Aristidis Pagratidis (Greek: Αριστείδης Παγκρατίδης; May 1940 – February 16, 1968) was a Greek man who was falsely accused of committing a series of murders and predatory attacks on couples in the forest area of Seikh Sou in 1959.
He was arrested in December 1963 after he attacked a 12-year-old in the "Alexander the Great" orphanage. He was tried in October 1964 and sentenced to nine years in prison. During interrogations, he confessed to being the notorious "Ogre of Seikh Sou". He was retried in February 1966 and sentenced to death as a "dangerous person for public safety", and was executed on February 16, 1968.
Pagratidis quickly recanted his confession, claiming he was psychologically pressured and beaten, and until the moment of his execution, he remained firm in his innocence. Since then, whether he was innocent or not remains debatable, with most claiming he was innocent.
Early life
He was born in May 1940 in the village of Langadikia, the youngest of three children to poor farmers. His father, Charalambos Pagratidis, captain of the Greek army in World War II, was assassinated by ELAS guerillas during the civil war period in 1945. The family (Aristidis' brother Pangratis, his sister Marika, himself and their mother Eleni), having lost their basic support, left Langadikia and settled in Toumba. The mother tried to preserve the family by taking any available work, later acquainting with a bus collector, Evgenios Alexiadis, marrying him and keeping with them Aristidis, while the older children were sent to live with relatives in Piraeus. Aristidis, or Aristos as some called him, attended only the first two grades of primary school (of which the first grade took three years to finish), and had problem with writing and reading. He worked various menial jobs, from a lemon seller to a glazier, from a shredder to a waiter and from a hammock at the Thessaloniki harbor, to an assistant in amusement parks. At the age of 10 he was sexually assaulted by a chemist for drachmas. Since then, when hunger threatened his life, he was used this way to make money. One of his first clients was a blacksmith named Vasilis Baradazoglou, who, in his court statement said with the lure of the little money he gave him, Pagratidis let him laugh: This child, Pagratidis, I met ten years ago. He sold his body for ten drachmas. He was coming with me and doing the job. I approached him. I knew it was a sign. We went to Rendzhi, I gave him 15 drachmas. I've been with him many times. So have other men in the harbor. In 1955, he stole 120 drachmas from the canteen of the P.A.O.K. gymnasium, was arrested and put under a child welfare program. In the same year, he stole and sold two bikes along with a friend, and with the money he planned to move to Athens. But both were apprehended, tried by the Minority Court of Thessaloniki and sent to the Minor Restoration Center in Vido. In 1957 he left the institution, returned to Thessaloniki and resumed work at the port. He also worked as a waiter in a country house, a waiter in a cafeteria, and any other work that he could find. In 1959, while working in the city circus, he was drafted into the army. In 1960, he was put into the 20th Armored Cavalry Division. After his desertion in May 1961, he was dismissed as mentally disturbed due to his drug addiction. He often visited prostitutes, but was also issued to men willing to pay as a cross-dresser, smoking hashish and drinking wine. In the typical way at the time, the court prosecutor wrote: "Pangratidis, in no case of diligence and education, has been turned into a way of corruption, having acquired a great deal of anomalous character and confused ... He was an energetic homosexual, voyeur, a robber, an outsider, a drinker, a deserter, and a hashish abuser."
"Ogre of Seikh Sou" attacks and Pagratidis' arrest
"The Ogre of Seikh Sou" In February 1958, in the area of the Panorama forest, a young woman was killed with a stone by an unknown young man. The accidental presence of a car that was going up in the woods, however, blew the perpetrator out.