Karel Šťovíček

Karel Šťovíček (born 1977) is a Czech serial killer. He murdered two women in the Bohemian Paradise region in 2021, after being released from a previous accessory to murder conviction dating back to 1998. For his new crimes, he would later be convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Early life and first murder Little is known about Šťovíček's life prior to his crimes, aside from the fact that he was born in 1977. At the advent of his teenage years, he began stealing and was repeatedly incarcerated on charges of property theft and fraudulent sale of stolen cars. One notable incident was when a teenaged Šťovíček stabbed his mother in the back with a knife after she tried to intervene in a dispute between him and his stepfather, but he was not prosecuted for this attack. In the late 1990s, he and his girlfriend Věra Vondrová began sneaking into the apartments of rich men and drugging them with rohypnol before stealing any valuables they could find. Lucie, who had recently gotten into an argument with her boyfriend, accepted his offer. When they were alone, Šťovíček forced Lucie to perform oral sex and then decided to kill her after she threatened to report him to the police. To do this, he bludgeoned her on the back of the head with a wine bottle he was carrying with him and then strangled her with a waist belt. In order to dispose of the body, he then carried it to a nearby field and left it there, where it was found two days later. Upon his arrest, he immediately confessed responsibility to both killings. The fact that he was not detained after the first murder led to public outrage, with GIBS initiating an investigation into the conduct of the people involved in the investigation.

Šťovíček's trial was scheduled to begin in April 2021, but it did not take place in the end, as he accepted a plea deal from the prosecutor and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a chance of parole after 30 years. The head prosecutor, Lenka Faltusová, noted that while he did not suffer from any apparent mental illness, Šťovíček was incapable of reintegrating into society. In addition to this, he waived his right to appeal the sentence and agreed to pay 11 million koruny in damages to the victims' family members.