. 

Preparing for Kanibm to be armed and dangerous when they arrived at the meeting location, authorities employed the help of specially trained police officers and a professional sniper. All authorities on the case arrived at the location in Kysak at 3am on May 10th, waiting for Kanibm to arrive at 9am. The agent, who was pretending to be Markus Dubach, arrived at the scene around 6am and not long afterward, Kanibm arrived as well. When Kanibm arrived at the meeting location, the agent thought that the person was a tourist that was going to ask for directions, but no, it was Kanibm. The agent then gave the signal that they had their individual. 

Authorities emerged from the bushes that they were hiding in, and shouted at the individual, Stop, Police! A police officer slowly went around the suspect and when he got to the right hand side, Kanibm pulled down their vest with their left hand, took a pistol from their back waistband with their right hand, sunk to their knees, brought the gun up to eye level, and began to shoot. To authorities, it looked like the suspect had practiced shooting one way or another. The police officer that had emerged from the bushes yelled, “gun!” when Kanibm began shooting and the officer then started shooting at the suspect, getting shot in the process. In the shootout, Kanibm did injure the police officer who ended up in a coma, but they were shot at least five times by snipers, which caused the injuries that led to their death. When police began searching the crime scene, they found the suspect’s backpack, which they promptly searched through. In it, they found multiple knives, plastic bags, three bottles of vodka, plastic handcuffs, and a handsaw. They also quickly found out that the suspect, Kanibm, was a 43 year old man named Matej Curko. 

Matej Curko was born in Kosice, Slovakia and grew up with his grandma and mom because his parents divorced early into his life. He often got in trouble in school because he didn’t listen to his teachers and didn’t like the hierarchy that came with student teacher relationships. While he was exceptionally good at math, by the age of 13, he began showing signs of psychological issues, which led him to attack his neighbor, an 11 year old boy, with a knife and left the boy seriously injured. Due to this attack, Curko was sent to a psychiatric facility for a month, followed by a children’s psychiatric hospital to undergo treatment for his psychological problems. He eventually graduated high school and then completed vocational school before entering the Slovakian Army as a technical specialist. When his time in the army was over, he settled down and became an IT employee for an insurance company, living alone until the age of 30. During this time, he showed little to no interest in having a relationship and was known to file police complaints and criminal charges against people that lived in his village or people who were politically active. He eventually met a woman who then began to live with him and they had two children together. Even during this time, Curko was a member of many suicide forums, assumingly looking for potential victims.

After the shootout in 2011, the authorities searched the residence of Curko and found what has been termed a “fridge of horrors.” Inside a fridge in the residence, authorities found human body parts filed away. They also found the computer that he used to communicate with the Swiss man. The IT experts at the police department were able to crack Curko’s passwords and gain access to his computer and when they looked through his computer history, they found GPS coordinates, communications with two women that included photos of them, and plans to meet up with a 22 year old Czech man, presumably his next planned victim after Markus. Police decided to use the coordinates they found on his computer to see why Curko would have them saved and they were shocked at what they found. 

The coordinates had brought them to several different places in the forest. Many of these places had tools that were buried there, including a pickaxe and a shovel. At another set of coordinates, there was a spot that was marked by a police K9 and was identified as something that looked like a shallow grave. When they investigated it, they found two corpses. They were both buried 60cm deep, which is about 2 feet and their grave was 1.6 meters wide by 2 meters long, or 5.25 feet wide by 6.5 feet long. Both sets of remains were identified as being women and each had parts of their bodies dismembered. Every one of their missing body parts corresponded to images that police found on Curkos’ computer and had also been sent to Dubach. 

The autopsies of the women revealed that Curko had the women take drugs with alcohol and then stabbed them in the hearts multiple times. He had even hit one of the women in the lung. He then dismembered their bodies, removing their heads and their legs. He then cut off their breasts and other muscles, presumably to eat. Investigators never ruled out that the pictures that Dubach had been sent from Curko were from one or both of the women they had found. One of the bodies had items buried with it that police believed could allow them to identify the victim. Luckily, this turned out to be true and they were able to identify one of the women as Lucia Ichnarova who was from Snina, Slovakia. Lucia had disappeared and police had known that she was a missing person before finding her body. Her mother had reported her missing on September 3, 2010 and had not been in contact with her the entire time she was missing. While police searched for her, they had a suspicion that Curko had something to do with it because prior to her disappearance, she had been in communication with Curko and had been suicidal at the time, but they couldn’t prove he had anything to do with it. 

