The Mitsero Red Lake in Cyprus is an eerie and unnatural wonder. Its waters, stained a deep, blood-red by the acidic pyrite runoff from an abandoned copper mine, are toxic and devoid of life.

For years, it was a dark tourist spot, a place for curious photos and uneasy jokes. In a 2017 travel vlog that would later become chillingly prophetic, a visitor remarked that the place “smelled like death.”

Two years later, that morbid jest became a horrifying reality, as a freak rainstorm would unearth a human body, exposing the lake and its surroundings as the secret graveyard of the nation’s first-ever serial killer.

The investigation that would grip the Mediterranean island nation began on April 14, 2019. After a period of unusually heavy rain, a pair of German tourists were biking near the abandoned mine when a landslide exposed a black plastic bag in a flooded mineshaft.

Using the powerful zoom lens on their camera, they confirmed the horrifying contents: the skeletal remains of a human being.

They immediately called the police. The body, bound at the feet and wrapped in a sheet, was soon identified as 38-year-old Mary Rose Tiburcio, a Filipina domestic worker who had been reported missing in May of 2018—a case the police had largely ignored.

This grim discovery was just the beginning. As police launched a massive search operation, they found a second body in the same mineshaft just six days later. It was another missing Filipina domestic worker, 28-year-old Arian Palanas Lozano.

The investigation then turned to Mary Rose’s laptop, where computer forensics experts uncovered her activity on the dating app Badoo. They meticulously traced the IP addresses of the men she had been communicating with and brought two soldiers from the Cypriot National Guard in for questioning.

One of them was a 35-year-old army captain, Nikos Metaxas.

After days of intense interrogation, Metaxas confessed. He not only admitted to killing Mary Rose and Arian, but he stunned seasoned investigators by calmly admitting to five other murders.

In a chilling, handwritten note, he detailed a three-year killing spree, providing the names of his victims and the locations of their watery graves.

The man behind the uniform was a predator hiding in plain sight. A divorced father of two and a skilled photographer, Metaxas presented a respectable image to the world. But he lived a dark double life. Online, he was “Orestes,” a confident and charming man who used dating apps to systematically target and groom vulnerable, low-income foreign workers from countries like the Philippines, Romania, and Nepal.

Psychologists would later diagnose him with a severe antisocial personality disorder, noting that his traumatic childhood—being abandoned by his mother after she left his abusive father—led to deep-seated abandonment issues, but that he felt no remorse for his actions.

His modus operandi was cold and calculated. He would connect with the women online, “love bomb” them with compliments, and gain their trust. He would then arrange to meet for a sexual encounter. Afterwards, when his victims believed a serious relationship was beginning, he would strangle them to death.

He would then bind their bodies, stuff them into suitcases, weigh them down with concrete blocks, and dump them in the Red Lake or other remote wells and lakes. In two horrific instances, his victims had brought their young daughters, aged 6 and 8, along to the meeting. To eliminate the witnesses, he murdered the children as well.

As Metaxas led police on a grim tour of his disposal sites, the full, heartbreaking scale of his crimes became clear. A third victim, a woman from Nepal, was found in a well at a military shooting range. With the help of high-tech cameras and expert divers from Scotland Yard, investigators searched the toxic depths of the Red Lake.

There, they found three more victims stuffed in suitcases: 36-year-old Livia Florentina Bunea and her 8-year-old daughter Elena, both from Romania, who had been missing since 2016; and 31-year-old Filipina single mother Maricar Valtes Arquiola, missing since 2017. The final victim, Mary Rose’s 6-year-old daughter, Sierra, was found two months later in a different lake after Metaxas finally revealed her location.

The case became a moment of national shame for Cyprus, exposing the gross negligence and alleged systemic racism of the local police. It was revealed that several of the victims had been reported as missing persons years prior, but their cases were dismissed by authorities who assumed, without investigation, that the women had simply left their employers to work illegally elsewhere.

The scandal sparked massive public protests, with citizens demanding an end to discrimination against migrant workers and leading to the firing of the country’s chief of police. The President of Cyprus issued a public apology for the state’s failure to protect the victims.

In June 2019, Nikos Metaxas pleaded guilty to all seven murders in an emotional court hearing, where he tearfully apologized to the families. He was given seven life sentences, the longest sentence in Cypriot history. The case of the “Red Lake Killer” is a devastating story of vulnerable women who came to a foreign land seeking a better life, only to be preyed upon by a hidden monster, and a powerful indictment of a system that failed to see them, listen to them, or protect them until it was far too late.