Danuta Barasińska was not seriously ill. Her family doctor had sent her to the hospital for tests, to be on the safe side, because her blood pressure was a little high. The ambulance that came for her had gone a few hundred yards when the paramedic in the back, Andrzej Nowocień, injected her with Pavulon. She never reached the hospital. Her death was one of the few, the journalist Tomasz Patora said later, that could be proved.
Pavulon is the trade name of pancuronium, a muscle relaxant used in anesthesia. Given without a ventilator, it paralyzes the muscles of breathing, and in the doses used in Łódź it left almost nothing a routine examination would find. Between December 1, 1997 and the end of 2001, 939 ampoules of it disappeared from the pharmacy of the Łódź emergency ambulance service. After the case broke, the losses fell almost to nothing.
The motive was a market. Funeral homes in the city competed for bodies, and staff of the ambulance service sold them news of deaths before families could call anyone else. The going rate for a skin, as the crews called a corpse, was reported at between 1,200 and 2,000 zloty, split among the dispatcher, the paramedic, the driver and sometimes the doctor. The more skins, the more money. At first it meant delay: ambulances sent late or from far away, stops for food on the way, resuscitations only pretended. Then some staff began to kill.
The story was published on January 23, 2002 by Tomasz Patora and Marcin Stelmasiak of Gazeta Wyborcza and Przemysław Witkowski of Radio Łódź, under the headline that gave the case its name, Łowcy skór, the Skin Hunters. It became one of the largest scandals of post-communist Poland, because the allegation was not that one man had killed but that an emergency service had been running a trade in deaths.
Nowocień, a paramedic whose colleagues called him Doctor Ebrantil and Horse, was tried with three others in the Łódź regional court. On January 19 or 20, 2007 (Polish sources give both dates) the court, presided over by Judge Jarosław Papis, convicted him of the murder of four patients and of helping a fellow paramedic, Karol Banaś, commit a fifth. He received four terms of twenty-five years, merged into life imprisonment, and ten years' loss of civic rights. Banaś got twenty-five years for what the court called the especially cruel killing of a patient, Ludmiła Ś., with Pavulon. Two ambulance doctors were convicted of knowingly exposing patients to death: Janusz Kuliński, six years, for ten patients, and Paweł Wasilewski, five years, for four. All four were barred from their professions for ten years.
Judge Papis described the inside of an ambulance as the place where a patient's hope and a family's trust met the ruthless work of an agent of darkness dressed in a paramedic's uniform, cynical and contemptuous of human life. One of the defendants had boasted, the court heard, that he had "knocked off" a woman who had a rash.
The Łódź appeals court upheld the verdicts on June 9, 2008, and on October 27, 2009 the Supreme Court rejected the final appeals. Judge Stanisław Zabłocki opened with Saint Paul, that the love of money is the root of all evil, and said the men had priced a human life at a thousand zloty to be split four ways. He called the case a small, tragically deformed fragment of the health service, a dark margin, and not a picture of the whole.
Five murders were proved at the trial, four of them against Nowocień. Estimates of the real toll have run far higher; some accounts attribute fourteen deaths to him, and journalists who covered the case have said that other killers in the ambulance service were never charged. Those figures are reporters' estimates, not findings of the court. Polish television reported in 2024 that Nowocień was still serving his life sentence and that the two doctors had been released.