The other woman that was in the shallow grave was found completely naked and didn’t have any identifiable information, so authorities had to wait for DNA tests to come back to determine the identity of the second woman. By March 24th, the DNA tests had come back for both women. They were able to confirm the identity of Lucia and the other woman was identified as 30 year old Elena Gudjakova from Oravske Vesele, Slovakia, who had also been a missing person. Elena had left her home in the early morning hours of July 23, 2010 without her family’s knowledge. They reported her missing, but had never heard from her again.

While waiting for the DNA results, the police continued to search the area near the shallow graves and found an altar that seemed to be used for some type of ceremony near Curko’s village. It is assumed that this is where Curko often cooked and ate body parts, but authorities are unclear as to whether it had any ritualistic purposes. When the investigation was closed, the altar was destroyed to avoid it becoming a sacred site for “sickos”. While Police continued to sift through Curko’s computer, they found that he had been in contact with both of the women, like they had known before, but they learned that both women entered their deaths willingly with Curko, knowing he would murder them and then eat their bodies. 

One of the messages that Curko had sent to Lucia reads, “I am not a rapist, not gay, I am just a pervert who wants to feel death, to touch a dying body” and then added the fact that he didn’t care if the person was a woman or a man. The conversation continued with both seeming to be excited to have found each other because Lucia wanted to commit suicide and he was willing to murder her to fulfill his need to feel death. They spoke about what the plan was and what Curko would do to Lucia. He told her that if she showed up without police, she would die. He even added that he had once attempted to commit suicide when he was 17, but still managed to have gun licenses. He told Lucia that if she did show up with authorities, he would shoot himself, or if he were caught killing or eating Lucia, he would kill himself. But with that being said, he ensured to tell Lucia that he would do everything that he could to hide everything about the transaction stating, “no body, no crime.” At one point, Lucia asked for a picture of Curko so she would know what her future executioner looked like, but he refused in case she was planning on going to the police. 

In other conversations with the women, he told them that he could never be a contract killer because he couldn’t deal with the panic or screaming of people he would kill, but if he had consent from his victims and it was voluntary, he would be able to satisfy himself. He told them that he normally drugged his victims and said that it, “worked perfect with most of them.” This leads to the question of how many victims he truly had out there? According to investigators, It seems Curko may have been in contact with an Italian female, between 25 to 28 years old, at some point, assumingly offering his services to take her life, but no other information is available. Italian police had requested DNA samples from the body parts that were found in the fridge of horror to see if any missing Italian women’s DNA matched, but there has been no other information released around these news reports. 

After Curko’s death, several forensic experts were asked to provide a psychiatric-psychological exhumation opinion, which pretty much means they were asked to provide a psychological opinion on Curko. According to the experts, Curko seemed to suffer from schizoid personality disorder, also known as psychopathy. They also stated that it was possible that he suffered from the deviation necrophilic sadism and cannibalism. The experts stated, “This is a deviation that manifests itself in a fondness for and strong emotional excitement when it comes to topics of death, various ways of killing others, contact and manipulation of their bodies and subsequent consumption. Even from the incomplete data on the victims, it is clear that they could have been mentally ill people, and in addition, the perpetrator manipulated them relatively sophisticatedly via the Internet, so even given his instinctive deviation, a psychological analysis of motivation can support the version of premeditated murders.” they also went on to say that he presented with multiple signs of psychopathy, even from a young age, which included dislike of social contact, conflict with authority, inability to express his feelings, and a weakened ability for empathy.

The police officer that was shot by Curko survived, but had to stay in the hospital for 20 days before being released. He had been shot through the arm and the bullet entered his chest cavity. It was confirmed that the bullet belonged to the gun that Curko had shot. Even with the evidence piled up against Curko, his family still maintains his innocence to this day. His brother is a composer and actor named Marian Curko and has had some interviews about Matej, but it seems that Marian has always distanced himself from Matej, even from a young age. Marian was on vacation in London when he got news that his brother had been shot and killed by police, and the reason why. Later, Marian stated, “Matej apparently had a mental illness and a strange deviation. He had two worlds, and since he was a perfect pedant in everything, he managed to hide it.” 

We may never know how many victims Matej Curko had. He took that information to the grave with him. 

And that is the end of this case and I think this is the wildest one I have covered so far. As always, please give me 5-stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well as a review on Apple Podcasts. I am always looking for cases to cover, so if you have a case suggestion, please visit the link in the show’s instagram page, @CrimeontheClarkfork. I also post pictures from the cases I cover on my instagram page, so go give that a quick follow and let me know what your thoughts are on the case in the comments on instagram. Do you think Matej had more victims that we don’t know about? I hope you enjoyed this episode and I will catch you next time with more big crime in small places.