Reward Tripled for 'Cold-Blooded Killer'

Aug. 22, 2001 -- The reward for a 27-year-old immigrant from Ukraine who police say is a "cold-blooded, calculating killer" responsible for murdering six members of his family has more than tripled.

Sacramento police said they don't know where Nikolay Soltys is, but they believe they know the kind of vehicle he may be driving.

Soltys was last seen with his 3-year-old son, Sergey, the last victim in his alleged killing spree, in an emerald green mid-1990s Ford Explorer on Monday evening around 8 p.m., police said. The vehicle has silver on the lower parts of the side, and the hatchback door is a lighter green than the rest.

Sometime shortly after that sighting, police believe, Soltys stabbed the boy to death in a cardboard box in a rural area outside Sacramento, but they don't know whether he left the area, possibly heading towards Seattle, where he has relatives, or whether he is hiding somewhere in the city.

"We don't know where he is," Detective Ron Garverick said. "If he's in a car he could travel. I don't know if he's out of the area or not."

Police are getting a better idea of who the person is that they are looking for.

"We're finding out more and more about how much of a cold-blooded, calculating killer this man is," Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas said.

Perhaps even more chilling than the alleged stabbing murders of his 23-year-old pregnant wife, his elderly aunt and uncle, his 9-year-old nephew and 10-year-old niece, was the implication that Soltys may have done more than stab his son to death.

"It appears the child may have been violated also," Garverick said, quickly adding, "I'm not going to speak about that now."

Police found the Sergey's body after they interpreted a note of directions discovered in the 1995 Nissan Altima they say Soltys used to escape after his other five relatives were slain, indicating he knew before hand that he was going to kill the boy and where he would do it.

Tracks around the boy's murder scene show that Sergey walked to the box with an adult and was killed inside the carton. There were new toys found in the box with him, indicating he was "enticed" into the box, Garverick said.

Sacramento police announced Tuesday that they had put up a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Soltys. Today they said an additional $10,000 has come from the U.S. Marshal's Service, and another $10,000 from an anonymous donor, as well as numerous other smaller donations.

’For Her Tongue’

Part of the new picture of the suspect has come from scraps of information left by Soltys himself. It was a note in his handwriting on the back of a photograph of Sergey and Soltys' wife, Lyubov, who was three months pregnant when she was stabbed to death at around 9 a.m. Monday, that told police where to find the boy's body.

Notes on the back of another photograph made police believe that Soltys thought out the six murders he allegedly committed.

The names of his wife and the parents of two other victims were listed on the photograph, and following each name was written "for her tongue," or "for his tongue." There has been speculation that the killings were committed either because members of Soltys' family were pressuring the unemployed immigrant to get a job and support his family, or because they discussed his relationship with his wife to people outside the family.

The investigation has been hampered by the difficulties police have had communicating with members of the immigrant community in which Soltys lived, Garverick said. Many people in the community speak only Russian or Ukrainian, and the police have few officers who speak either of those languages.

But language is not the only barrier to communication between American law enforcement and immigrants from the former Soviet Union, he admitted.

"Some of the cultural differences I won't understand this week or next week or next year," he said. "What it means to talk outside the family to a person from Russia I don't understand."

Mental Instability or Religious Faith?

Police were frustrated three years ago by what they considered a lack of cooperation from the Russian and Ukrainian community when they were investigating the killing of a teenager whose bludgeoned body was found on the grounds of the local high school. In the wake of Monday's horrific crimes, though, they say they are getting plenty of help.

"The Russian community so far has been very, very helpful," Garverick said. "The big problem has been our department has very limited Ukrainian and Russian speakers."

According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, people who knew Soltys in his hometown of Shumsk, Ukraine, deny that he ever showed signs of mental instability, and cast doubt on whether his being denied military service would be any proof of that.

Soltys was a member of a fundamentalist Christian group that believed it was wrong to carry weapons, according to people who knew him in Shumsk, the Chronicle reported. It was not uncommon for people with such beliefs to receive statements from doctors attesting to their mental instability in order to avoid military service during the Soviet era, the paper said.

The picture police drew of Soltys today sounded more like a man who had thought out what he was doing than someone who was acting on a sudden impulse.

"I don't want to say he planned everything out, but this is not a spur of the moment thing," Garverick said. "We're talking about murders taking place at one end of the county and the other. We're talking about one murder at 9 a.m. and another after 8 p.m."

Soltys is believed to have relatives in Seattle and North Carolina, as well as in Binghamton, N.Y., where he lived when he first came to the United States from Ukraine in 1998.

ABCNEWS' Dean Schabner contributed to this report.