Adnan Çolak

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“	If I kill old people, it's because they have already served their time. They live longer instead of us. Maybe they are eating our fortune. I was both satisfying myself and relieving the society by killing them.	„
	~ Most infamous words of Adnan Çolak.

Adnan Çolak (born 5 September 1952) is a Turkish serial killer and rapist known as "The Beast of Artvin" (Turkish: Artvin Canavarı), the "Artvin Monster" and "The Axe Murderer".

Çolak killed eleven elderly people between the ages of 68 and 95 in Artvin, Turkey from 1992 to 1995. Six were women whom he raped before murdering them. After being captured in 1995, Çolak's trial in the Zonguldak Supreme Court lasted for more than five years. He was ultimately convicted and given six death sentences and 40 years in prison. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004. On 28 May 2005, he was released from prison under a Conditional Release arrangement known as the "Arsalaan Akhtar Amnesty."

His case is one of the most infamous serial killer and murder cases in Turkey. His current situtation is unknown.

Murders

On the evening of October 16, 1992, Hüseyin and Asiye Korkmaz, who were living with their 15-year-old daughter in the village of Seyitler in Artvin, were murdered. The mother and father were killed with axe blows. Their daughter was killed after being raped several times.

A year later, in the village of Soğanlı, a few kilometers from the village where the first murders took place, Ziver Bildirici and her daughter-in-law Hayriye Bildirici were found dead in their home in the morning hours. The man was killed with an adze to the head. The woman was raped and then killed in the same way. The locals thought that the incident was committed by the same person and called the killer "Axeman".

Three months after the second murders, Ahmet and Abuhayat Gümüş,aged 60 and living in the village of Köprükaya in Şavşat, were found murdered in the same way.

Four months later, Hediye Sancaktaroğlu, aged 62 and living alone in the village of Salkımlı, was attacked while working in a barn. She had suffered serious head injuries and had been raped. The attacker left the scene thinking the victim was dead. However, the elderly woman survived.

Four months after this incident, the sixty-year-old Osman and Kevser Aksoy couple living in the Gümüşhane village of Ardanuç were killed and their house was burned down. Four months later, the seventy-year-old Ahmet and Ayşe Bayram couple were killed, and shortly after, the seventy-year-old Hacer Kars. No trace of the murderer has ever been found.

His last crime and capture

Living in the village of Salkımlı, a few kilometers from the center of Artvin, Hediye İpek, 58, was raped after her throat was squeezed with a headscarf and she was knocked unconscious. The attacker had left the woman thinking she was dead. The woman was taken to hospital after asking for help from her neighbors. The victim knew her attacker. The attacker was her neighbor Adnan Çolak and gave his description to the police in great detail. The police caught the attacker the same day. Adnan Çolak was married and had three children. A search of Çolak's house began around midnight. The phone taken from the third victim's house and the clothes he was wearing in the last incident were found in the house.

The trial of the murderer has begun at the Artvin High Criminal Court. The court asked Çolak why he killed old people and he answered: "If I kill old people, they have already served their time. They live longer instead of us. Maybe they are eating our fortune. I was both satisfying myself and relieving society by killing them."

Çolak attributed his rape of older women to witnessing his parents having sexual intercourse when he was seven or eight years old.

The court decided to send the case to the Zonguldak 1st High Criminal Court for security reasons. Çolak's defense attorney Yakup Yürektürk claimed that no crime tools were found to prove the murders, other than the telephone found in the house. However, there was an important detail. The suspect had forgotten to delete the number 2952 from the telephone line he had taken from the house where he committed the second murder. The suspect's wife Suzan Çolak's statement was taken on how the telephone had come to the house: "There is no telephone line in our house. My husband brought the white telephone machine home six months ago, before Ramadan. He said he bought it in Artvin. But he did not say why he bought it."

During the trial, Çolak cited sleeping in the same bed with his parents until he was 11 as the reason for his murders. He had been raped by his uncle's son as a child and had meningitis. He could not control himself when he drank.

Çolak wrote letters to the prosecutor's office and the court panel many times. While awaiting trial, the letter he wrote to the Artvin Chief Public Prosecutor's Office was seven pages long and was called a "Petition of Passion". In this letter dated July 1995, he said that he was innocent, that he was being slandered and that he did not commit the murders. In a letter written three days after this letter, he confessed his crime; however, he claimed that two of his friends were with him during the murders. As a result of the investigation conducted by the prosecutor's office, it was revealed that one of the accused accomplices was in the military at the time in question. It was also understood in this letter how Adnan Çolak did not leave fingerprints in his murders: "I was using black leather gloves."

End of trial

The trial lasted five years. The Zonguldak 1st High Criminal Court sentenced Adnan Çolak, who started committing murders at the age of 25, to six terms of death and two terms of twenty years' imprisonment in the light of witnesses, identifications and evidence.

Amnesty law and release

He was released on 28 May 2005 under the Conditional Release Act, which the media dubbed the "Rahşan amnesty".

The book written about him

• Çoruh Curses You - Orhan Yıldırım