Two women, one 87 and one 83, stood before the court in Kumanovo and described what the man sitting a few metres away had done to them. Both are from Chelopek. Both survived. Four other women from the same villages did not.

Trajko Bojkovski (25) from Dragomance is charged with four murders and two attempted murders. The indictment says he committed the acts out of base motives - he attacked elderly, isolated and defenceless women he already knew, strangled them, and after killing them, raped them. The court now has to establish whether the man who did this knew what he was doing.

The testimony that lasted an hour

Rosanda Trajkovska was attacked on 9 February 2025, while watching television in her home. "He beat me for a full hour, hit me with his hands and with a phone on my head," she told the court. He stood on her foot so she could not move. He fled only because something banged outside - the house sits by the road.

Slobotka Arsovska was attacked on 22 July, around one in the morning. She got up to go to the bathroom and found him in the hallway. She asked him three times how he had got in. He said nothing, then attacked her and began to strangle her. She ran out of air and with her last strength called out for her son Jovan. He assumed the son was home and ran. She lost consciousness and only sought help the following day.

That is the key thing in both accounts: in both cases the man ran not when someone stopped him, but when he thought someone was coming. Five months passed between those two attacks.

The behaviour in the courtroom

At the previous hearing Bojkovski laughed and stared at the ceiling. Neuropsychiatrist Mice Duduchki described this to the court as pseudo-dementia - behaviour that gives the impression the person does not remember and does not understand. He also mentioned Ganser syndrome, a condition in which a person gives obviously false answers. But he stressed that the presence of psychopathology does not automatically mean the man is not accountable.

The prosecution is sharper. According to the prosecutor, the expert report already prepared leaves no room for doubt - this is a fully accountable perpetrator. The defence wants all three experts questioned before the court, so that a security measure under Article 63 of the Criminal Code can be considered. The logic of the new court-appointed lawyer is unexpectedly frank: the defendant will certainly be convicted, but a prison sentence alone does not remove the danger the experts identified.

The risk the experts put in writing

That is where the most uncomfortable detail of the whole hearing sits. The experts' findings contain the conclusion that there is a high risk of repetition of the acts. This is not media speculation - it is written in a document entered as evidence in the proceedings.

The trial continues in September, when the three experts and the defendant himself are due to testify. Until then one question remains, and nobody at the hearing asked it out loud: how much time passed between the first attack in February and the last case, and what was the system doing during those months while one man walked from village to village across Staro Nagoricane.