A Lifetime Punctuated by Violence

SHUMSK, Ukraine â€”  Lyubov Nakonechna was 17 when she went against her family’s wishes and married Nikolay Soltys. It was the only time in her short life she ever disobeyed her parents. So when things began to go wrong, she kept the violence from them.

Then, when she was six months pregnant, she finally told her brother Petro Nakonechny, 28, that her husband would bang her head against a wall until she fainted. Then he would douse her with water. She would come to, and he would beat her again. It was 1998.

Today, Lyubov is dead and Nikolay is in custody of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, accused of killing her, their toddler son, an aunt, an uncle and two young cousins.

In the small town where the couple were married, Nikolay Soltys’ hands were his weapons, witnesses allege; he used them against his wife and his neighbors. In Binghamton, N.Y., his hands were his tools; he used them to fix his best friend’s car.

In Sacramento County, police believe he used those hands nearly two weeks ago to stab six family members to death in a crime that has transfixed people across two nations.

Six thousand miles from his homeland, authorities believe Soltys may have come full circle, although no one can quite explain how the unemployed Ukrainian shoemaker evolved from violent husband to loyal friend to quiet neighbor and finally murder suspect.

On Thursday, when he was apprehended after a week on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, friends and relatives in Shumsk, Binghamton and the Sacramento suburbs fingered their separate pieces of the Soltys puzzle and thanked God he had not killed again--in their hometown.

Explosive Temper, Few Close Friends

Set under a low sky against green rolling hills, Shumsk is a small provincial center of whitewashed houses where horses and carts or bicycles are the common means of transport, and scythes, not lawn mowers, are used to cut grass in the fields.

Mykola Soltys, as he is known here, comes from a religious family. They are members of the Pentecostal church in Shumsk, which suspended Soltys after one violent episode against his wife. In fact, when Soltys finally reached Sacramento last year, America’s largest Russian Pentecostal church refused to admit him as a member because he was so vague about leaving his old congregation, according to the church’s secretary.

Residents of Shumsk on Thursday described Soltys as a man with few close friends and an explosive temper, whose flare-ups occasionally ended in violence against neighbors or relatives.

He often got into confrontations. He would ride his motorbike at night with no muffler, infuriating one resident so much that the neighbor punctured the bike’s front tire. In revenge, Soltys beat the man with a metal bar, said Vitaly Golopatyuk, who describes himself as Soltys’ oldest and closest friend.

But Golopatyuk said Soltys could be charming if he wanted something.

Determined not to serve in the army, he impressed Taisia Grushko, the doctor at the Shumsk enlistment office, with his good humor. Documents show he was not accepted into the army because of flat feet.

Although he did have flat feet, so did many others who were drafted. Those who could afford it would usually pay the going bribe of $400 in return for documents freeing them from military service.

In Shumsk, where talk of domestic violence is all but taboo, Lyubov Soltys lived with the suffocating control of the man who was supposed to love her but rarely let her out of his sight, witnesses said.

In 1998, when Lyubov finally confessed the violence to her family, her relatives called police to help them remove the terrified woman from her home. Authorities don’t want to admit that they were called upon for help. But a local priest confirms the family’s account.

Petro Nakonechny had arrived with two brothers to collect their sister. He said Soltys had an ax and had threatened them all. The priest, Borys Kovalchuk, described the scene: “I saw several policeman. He [Soltys] was raging, running around, absolutely furious and yelling at people.�

‘A Very Odd Person’

Lyubov returned to her husband after their son, Sergey, was born. Soltys kept her under strict control, Golopatyuk said, regularly locking her in the house, and not allowing her to leave alone, even to go shopping. And he was bitter that she switched her attentions from husband to child.

“He was a very odd person,� Golopatyuk said. “Whenever I came to visit her, Mykola would always stick around, making sure he heard everything that was said. He never left us alone. He never left her to her own devices, except when she was locked up. She was strictly under his control.�

Soltys complained that he couldn’t sleep in the same room as the baby and said that Lyubov wouldn’t cook for him.

Lyubov confided to a friend, Tonya Melnyk, 23, that her husband had beat her after the baby was born, convinced that the child’s father was someone else. Lyubov told her friend that her husband had little affection for his son.

After she left him again, Soltys immigrated to Binghamton to join his parents, who had fled Ukraine because of religious persecution. He wasn’t eager to go, but he did so because his father was ill and because of his marital problems, according to Golopatyuk.

Not long after Soltys arrived, his father died. He pined for his wife and kept largely to himself. In the tightknit, religious Ukrainian community in Binghamton, there was some talk of Soltys’ violence back home.

“He was separated from his wife and people knew it,� said Sergei Petchenyi, 26, a neighbor of Soltys’ in the Ely Park Townhouses. “He was looked down at because of that.�

Twenty-year-old Ananiy Vasyura recalls meeting Soltys for the first time last year. Vasyura was trying to fix a stubborn engine problem on his Honda Accord when a bright-eyed man seven years his senior came by his apartment.

For months, Vasyura’s father had driven the then-carless Soltys to the hospital to visit Nikolay’s father, who was dying of cancer.

“He loved cars and knew everything about them,� the younger Vasyura said during an hourlong interview Thursday. “He could do body work, repair engines, paint, basically do anything. He looked under my hood and had the problem fixed in like five minutes. He said fixing cars was nothing to him.�

Vasyura recalls Soltys as a young man in search of meaning in his life. For the most part, Soltys was frustrated. He couldn’t find a job, had trouble learning English, cast about for focus.

At one point Soltys talked about opening his own car-repair shop. At other times, he said he wanted to study to become a paramedic. After hurting his back in a car accident, Soltys was forced to see a chiropractor, then decided to become one.

“He said chiropractic work was easy and it didn’t take a lot of time. And you made a lot of money. He liked that the most,� Vasyura said.

Soltys also talked about his wife and how much he missed her. But never, Vasyura said, did he hear his friend talk about violence or hurting anyone. “He never showed me any violence or talked about it. He was a cool guy, a normal guy.�

Then Soltys told his friend he and his mother were going to join relatives in California “for a better life.� Soltys would call and describe the good weather and talk about how “loud� Sacramento was, with what he described as frequent shootings and police helicopters.

When Vasyura heard that Lyubov and Sergey and the others had been stabbed to death in a savage rampage, he said Thursday, he was stunned to find out that his friend was the only suspect. So he bought a copy of the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin. There on the front page was a picture of his mentor, now labeled a killer.

“My heart sank,� he recalled. “I was going to go to California to visit him this fall.� He paused, his voice catching. “Guess not.�

‘No Sign of Violence’

In Sacramento on Thursday, a cousin, Sergey Kukharskiy, 34, recalled Soltys as a complicated man. He and Soltys, he said, were “like brothers.�

With the odd perspective of grief, hindsight and denial, Kukharskiy said he knew that Soltys beat his wife, but believed there was nothing the family could do to help. They never saw the rampage coming, he said.

In the killing spree nearly two weeks ago, Kukharskiy’s 9-year-old son Dimitriy died, along with his elderly parents, Petr and Galina Kukharskiy, and his niece, Tatyana Kukharskaya.

There was no happiness in Soltys’ capture, Kukharskiy said, only relief. The family is “still feeling terrible,� mourning their loved ones, he said.

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Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga and Eric Bailey contributed to this report. Dixon reported from Shumsk, Glionna from Binghamton and Bailey from Sacramento.