Nicolai Bonner

As of 2021, Bonner is still alive and remains behind bars.

About a month later, on March 11th, Bonner went to the home of 34-year-old Russian immigrant Alexander "The Chechen" Levant, a former soldier in the Russian Armed Forces who had fought in the Second Chechen War. The two men were acquainted from the nearby marketplace and were drinking buddies, but when Levant fell asleep, Bonner attempted to steal a bottle of alcohol. However, Levant awoke and warned him to leave it. In response, Bonner began beating him, killing his friend in the process. After he had killed Levant, he grabbed several matches and lit the corpse on fire.

On February 9, 2005, Bonner offered to help escort 52-year-old Rita Wolman back to her apartment on Hussein Street. Wolman, a fellow immigrant and former bar singer who suffered a leg injury from a car crash, invited him for a drink in her apartment. The two drank and smoked until the late evening, with Wolman offering Bonner to stay over. Taking this as an offer for intimacy, the half-drunk Bonner asked Wolman to have sex, but she refused. Enraged, he slapped her twice, before Rita retaliated and slapped him back. At that point, Bonner hit her on the head and knocked Wolman unconscious, before he proceeded to rape her. After he finished, he noticed that she had stopped breathing, and in order to dispose of the evidence, he set her bed on fire with a lighter.

In January 2003, his wife died suddenly from tuberculosis, causing Bonner to indulge into alcoholism even further, which impacted his work performance. Eventually, he quit and began moving around the country in search of labor-intensive jobs, but eventually returned to Haifa and began living on the streets with the homeless. Over the following months, he befriended an older homeless man, Simon Ariri, and even found himself a new girlfriend, often visiting the former's house to drink vodka together. In September 2004, Bonner moved in with his sister in Tel Aviv, but after she was deported from the country, he moved to Emunim moshav, where he worked in construction. In December, he was fired from the job and then returned to Haifa.

While at the boarding school, Bonner began to drink vodka to ease his feelings of loneliness. After graduating, he returned to live in his parental home and began working as a shepherd on a local farm, but quit after some time, opting to work menial jobs in Ukraine and Russia to earn an income. A year into his travels, he was convicted of theft and sentenced to a yearlong incarceration. When he served it out, Bonner returned to Moldova, where he soon met and married a 18-year-old girl. In 2000, the couple decided to immigrate to Israel; while Bonner wasn't Jewish, he was still eligible via the Law of Return as his wife was. They moved into a rented apartment in Haifa, with Bonner taking on jobs in the construction industry, most notably spending two years as a pipeline manufacturing plant in Acre. According to his employer, Yossi Ben-David, Bonner was considered a diligent and respectful worker who performed his tasks without any complaints.

Nicolai Bonner (Hebrew: ניקולאי בונר; born 1972), known as The Haifa Homeless Killer (Hebrew: רוצח ההומלסים), is a Moldovan-born Israeli serial killer who killed four people in Haifa between February and May 2005. For these crimes, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Nicolai Bonner was born in a village in the Moldavian SSR in 1972, the third of four children. His mother was busy working at a factory, while his father was an alcoholic who paid little attention to his children. At the age of 9, Bonner's mother passed away, and he was sent to a boarding school to complete his education.

On May 1st, Bonner was squatting in an abandoned apartment with another homeless immigrant, 39-year-old Alexander Kars, whom he had befriended the day before. While the pair were drinking, Kars made an off-hand comment about Bonner's mother, which insulted the latter. Noticing a large stick nearby, Bonner grabbed it and started hitting Kars, knocking him to the ground. After incapacitating him, he strangled Kars to death with a TV cable.

Bonner wasn't arrested immediately, since the investigators had no evidence connecting him to any of the recent murders at the time. He was kept under surveillance until May 29th, when he was arrested at his mother-in-law's home and brought in for questioning. At the interrogation, Bonner confessed to all four of the murders, recalling what he was able to remember while committing them and why. When asked if he felt any remorse for the acts, he simply replied 'No.' and then burst into tears.