Journo slay shocker!

For a writer working the beat, the pressures of the newsroom are numerous. Scab-fingered editors, for instance, changing copy to reflect their own weak and rightly-ignored voices and nasty phone calls about missed deadlines. Vlado Taneski possibly suffered all those indignities and more in his career at Macedonia’s Utrinski Vesnik newspaper. So when he had the chance at a scoop on the bizarre torture, rape and murders of elderly women, he jumped on it. It wasn’t the awards committee that turned their attentions to Taneski, though. It was the police.

Although two other men had already been convicted in the first two murders, police thought something was up with Taneski when they realized that the stories he’d been writing contained details that had never been made public. There was also a curious similarity between the victims and Taneski’s late mother, with whom he is said to have not gotten on very well.

Police arrested Taneski and were investigating his role in the three murders (and the disappearance of a fourth woman) when he was found dead in his cell with his head in a bucket of water. Police are ruling it an easy-to-investigate suicide. Good news, at least for Taneski’s two cell mates.

by Scott Saxon