Introduction
Thasos is the northernmost island of the Aegean sea. It is located below coastal eastern Macedonia, and the largest nearby city is the picturesque Kavala. Thasos itself is almost 400 square kilometers (150 square miles) in size, and home to around 15 thousand people.
During antiquity it was briefly part of the Delian League, but soon came into conflict with Athens. Athens besieged the island and in the end forced the town of Thasos to destroy its walls, so as to effectively be unable to fend against Athenian usurping of its copper and other resources.
While it briefly switched to Spartan overlordship, the Athenians returned, and only left following their utter naval disaster at Aigospotamoi, which marks the start of Spartan Hegemony in the Greek world. A third Athenian presence seems to have ended with the rise of Macedonia. After Alexander's death the island was mostly tied to the Ptolemaic empire.
The main small town in Thasos is in its northern edge. It is called Limenas, which means "harbor". It is home to little over three thousand people during most the year, although in the summer the population expands significantly.
The Beginning
Our story begins in the summer of 1996, at one of the isolated old houses at Limenas.
There Theophilos Sechides, a then 24-year old Law student at the Aristotelian university of Thessalonike, was staying at his parents' place for part of the summer. Apart from his mother and father in the house was also his grandmother, an uncle (his father's brother) and his sister, Hermione. His father was called Demetrios, and was a principal at the local elementary school.
The student Sechides was arrested in the morning of the 8th of August, in a central area of Thessalonike where he was living. This was the outcome of a plea of his aunt, the wife of the uncle who stayed at the house in Limenas, to the authorities, with the meaning that her husband was nowhere to be seen since the 19th of May. She could only get hold of Theophilos through the phone, but Theophilos always claimed that his entire family was out of Greece, in various countries, and this led his aunt to become even more suspicious.
After a long interrogation in the 8th of August, Theophilos Sechides confessed that in the 19th and 20th of May he had killed his father, his mother, his sister, his uncle and his grandmother, and then chopped the bodies to pieces- apart from the one of his uncle. Afterwards he threw them at a garbage dumping site outside the city of Kavala.
Theophilos gave a number of reasons for his actions. Fist he said that his relatives were sick, and he wanted to liberate them from their sickness. Later on he claimed that they intended to kill him so he was acting in self-defence. Also argued that he was in reality born by another woman, and his family refused to tell him the truth.
The Murders
The first murder happened in the 19th of May, and had as its victim Theophilos's uncle. It is possible that his uncle had returned to Thasos, from Belgium where he and his family mostly lived, following a request by his brother to help him convince Theophilos to see a psychiatrist. From some letters of Theophilos to his uncle in Belgium it seems clear that the Law student had reasons to hate him, one of which was a violent beating of his by the uncle, when he was just a small boy. The law student interestingly claimed in the letter that this beating was in reality orchestrated by him (Theophilos) as part of his plan to finally get rid of all his enemies.
Theophilos claimed that his uncle tried to hit him that morning on the 19th, with a knife, so he pushed him over the edge of a cliff. Later on, seeing that his uncle was in great pain, he explained that he decided to put an end to that pain by decapitating him with the knife.
Following that Theophilos got hold of a small hunting rifle, and returned to the family house. There he claimed that his father had a knife and was meaning to harm him, so he shot him in the head. His mother also seemed to be carrying a knife, he wrestled it out of her hands and killed her with it. His sister also appeared to him to be holding a knife, so she was met with the same end. Theophilos remained in the house with the three corpses, and at some point removed their brains, an action he said was done so that he could examine them, for purely scientific interests.
The next morning his grandmother visited the house, she was also seen as having a knife, so was executed by a wound to the heart.
Getting rid of the bodies
Getting rid of the bodies, which he first cut into pieces, was a very long and systemic process. He travelled on a small liner, with his car, three seperate times so as to carry all the bags to the mainland.
According to Sechides he needed a full day to cut up the four bodies to four parts each, and another day to place them into bags. It seems he did this using two large saws and an axe.
A mistake
During the examination of the family house, which was full of dried-up blood and brain-tissue remains, police saw on a wall the painted word "Λάθος" (Mistake). When Theophilos was asked about the meaning of that word there he replied: "A mistake means a mistake, nothing more".
A picture of Theophilos some time after his confession:
He is serving a life sentence, and has been in prison for 16 years now, at a ward for the insane, part of a maximum security facility in Athens.
Theophilos literally means "friend of God".
In 1996 Greece was still almost an idyllic land in regards to low crime. The story of the brutality in Thasos was extremely shocking, the image of Theophilos lingered on in memory.
