Zhivko Dimitrov

After the trial's conclusion, an internal review resulted in two deputy chiefs and several other employees from the Ministry of Interior to be fired for their mishandling of the case. In 2020, Dr. Dimcho Kalev, the coroner who performed the autopsies on Dimitrov's murder victims, briefly discussed the case in an interview about his career in his native Bulgaria and while working abroad in South Africa.

In the late hours of February 10, 1981, Dimitrov went to a department store in Tolbuhin and relieved the two officers tasked with guarding the two employees present there. Acting under the guise of official business, Dimitrov told the clerks - two women named Pasha and Vlaika - that he wanted to measure how much time it would take to drive them from the store to the nearest bank, and whether it required the use of an automobile. As he was a high-ranking officer from the First Regional Division, the clerks trusted him and took with them the bag containing the store's savings, amounting to approximately 100,000 leva. The trio then got into his car, a blue Moskvitch, and started their journey, but along the way, Dimitrov claimed that he had to make a detour so he could fill the car's gas tank.

In the spring of 1976, Dimitrov got in contact with a man named Sebaydin Bayraktarov, who was known to possess many different types of electronic devices. Thinking that he could maybe steal some of them, Dimitrov lured him to a wellhead protection area near the village of Branishte, where he shot him in the head with his service pistol. He then doused Bayraktarov's body in benzine and set it on fire, before finally burying the remains. He later claimed to have reported him missing, but authorities were unable to locate Bayraktarov.

Dimitrov committed his first murder sometime during the autumn of 1975, when he invited a man named Lyuben Yankov to his father's house in Tolbuhin. He lured Yankov to the basement, where he closed the door and shot him in the back with his service pistol. When pressed for a motive, Dimitrov claimed that he thought he was carrying a certain sum of money with him so that he could buy back a cassette player that had been confiscated by agents from the border patrol. When he failed to find any such money, he dragged the corpse to the yard and dumped Yankov's body down the well. Two weeks later, Dimitrov called some health inspectors to take samples from the well, and after finding that it had some unexplained bacterial infection, the well was sealed off. For unclear reasons, the workers failed to do a proper search and did not detect the presence of human remains.

Zhivko Hristov Dimitrov (Bulgarian: Живко Христов Димитров; 1946 – 1981) was a Bulgarian serial killer and former police officer who killed six people in Dobrich Province from 1975 to 1981 in order to steal their money. Arrested shortly after committing a triple murder, he was convicted, sentenced to death and subsequently executed after confessing to all of crimes.

Little is available about Dimitrov's life. Born in Tolbuhin (present-day Dobrich) in 1946, he entered the police force and eventually managed to reach the rank of Major of the local police department's First Regional Division. According to former colleagues and people who knew him, he was known to be a very arrogant, egotistical individual who threatened everybody who slighted him for even the smallest of things.