Steel and Shadow. The Dnipropetrovsk Murders and the Dawn of Digital Nihilism - Liam Lomasney

Steel and Shadow: The Dnipropetrovsk Murders and the Dawn of Digital Nihilism

In the summer of 2007, three teenagers from the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk committed twenty-one murders in three weeks, targeting the elderly, the vulnerable, and children with a carpenter's hammer carried in a yellow plastic bag. They filmed their crimes. One video, the killing of forty-eight-year-old cancer survivor Sergei Yatzenko, circulated globally and continues to circulate today, making the case one of the most disturbing criminal episodes of the digital age.

Steel and Shadow is not simply a true crime account of what happened. It is a forensic examination of why it happened, tracing the psychological development of the perpetrators through the institutional wreckage of post-Soviet Ukraine, analysing the role of internet gore culture and deliberate desensitisation in dismantling normal human inhibition, and centring, always, the twenty-one lives that the summer consumed.

Drawing on criminological research, social psychology, and the detailed record of the investigation and trial, Irish crime writer Liam Lomasney constructs a meticulous, morally serious account of a case that forced criminologists to propose an entirely new typology of serial violence: the digital nihilist killer, whose primary motive is not sex, money, or politics, but the creation of a permanent violent legacy in the only medium that guarantees permanence, the internet.