Olga Hepnarová: The Woman Who Drove to Kill
On a summer morning in 1973, the peaceful routine of a Prague tram stop was shattered in an instant. Elderly commuters stood chatting, waiting for their transport, oblivious to the tragedy that was about to unfold. At approximately 11 a.m., a Praga RN truck came hurtling down the road. It swerved violently onto the pavement, ploughing through the unsuspecting crowd.
By the time the dust settled, bodies lay scattered across the street. Eight people had lost their lives, twelve more were injured. A short distance away, the driver sat motionless behind the wheel. She made no attempt to flee. Instead, she calmly waited for the police, fully aware of what she had just done. The driver was 22-year-old Olga Hepnarová, and she had spent months planning this act of mass murder.
While shocking in its brutality, what makes Hepnarová’s crime even more chilling was its cold calculation. This was no moment of madness or impulsive rage. This was premeditated slaughter, executed with methodical precision.
A Troubled Childhood and a Life of Isolation
Born on 30 June 1951 in Prague, Olga Hepnarová was the daughter of a bank clerk and a dentist. By all accounts, she had a fairly unremarkable early childhood, but as she grew older, troubling signs began to emerge. Socially awkward and withdrawn, she struggled to form relationships and found it difficult to communicate with people.
Her teachers described her as a lonely and introverted girl, often distant from her classmates. She was bullied at school, and she later claimed that she was frequently beaten both at home and outside. These experiences reinforced her growing sense of alienation. At the age of 13, she made her first attempt to take her own life. She overdosed on her medication, an act of desperation that led to her being institutionalised in a psychiatric ward in Opařany for a year. There, she experienced severe mistreatment, including physical abuse after attempting to escape.
Despite this, doctors concluded that she had no diagnosable mental illness. No clear psychiatric explanation was provided for her growing hostility towards the world, some reports indicate that she suffered from depression, and she herself described periods of apathy and feelings of complete detachment from society.
After her release, Hepnarová struggled to hold down jobs. She trained as a bookbinder in Prague, then worked in Cheb for a year before returning to Prague. Her employment history was marked by frequent dismissals, her difficulties in social interaction making her an outsider wherever she went. Eventually, she secured work as a truck driver, a solitary profession that suited her isolated nature.
By this time, her ties with her family were all but severed. She distanced herself from her father and older sister and sought refuge in a cabin in the village of Oleško, a retreat from the world she despised. But even that was temporary—she later sold the cabin and used the money to buy a Trabant car.
Olga Hepnarová's First Attempt at Destruction: Arson
Her growing anger towards society first found an outlet in an act of arson. In August 1970, Hepnarová’s father inherited a farm in the village of Zábrodí, which the family used for holidays. One morning, Olga set fire to the farmhouse door, hoping the flames would spread to the hayloft and destroy the property. Her sister and two elderly tenants, a married couple in their seventies, were sleeping inside at the time.
Luckily, they woke up and managed to extinguish the fire before it could do any real damage—the total loss amounted to just 50 Kčs. Suspicion never fell on Olga, and she remained free. Three years later, during a psychiatric evaluation, she confessed to the crime. She claimed she had done it because the property had become a source of conflict between her parents.
Planning a Mass Murder
By 1973, Hepnarová’s sense of alienation had hardened into something much darker. She had convinced herself that society had turned against her. She claimed that she had been physically assaulted in the street for no reason and that no one had intervened to help her. She refused to become just another anonymous suicide victim; she wanted to make a statement.
Initially, she considered derailing a train or setting off an explosive in a crowded room, but these methods seemed too complex. She even enrolled in a shooting course with the Svazarm (Czechoslovak Union for Cooperation with the Army) with the idea of carrying out a mass shooting in Wenceslas Square. However, she abandoned this plan as acquiring a firearm proved too difficult, and she feared being shot before she could complete her mission. Ultimately, she decided that the easiest and most effective way to kill was with a vehicle.
In the months leading up to the attack, she prepared meticulously. From January to July 1973, she lived in a hostel in Prague while perfecting her plan. On 9 July, she made a final visit to her countryside retreat before abandoning her Trabant, a symbolic severing of ties with her past. The next day, she completed a test drive to prove she could handle the truck she intended to use for the massacre.
Before the attack, Hepnarová had sent a letter to two newspapers, Svobodné slovo and Mladý svět, explaining her actions as revenge for the hatred she felt was directed against her by her family and the world. The letter was received two days after the murder.
I am a loner. A destroyed woman. A woman destroyed by people ... I have a choice – to kill myself or to kill others. I choose TO PAY BACK MY HATERS. It would be too easy to leave this world as an unknown suicide victim. Acta non verba. Society is too indifferent, rightly so. My verdict is: I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to death.
The Attack
On 10 July 1973, at 1:30 p.m., Olga Hepnarová drove a Praga RN truck onto a pavement at Strossmayer Square, Prague 7, crashing into a group of approximately 25 people waiting for a tram. Three were killed instantly, three more succumbed to their injuries later that day, and two others died in the following days. All were between the ages of 60 and 79. Another twelve were injured, but survived.
In the aftermath, passers-by rushed to the vehicle, believing the driver had lost control due to a mechanical failure. Instead, Hepnarová coldly admitted that she had done it deliberately. She had made a trial run minutes earlier but turned back because there were not enough people at the stop. This time, she saw her opportunity and seized it.
Trial and Execution
During her trial, Hepnarová was unrepentant. She fully admitted her intention to kill as many people as possible. Psychological evaluations found her mentally competent, and she demanded the death penalty. On 6 April 1974, she was sentenced to death by the City Court, a verdict upheld by the Supreme Court. The Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Lubomír Štrougal, refused to grant her clemency.
On 12 March 1975, Olga Hepnarová was executed by short-drop hanging at Pankrác Prison, making her the last woman to be executed in Czechoslovakia. Reports vary on how she met her death; some claim she faced it calmly, while others state that she became hysterical, screaming and begging for her life before being dragged to the gallows.
The story of Olga Hepnarová remains one of Europe’s most shocking cases of vehicular homicide. It was revisited in the 2016 film Já, Olga Hepnarová, which sought to examine the mind of a woman consumed by hatred and isolation. While the film attempts to humanise her, the brutal reality remains: Olga Hepnarová chose to turn her despair into a massacre, ensuring her place in history for all the wrong reasons.