This third letter possessed the same characteristics as the first two, so now the police were aware that they were dealing with a vicious predator who enjoyed mutilating young women. He was clever and prepared, because once again he left no clues behind and managed to accomplish his foul business close to the girl’s home, in a residential community, without being seen.
Even so, he was careful not to make the mistake of attacking again too quickly. The people and officials of Warsaw relaxed their guard somewhat as winter passed into spring and then summer with no further incidents and no more scraggly letters. They hoped that perhaps the Red Spider had desisted or been caught and jailed for something else. They were too optimistic.
The Spider’s Web
It was All Saints’ Day, November 1, before the schoolgirl killer targeted another victim, but it was fairly far from Warsaw, over 150 miles away, in Pozna. This victim was a working girl, a blond receptionist named Janka Popielski. Apparently she had gone to the freight terminal looking for a ride to another village so she could visit her boyfriend. While there, she was attacked. Dragged behind some packing crates, she was raped and then repeatedly stabbed with a screwdriver. The killer left the clothing on her upper torso, but absconded with the rest or threw it away. He then placed the body inside a crate and left the area. Local workers found the body right away and called the police. Detectives who examined the scene suspected that a man associated with the terminal had exploited the opportunity, grabbing a weapon of convenience, so they questioned every employee, but found no evidence to link anyone to the crime.
The next step was to investigate the trains for roving killers. Whoever had mutilated this woman would have blood on his clothing, and they believed if they acted quickly, they could apprehend him. They moved from one car to another, yet despite this logical plan of action, they were unable to detain anyone even remotely suspicious. The killer had successfully slipped away.
Even so, if this was the work of the Red Spider, police knew, he’d grown careless. The victim had been discovered quickly and the proximity of the workers meant he could have been caught in the act. It was possible that he’d grown more arrogant or more compulsive. Either way, he would probably make another mistake.
The police awaited his familiar message, and sure enough, on November 2, it arrived at the newspaper office in Pozna. Its single statement was a quote from a 1948 novel about post-World War II Poland,
Popil i,
by Jerzy Andrzejewski: “Only tears of sorrow can wash out the stain of shame; only pangs of suffering can blot out the fires of lust.”
While the enigmatic correspondent did not take direct credit for the murder, it was clear from the location and the extreme mutilation involved in this latest lust crime that he had killed again. Officials worried about the fact that the sites of his murders were so widely dispersed; this made it difficult to anticipate his next move. But they did have one more clue: the killer was apparently a literate person who read novels and who might be political. That aligned him more with the cultural crowd—and art—than to a mere purchaser of red paint. The Red Spider appeared to be intelligent and crafty, and was probably educated. Still, that did not get the investigators any closer to solving this terrible mystery or to ensuring the safety of the young women he targeted.
He did seem to lay low for six months between each killing, so officials anticipated that there would be no more violated female corpses for a while. Even so, as Christmas approached, given the pattern of murders around holiday times, the police in Warsaw were extra watchful. To everyone’s relief, the winter season of 1965 passed without an incident that spoke of the Warsaw Ripper. Yet he was not finished.
May 1 was a major holiday for the Communist Party. It was also Labor Day, a time to honor the country’s workers. Once again, parades filled the streets and people celebrated. As evening closed in, a prowler went about the streets of Zoliborz, in northern Warsaw. He looked for young females alone and he found one: Marysia Galazka, seventeen, was in the yard of her own home, looking for her cat. He probably heard her calling the cat’s name. The predator leaped out at her, muffling her screams and dragging her into a toolshed, where he raped her. Then he used a knife to dig into her abdomen, and as she died, he ripped through her entrails and removed them, leaving her intestines lying across her thighs. He fled just before the girl’s father came out looking for her. When he saw her brutalized body, he ran inside and called the police, but the killer was long gone.
