Süleyman Aktaş is a Turkish serial killer who murdered five people. He has been nicknamed "The Nailing Killer" due to his signature of nailing his victims' heads post-mortem.
Background and first murder
Süleyman Aktaş was born in Çambaşı. He was employed as a worker at the Turkish Electricity Company in Denizli, Turkey.[1][2] He was severely injured by high voltage during work at a 31.5 kV electric power distribution line.[1][2]
After this accident, he killed police superintendent Nuri Keskin in Antalya in 1986.[1][2][3][4] He was arrested, and was placed in Manisa Psychiatric Hospital after the court ruled his mental disorder.[1][2] Aktaş stayed four and a half years in the hospital before his
release.[1] He returned to his hometown of Çambaşı village in Bozkurt, Denizli.[1]
Later murders, institutionalization, escape, and incarceration
In 1994, Süleyman Aktaş strangled four elderly neighbours three years after he came back to his hometown.[1][2][3][4][5] He nailed the couples Ayşe (65) and İsmail Güneş (66), and Rukiye (77) and Ramazan Kocatepe (78) in the eyes and heads.[1][2][3][5] In his testimony after his arrest, he stated that "He can not stand nails. He wants to nail people in the head."[1][2][5] Aktaş was nicknamed "The Nailing Killer".[1][2][3][4][5] He was hospitalized as diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.[1] He escaped from the hospital but was apprehended in the coach terminal.[1]
In 2007, Aktaş was seen publicly for the first time after twelve years in a rehabilitation show program of the hospital.[3][4] At noon of 28 May 2008, he assaulted his roommate, the child killer Ömer Yılmaz, and wounded him by hitting him in the head with a rock in the exercise yard of the hospital, where he had been kept in a special department for 13 years.[1][6] Yılmaz underwent head surgery in a nearby state hospital, and survived the attack.[1][6] Aktaş also shared the same ward as Ayhan Kartal, the latter of whom feared him before his death in 2000.[7]
