At the end of the spring of 1980, a shocking case occurred in southwestern Bohemia, when a soldier escaped from the barracks at night and murdered four people in the morning in a former game house that served as a motor station. Why? This has never been determined for sure. The police and the army launched a large-scale search operation, which ended on the outskirts of Pilsen.
Road No. 602 branches off at the beginning of the spruce forest, in a flat landscape not far from the village of Holostřeva. On the left, the road stretches to Bor and on to the state border at Rozvadovo, on the right to Tachov or north to Plana and Mariánské Lázně. Forty years ago, the famous Kadrnožka motor station stood at the crossroads. A low house with a large glazed veranda. He used to serve as a gamekeeper. Solitude. The nearest house is a kilometer away through the forest.
Today, the restaurant, which disappeared for good at the beginning of the millennium, is remembered only by the name of the bus stop. And an inconspicuous white cross stuck in the ground near the roots of an old oak tree. The place refers to the tragedy that took place here on June 1, 1980.
It was cloudy that day and rained occasionally. Fifteen degrees. Sometimes a car drove by on the road. A quiet, stiff Sunday morning. A little after nine o’clock, an employee of the consumer cooperative in Tachov, Pavel Punčochář, who was the manager of the restaurant, arrived at the motor station. The staff must have been inside at that time preparing for Sunday operations. After all, the cars of the cook and the waitress were parked in improvised garages on the patch behind the motor station. Red Škoda 105 L and pea green Škoda 110 R called “erka”.
Nevertheless, Stockinger did not manage to get into the building. All the doors were locked and could not be opened because of the key stuck in the lock from the inside. No one responded to the ringing or pounding, nor did the stones that the manager threw at the windows of the casual staff bedrooms in the attic.
“Through the window, I saw something white lying on the floor in front of the entrance from the veranda to the kitchen and I saw a hand. I thought the staff had gotten drunk that evening. Then I noticed that there were holes in the glass above the sales window from the buffet. The glass was propped up a noticeboard with the inscription ‘Today is closing day’, but it should not have been in the cafeteria at all. And only I have the keys to it. I told myself that something was going on,” Punčochář testified to the criminal investigators that afternoon.
The frightened operator quickly jumped into his car and drove to the Public Security office in nearby Bor. He returned with reinforcements in a quarter of an hour. And he immediately noticed that the pea-green Skoda had disappeared in the meantime.
In the restaurant, the policemen were shocked by the bloodshed, which they had not experienced before. The twenty-eight-year-old waitress MV was lying dead on the ground by the steps to the bar, wrapped in pieces of light cloth, and in the kitchen was the twenty-seven-year-old cook AM, and her fifty-seven-year-old assistant AF was trying to hide from the killer behind a curtain. In vain.
In the attic one floor above, the body of a nineteen-year-old part-time AC lay by the bed. It was evident that he was running from the attacker, but he was knocked down by a fatal blow to the back. There was blood all over the place, traces of gunshots, several 7.62 mm cartridges from a submachine gun were scattered on the floor. 58.
“On the table top is a blouse from a military uniform with the rank of private. Under the blouse is a military belt with a buckle, a holster with a military assault knife, a khaki-colored plastic tie and a military boater cap with the national emblem,” criminal investigators described in the file, which was preserved in the Archive of the Security Forces.
The investigators soon discovered that a twenty-three-year-old soldier originally from Slovakia, Lubomír Bugár, had disappeared from the guard at the nearby unit in Bor during the night. As a surveillance unit, he broke into a weapons warehouse, pryed open the rack and stole a submachine gun with registration number 28,801, including 94 cartridges. He disappeared from the barracks after four o’clock in the morning.
It wasn’t difficult to joke and soon map out what happened next. One of the witnesses noticed a soldier walking along the road from Bor to Holostřevy at dawn. After five o’clock in the morning, he broke into the Kadrnožka restaurant, where the staff surprised him. He mercilessly shot them all with his submachine gun. He hit each of the victims multiple times. A total of ten shots. Usually in the face.