Now an organized task force was required. The police had little doubt that the same offender had committed this fourth murder. In fact, Major Ciznek, who led the investigation, decided to examine similar crimes in a wider area. Just because a murder had not been followed by a gruesome red-lettered note did not mean that the marauder had not committed it. In Ciznek’s search around the country over the past several years, he’d pinpointed more than a dozen murders of young women, all of which shared some similarities with the four unsolved killings he was investigating. Since there was no central reporting facility in Poland, these murders had not been linked. He now marked them all on a map to look for patterns. Clearly, the killer, if he was responsible for even a few of them, got around. He might be driving, but it seemed more likely that he was using public transportation.
Indeed, the towns in which murders had occurred were linked by rail lines to Krakow and to Katowice. Major Ciznek wondered if the killer might be from one of these two cities, and had been careful not to attack anyone in his own neighborhood. It would be easy enough to board a train and go to another town to seek victims, and then get on another train to return home. Ciznek gave this angle a lot of thought. Since most of the murders were south of Warsaw, he surmised that Katowice was the more likely area of residence.
It was around this time that the killer made his most egregious error to date, on Christmas Eve in 1966, taking the life of the sister of an earlier victim and linking himself to the mutilation with a note. This was the victim the sailors had discovered.
The Case Breaks
The parents of the murdered sisters told police that both girls had worked as models for artists in Krakow and were members of the Art Lovers Club there. That fit with the type of person the police were seeking. They decided to examine the list of male members of this club, as well as that of the School of Plastic Arts, where the girls had modeled.
Yet even this was no easy task. The membership numbered over one hundred and many of the male members were respected professionals. That did not excuse them, but it made the investigation a bit trickier. Going painstakingly through these lists, investigators learned about the members’ professions, schedules, family lives, and areas of residence. They also looked at whether or not a member was also an artist, and what kinds of work he produced. Specifically, they were looking for someone who used the same type of red paint that had been thinned down to write the letters.
One viable suspect was a young man named Lucian Staniak. He lived in Katowice, near the train line, and he worked as a translator for a government printing house, so he was educated. Twenty-six years old, he possessed a ticket for unlimited travel that allowed him to go anywhere in the country on the trains without paying extra fees. He seemed to be a good fit.
Ciznek went to the art club and ordered the manager to open Staniak’s locker, where he kept his painting supplies. He hit pay dirt. While he saw knives used for mixing and placing paint on canvas, it did not require another tedious chemical analysis to see a glaring clue that placed Staniak squarely in the category of “best suspect.” He liked red paint, but more to the point, his work was gruesome and bizarre. One painting, called
The Circle of Life,
showed a number of disturbing death scenes: a cow ate a flower and was then eaten by a wolf, which was shot by a hunter. A woman driving a car ran over the hunter, and she died at the hand of a mutilating sex murderer. Her abdomen was sliced open, just like all the Red Spider victims, and as she decomposed, flowers sprang up through her remains to complete the cycle of life and death.
The artistically rendered corpse was sufficient cause, on that last day of January in 1967, to bring Staniak in for interrogation. Ciznek dispatched several officers to perform this task, feeling optimistic that at last he had a very good lead. However, to his dismay, Staniak was not at home. What Ciznek did not know was that Staniak was in another town, prowling for a victim. Before the police even knocked on his door, another girl was dead.
Staniak had boarded a train that very morning and had gotten out in Lodz, a city that had a film institute. There he looked around, spotted eighteen-year-old Bozhena Raczkiewicz, and using his charm, made her acquaintance. That evening, they went together to the railway station and settled inside a shelter, where they drank some vodka and talked about art. When he sensed that the coast was clear, Staniak used the liquor bottle to knock the girl unconscious and proceeded to use his artist’s knife to cut through her skirt and panties. He raped her and kept stabbing her lower torso until he exhausted his driving need to see blood and gore. Then he fled. But he’d made yet another mistake.
