Andrzej Nowocien was a paramedic with the emergency ambulance service in Lodz, Poland's third city.
Between 1998 and 2001 he and colleagues administered Pavulon, a muscle relaxant that paralyses the diaphragm, to patients they had been called out to. The patients died, and the crews then sold the information to funeral directors, who competed for the business of collecting a body. The going rate was reported as a few hundred zloty a corpse.
The Polish press named the case Lowcy skor, the Skin Hunters, from the slang the crews used for a body. It broke in 2002 through the reporting of Tomasz Patora and Marcin Stelmasiak at Gazeta Wyborcza, and it caused one of the largest public scandals in post-communist Poland, because the allegation was not merely that individuals had killed but that an ambulance service had a commercial market in deaths.
Nowocien was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 20, 2007, for four murders, with a wider number attributed. Several colleagues received shorter terms and a number of funeral directors were convicted of the corruption offences.
The figure of fourteen appears in some accounts and is not what the court found. The convictions are what this entry rests on.