On the face of it, this loss for words may seem strange, as the Greek press has had no trouble in the past handling what in other countries may appear as equally extraordinary crimes of passion. Eighty-year-old women axing their 90-year-old spouses who are carrying on with their 70-year-old paramours (usually in a rustic setting) receive mere footnotes to the news of the day. Vendettas and murders avenging outraged honor may capture headlines today because they express, almost nostalgically, the morality of a world that has passed. But reports of cold-blooded, calculated murders involving people who are, reluctantly, recognizably like ourselves – about whom Dostoyevsky and others have been attracted to write – is something quite special.
That two weeks after the headline-grabbing arrests, the crimes were still only alleged and the suspects merely under investigation can only add to the intellectual refinement. In brief, the five suspects were arrested on the night of Monday, April 13, with the supposed intention of doing away with an elderly and wealthy couple living in a village in the Peloponnese. In the suspects’ car were found bottles of vitriol, two nooses and a knife wrapped in newspapers. The suspects were Christos Papadopoulos, court clerk; Yiorgia Papanicolaou, a housewife; and Yiannis Pambris, a floor polisher.
Under questioning, four murders were admitted to. There was shipowner Haralambos Typaldos, whose next of kin noted among the 135 beneficiaries of his will only nine were members of the family. It is said that this discrepancy led to the investigation of other wills – all forged – which mentioned in some cases the same beneficiaries.
There was Laura Pandou, a wealthy resident of Kolonaki, who came to Papadopoulos’ office to interview a prospective maid (Papanicholaou). She was asphyxiated, thrown with some books into a sack which was discarded on the slopes of Lycabettos. The autopsy explained she died from a fall. Her relatives were presented with a forged document that she owed Papadopoulos 25 million drachmas. He settled for 11.
Elli Vergiopoulou met a similar fate two months later after being forced to sign some blank sheets of paper. She remembered the church in her will – and Papadopoulos’ daughter as well.
Efrosini Frangoulaki was promised to Plataniotis in marriage and handed over to him some real estate. On the way to a taverna near Anavissos she was struck on the head with a hammer, thrown into a hastily dug pit over which a dead dog was placed to put the nosy off the track.
That these Gothic doings involved lawyers, public notaries, coroners, members of the judiciary and even a former mayor of an Athens municipality suggested a political explanation. If the professional writers of horror stories could use the resuscitation of the dead only with discretion, wasn’t it likely that only a politician could die and be brought back to life several times?
Right and left-leaning newspapers had to agree that Christos Papadopoulos was born of a mother and father in Epirus, came to Athens, graduated from the faculty of law, presented cases before the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeals and, finally, the Supreme Court. The right-wing press liked to emphasize that he joined PAK, the predecesor of PASOK, financed the socialist organ Exormisis, successfully ran for mayor of Halkidona with the catchword “Peace” – an exemplary slogan, if one isn’t thinking of the word as it is etched on gravestones.
The left-wing press emphasized that he dabbled in the black market during the occupation, joined right-wing elements during the Civil War and had dealings with the junta. A man, then, of many faces. But in politics, the frequent changing of ‘gravy trains’ is not without precedent. It was only as his problems deepened that he became a man of many lives.
With such juiciness of detail but such dryness in overall intent, any man – even a criminal – might be confused in these reports by the facts of his own life. And that is what probably fascinated the public as well. Society may explain the crimes of individuals as cases of private madness, but, as Dostoyevsky so clearly showed, people acting madly in numbers may exhibit together a social pathology which is more difficult for society to dismiss, since the horror of what it cannot explain exists somewhere in the emptiness of its own being.
