Dimitris Vakrinos

A taxi driver from rural Arcadia

Dimitris Vakrinos came from Gortynia, a farming district of Arcadia in the central Peloponnese. Alfavita gives his year of birth as 1963; some English-language reference works give 1961, and we have not found a primary record that settles the point. Greek press reconstructions of his life describe a poor rural upbringing, a violent father who drank heavily and a move to the Athens area while still young. He worked as a welder at the Skaramangas shipyards west of the capital until 1992 and then became a taxi driver. A first marriage in 1990 lasted about 14 months, and a second, in the summer of 1996, also failed quickly.

To passengers he was an ordinary cab driver. Those who later reconstructed the case described a man who brooded over slights, often trivial or imagined, and answered them with deadly violence. He was also involved in stealing cars and motorcycles. Greek media came to call him the country's first serial killer.

The killings

To Vima dates the series to 1987–1996. The first victim named in Greek accounts was Panagiotis Daglias (spelled Gaglias in some English sources), who had shared a home with Vakrinos and whom he blamed for the theft of a hunting rifle. Another victim, Anastasia Simitzi, was a woman he said had insulted him by calling him short. On 9 January 1994 he killed fellow taxi driver Theodoros Andreadis, 35, with whom he had quarrelled over a place on the taxi rank in Elefsina. According to To Vima, he posed as a passenger, asked to be taken towards Corinth and shot Andreadis on the road between the Isthmus and Loutraki, then took his watch to make it look like a robbery and burned the cab.

On or around 21 December 1995 he shot dead the brothers Kostas and Antonis Spyropoulos at a petrol station. He had sold them a car and felt cheated over the price, took the car back with a spare key, and was chased by the brothers before the shooting. In May 1996 he went hooded to the Peristeri home of Serafeim Agiannidis, whom he blamed for wrecking a marriage match with a woman he loved. The man's mother saw him through the peephole and called police. Vakrinos waited for Agiannidis to arrive and, according to Alfavita and Dnews, shot him dead. Police officers who responded and the victim's father were seriously wounded.

How many victims?

Sources do not agree on the total. The Greek articles that list the victims name six people killed, counting Agiannidis, yet the same pieces also speak of five murders. To Vima gave six victims in one 2017 article and five in another. Some English-language summaries list five dead and omit the Peristeri killing. The safest statement is that five or six people died, with several others wounded.

Investigation and arrest

For years the killings were handled as unrelated cases spread across different suburbs, with different apparent motives. The wounding of officers in Peristeri hardened the police effort. According to later Greek accounts, the key clue came from the car-theft thread: a witness reported a thief escaping by taxi, and detectives reasoned that only the original owner of the stolen car, Vakrinos, would have held a spare key. After his arrest he admitted the Spyropoulos and Agiannidis shootings and then disclosed three further killings that police had not linked to him.

The arrest date is disputed. Alfavita and Dnews give 12 May 1997. English-language reference works citing a To Vima report of 13 April 1997 place the arrest on 6 April 1997, which would mean the case was already public by mid-April.

Death in Korydallos

Vakrinos was held in pre-trial detention at Korydallos prison in Piraeus, Greece's largest jail, and was found dead in his cell by suicide. Greek outlets date his death to 25 May 1997, while English reference works give 12 May 1997, the same day Greek outlets give for his arrest. Either way, he died within weeks of being taken into custody. Because he was never tried, none of the charges was tested in court, and in legal terms he was never convicted. What is known rests on police findings and his reported confession, and the missing trial record helps explain why later accounts differ on dates and numbers.

Regional and legal context

Under Greek law, criminal proceedings end when the accused dies, so there was no verdict, no public examination of the evidence and no judicial finding on his mental state. The case came at a time when the Greek public had little vocabulary for repeat killers, and coverage of it helped make the term serial killer familiar in the country. It also showed how a killer driven by personal grudges could go unnoticed while each death was investigated in isolation. When a gunman attacked two taxi drivers in Kifisia in early 2017, killing a 52-year-old, Greek newspapers turned again to the Vakrinos file as the reference point. Our searches of Greek and English sources found no new developments in the case between late 2024 and November 2026.