Thasos is the northernmost island of the Aegean sea. It is located below coastal eastern Macedonia, and the largest nearby city is the picturesque Kavala. Thasos itself is almost 400 square kilometers (150 square miles) in size, and home to around 15 thousand people.
During antiquity it was briefly part of the Delian League, but soon came into conflict with Athens. Athens besieged the island and in the end forced the town of Thasos to destroy its walls, so as to effectively be unable to fend against Athenian usurping of its copper and other resources.
While it briefly switched to Spartan overlordship, the Athenians returned, and only left following their utter naval disaster at Aigospotamoi, which marks the start of Spartan Hegemony in the Greek world. A third Athenian presence seems to have ended with the rise of Macedonia. After Alexander's death the island was mostly tied to the Ptolemaic empire.
The main small town in Thasos is in its northern edge. It is called Limenas, which means "harbor". It is home to little over three thousand people during most the year, although in the summer the population expands significantly.
The Beginning
Our story begins in the summer of 1996, at one of the isolated old houses at Limenas.
There Theophilos Sechides, a then 24-year old Law student at the Aristotelian university of Thessalonike, was staying at his parents' place for part of the summer. Apart from his mother and father in the house was also his grandmother, an uncle (his father's brother) and his sister, Hermione. His father was called Demetrios, and was a principal at the local elementary school.
The student Sechides was arrested in the morning of the 8th of August, in a central area of Thessalonike where he was living. This was the outcome of a plea of his aunt, the wife of the uncle who stayed at the house in Limenas, to the authorities, with the meaning that her husband was nowhere to be seen since the 19th of May. She could only get hold of Theophilos through the phone, but Theophilos always claimed that his entire family was out of Greece, in various countries, and this led his aunt to become even more suspicious.
After a long interrogation in the 8th of August, Theophilos Sechides confessed that in the 19th and 20th of May he had killed his father, his mother, his sister, his uncle and his grandmother, and then chopped the bodies to pieces- apart from the one of his uncle. Afterwards he threw them at a garbage dumping site outside the city of Kavala.
Theophilos gave a number of reasons for his actions. Fist he said that his relatives were sick, and he wanted to liberate them from their sickness. Later on he claimed that they intended to kill him so he was acting in self-defence. Also argued that he was in reality born by another woman, and his family refused to tell him the truth.
The Murders
The first murder happened in the 19th of May, and had as its victim Theophilos's uncle. It is possible that his uncle had returned to Thasos, from Belgium where he and his family mostly lived, following a request by his brother to help him convince Theophilos to see a psychiatrist. From some letters of Theophilos to his uncle in Belgium it seems clear that the Law student had reasons to hate him, one of which was a violent beating of his by the uncle, when he was just a small boy. The law student interestingly claimed in the letter that this beating was in reality orchestrated by him (Theophilos) as part of his plan to finally get rid of all his enemies.
Theophilos claimed that his uncle tried to hit him that morning on the 19th, with a knife, so he pushed him over the edge of a cliff. Later on, seeing that his uncle was in great pain, he explained that he decided to put an end to that pain by decapitating him with the knife.
Following that Theophilos got hold of a small hunting rifle, and returned to the family house. There he claimed that his father had a knife and was meaning to harm him, so he shot him in the head. His mother also seemed to be carrying a knife, he wrestled it out of her hands and killed her with it. His sister also appeared to him to be holding a knife, so she was met with the same end. Theophilos remained in the house with the three corpses, and at some point removed their brains, an action he said was done so that he could examine them, for purely scientific interests.
The next morning his grandmother visited the house, she was also seen as having a knife, so was executed by a wound to the heart.
Getting rid of the bodies
Getting rid of the bodies, which he first cut into pieces, was a very long and systemic process. He travelled on a small liner, with his car, three seperate times so as to carry all the bags to the mainland.
According to Sechides he needed a full day to cut up the four bodies to four parts each, and another day to place them into bags. It seems he did this using two large saws and an axe.
A mistake
During the examination of the family house, which was full of dried-up blood and brain-tissue remains, police saw on a wall the painted word "Λάθος" (Mistake). When Theophilos was asked about the meaning of that word there he replied: "A mistake means a mistake, nothing more".
A picture of Theophilos some time after his confession:
He is serving a life sentence, and has been in prison for 16 years now, at a ward for the insane, part of a maximum security facility in Athens.
Theophilos literally means "friend of God".
In 1996 Greece was still almost an idyllic land in regards to low crime. The story of the brutality in Thasos was extremely shocking, the image of Theophilos lingered on in memory.