The chilling fact remains that the young part-timer, a student of the hotel school in Mariánské Lázně, who helped out at the motor station only on weekends, had finished his internship the day before. Only because of the late closing time, he missed the last bus, so he slept in the room above the restaurant. A few hours later, it became fatal for him.
Killer with a harmonica
“Bugár was quite ambitious, he was also evaluated as the best soldier in the receiver in the platoon and in the company. He never complained about anything. According to my assessment, he was an exemplary soldier, he behaved excellently. He was friendly and behaved completely normally,” Bugár praised his direct superior in the unit, Private René Fojtík.
“He was of a normal nature, he never complained about anything, he was not bitter and took life as it came. He often played the harmonica. I wonder about his behavior because he had no reason to run away from the war. As far as I know, he never said anything about that he would like to go for a walk today,” added Private Ján Braurer. So why did he kill like a mindless man?
Public safety launched a massive search operation. The army was also deployed. An alarm with the code name “Closing” was announced in the region. Dozens of police patrols went out into the field. They stopped and checked passing cars at exits from villages and at important intersections. They were looking for a green sports car with the state license plate TCA-21-10, the Skoda of the murdered waitress from Kadrnožka.
“At 12:50 p.m., I took up a position with my company vehicle on náměstí Řijnové revoluce in Toužim. At 1:50 p.m., while checking vehicles coming from Bečov, I targeted a Škoda 110 R car, light green in color, with the same license plate number, which, however, did not obey my signal and continued driving in the direction of Pilsen,” testified one of the intervening policemen.
“I immediately sent a radio message to the operations center in Karlovy Vary and started chasing the vehicle with a company vehicle,” he added.
Lubomír Bugár was speeding along road No. 20 from Toužimi towards Pilsen. In Úněšov, he drove past another police station, and a few kilometers further, at the intersection with Touškov in the village of Nová Hospoda, he passed other policemen armed with submachine guns vz. 62. At a speed of around 160 kilometers per hour, the green “erka” also passed another checkpoint near Chotíkov on the outskirts of Pilsen. The shooting of the officers did not stop the driver.
Bugar was chased by several police cars. But he was distancing himself from them. The police knew that a dangerous criminal, a quadruple murderer armed with a machine gun, was not allowed to enter the streets of the regional capital at all. That’s why they decided to stop him in the long left-hand bend at the farmhouse on the edge of the Košutka district of Pilsen. At any cost.
“I saw that there were a lot of members of the National Security Corps around the road, some of them were hiding in a ditch. It was around 2:30 p.m. when a Š 110 R car was coming from Karlovy Vary, followed by SNB service cars. The members started shooting at the car . I saw that they broke the windshield of the car, another member shot its tires,” testified Marta Juhaszová, who lived on the farm.
“We shot at the tires, the vehicle skidded and crashed on the left side of the road, where it overturned on its side. All patrols surrounded the vehicle, the perpetrator was asked to surrender,” Superintendent Svoboda described during the investigation.
According to later findings, the police fired a total of 133 projectiles at Bugár’s car outside Pilsen. However, they only hit him thirteen times.
“I used a megaphone to call on the perpetrator to drop the weapon and get out of the vehicle. After that, several shots rang out from the vehicle. I organized a group of officers who secured Second Warrant Officer Tišer, who was the first to approach the vehicle,” described the intervention commander.
Lubomír Bugár, in an overturned car, in a hopeless situation, leaned the stock of his submachine gun against his thighs, bent his forehead towards the barrel and pulled the trigger. A round of four shots went through his skull. And also the roof of the car.
What happened in Bugár’s mind that he murdered four people is still not known exactly. Some time ago, researcher Slavomír Kozák came up with a possible explanation. It is said that Bugár wanted to take revenge on his stepfather in Slovakia. Motorest Kadrnožka just got in his way.
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