The shock of Israel: ‘I’m a f**king nasty murderer’

Rishon l'Zion, scene of the crime. Image via Wikipedia

It’s the crime that shocked Israel.

Six people brutally murdered. Three generations of a family — grandparents, parents and children — brutally stabbed to death in the city of Rishon l’Zion. Dmitry Oshrenko, a Russian immigrant success story who rose to own several restaurants in his adopted country, was hacked to death. So were his three-year-old daughter Revital and four-month-old son Netanel. His wife Tatiana was killed. Oshrenko’s parents, Eduard and Ludmilla, were also found fatally stabbed in the apartment. Then, the murderer proceeded to set fire to the apartment while several of the victims were apparently alive.

There was immediate speculation that the Russian mafia was involved.

But the killer was caught. It wasn’t the mafia.

It was a self-described “f**king nasty murderer.” His name is Damian Karlik and he was the former chief waiter at one of Oshrenko’s restaurants. A compulsive gambler, Karlik was caught stealing cases of vodka by grandfather Eduard. Karlik was fired shortly afterwards. The shocking murder, in which the family was horribly killed, appears to have been related to the firing. There were also persistent rumors at the restaurant that Karlik’s wife, Natalia, was having an affair with Eduard.

Natalia was arrested for the murders as well; she gave Karlik a key she just happened to have for the Oshrenko family apartment. Kerlik’s parnets, Oleg and Olga, were also taken into custody on suspicion of disrupting the investigation.

The murderer confessed two days after he was taken into custody; Natalia confessed to the police first. Karlik was unrepentant, according to Chief Inspector Elidov Hecht of the Israeli police.

Investigators presented the murder suspect with their findings, including DNA evidence. Karlik eventually asked Hecht to step outside, citing his concern that his words will be recorded. At that point he turned to the police officer and uttered the confession police were waiting for: “I’m a f***ing nasty murderer.”

Hecht recounted his first candid conversation with Karlik: “He looked me in the eye and said:’ I butchered all of them, one by one’. He talked for 20 minutes about his feelings of despise and hate toward the family.”

“I saw the face of evil in front of me. He continued to brag about how he murdered the grandmother, mother, son and the children. It was shocking,” the police officer said. “He described each and every detail, including the last words of each of the victims.”

In his native Russia, Karlick was under investigation for armed robbery when he decided to emigrate to Israel. Overworked Israeli bureaucrats apparently failed to realize that the potential immigrant was a felony suspect.

The murderer was caught because of an SMS. After killing four members of the family, Kirlick sent a text message to the mother while posing as the grandmother, apparently not realizing that 56-year-old Ludmilla was unfamiliar with SMS:

Kirilik allegedly used Ludmila’s cell phone to send a text message to Tatiana Oshrenko, 28, the children’s mother. Posing as Ludmila, Kirilik urged her to return home, saying her children were feeling unwell.

“Ludmila never sent text messages,” a police source told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. Nevertheless, the ploy worked, and Tatiana rushed home, only to face the same cruel fate as her children and in-laws.

Police investigators found that the four-month-old infant was stabbed dozens of times.

Owing to the family’s Russian origins and their mixed Jewish-Christian religious background, there have been the inevitable racist rumblings among the sometimes jingoistic Israeli press. Never missing an opportunity to make the Jewish people look like crap, the former chairman of the theocratic Shas party said that the murder was the result of allowing Soviet non-Jews to immigrate.

The heart of darkness is alive in the Middle East.