It’s one thing to interpret a painting as a clue to a killer’s MO; it’s quite another to have his fingerprints on a weapon used in a murder. Staniak had inadvertently left one on the vodka bottle. This time, he’d not been so clever.
Yet he did not go home from Lodz until the following morning. Detectives waited throughout the night, and those who were at the train station spotted him when he disembarked and took him into custody. He was placed at once into an interrogation room.
It did not take long to get a confession. Staniak was apparently only too glad to take credit for the unsolved murders, and in fact claimed that he had killed as many as twenty women—just as Ciznek had surmised. He also supplied a rather bizarre motive.
In 1964, he told the police, a young blond woman was driving her car too fast on an ice-covered street. She struck his parents as they crossed the street, killing them. Although the woman was charged with reckless driving, she was acquitted. Staniak had been incensed by this lack of justice. She had taken away his entire family, but had paid no price for it. He wanted to kill her, but he knew the police would suspect him, so he had developed another plan to get his revenge. He would kill a substitute for this woman. On several occasions, when he spotted a young woman who resembled the drunk driver, he followed her and killed her. That would appease his rage for a while. But then he discovered that he enjoyed stalking and killing, so he continued doing it whenever the opportunity arose. The murder on the train, he confessed, had been committed merely because he’d been feeling neglected by the newspapers and wanted more publicity.
Despite his detailed confession, the physical evidence corroborated only six of the murders, so that’s what the authorities charged him with. He was convicted of them all and given a death sentence. However, psychiatrists stated that their analysis had determined that Staniak was psychotic and had thus been insane at the time of the murders, unaware of what he had done. A judge commuted his death sentence to life in a psychiatric institution in Katowice. The victims’ families were outraged, but the sentence was final.
In this case, an investigator had been sufficiently open-minded to see the value of a work of art as a psychological revelation. Because he had put together a thorough analysis of the killer’s movements, he went the step further to apprehend the suspect. In only two decades, another alert cop would think outside the box during an investigation and thereby initiate events that would forever alter crime-scene analysis and suspect identification.
Sources
Lane, Brian, and Wilfred Gregg.
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.
New York: Berkley, 1995.
Miller, Hugh.
Proclaimed in Blood: True Crimes Solved by Forensic Science.
London: Headline, 1995.
Newton, Michael.
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.
Second edition. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006.
Nickell, Joe, and John Fischer.
Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection.
Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Owen, David.
Hidden Evidence: Forty True Crimes and How Forensic Science Helped Solve Them.
Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2000.
Saferstein, Richard.
Criminalistics: An Introduction to Forensic Science.
Sixth edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Wilson, Colin, and Damon Wilson.
The Killers Among Us: Motives Behind Their Madness.
New York: Warner, 1995.
FIVE
COLIN PITCHFORK:
First DNA Sweep
When friends saw Lynda Mann at school on November 21, 1983, she seemed her usual bubbly self. The English village of Narborough, in Leicestershire County, was a place where people knew one another, thanks to a couple of churches, shops, and pubs, and residents were aware of small incidents worthy of gossip. The drama of crime, however, was generally absent. That was about to change.
Directly after school, Lynda walked over to a neighbor’s house to babysit. She often did this to make extra money to buy clothes. She hoped one day to be a world traveler, and those who knew her were confident that she would accomplish whatever she decided to do.
Around six forty-five that evening, Lynda went to do another round of babysitting, but learned she would not be needed, so she set out to see her best friend, Karen Blackwell. She intended to visit one more friend that day, Caroline, to retrieve a borrowed item, so she left Karen’s shortly after seven. It was cold that night, but Lynda liked to keep her affairs in order and she did not mind the weather. The house in Enderby was a fifteen-minute walk away. Caroline would recall that Lynda was in and out quickly, before seven-thirty. From there, she headed for a wooded path on the west side of town known as the Black Pad. It was fenced along one side because it lay near the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. This was the quickest way for her to get home. Somewhere along this path, she met a man who killed her and left her body in the dark, under the full moon.