Bogdan Arnold was charged with the murder of four women in the city of Katowice, in the Silesian industrial region of southern Poland, between October 1966 and May 1967. He gave himself up to the militia in June 1967. The Voivodeship Court in Katowice sentenced him to death in March 1968, and the sentence was carried out in December of that year. Polish press accounts place his name among the cases of the late 1960s that were solved and that left a mark on the public in the People's Republic, alongside the better-known Silesian cases of the following years.
The archival catalog gives his full name as Bogdan Eugeniusz Arnold, son of Eugeniusz, and his date of birth as February 17, 1933. Super Express, in a retrospective on the case, says he was born in 1933 in Kalisz, lived for a time in Brzeg on the Oder and in Legnica, and settled in Katowice in 1960. It says he trained as an electrician, that he was married three times and had two sons, and that his marriages ended. RMF24, in its own account of the case, gives his age at the time of sentencing as 35, which agrees with the 1933 birth date.
The court files describe the case in a single sentence. Arnold was the accused in a criminal case for the murder of four women in Katowice between October 1966 and May 1967, under Article 225 § 1 of the Polish Penal Code of 1932, the Penal Code provision on murder. The files carry two historical reference numbers, IV K 9/68 and II 1 Ds 22/67. The Institute of National Remembrance holds them in several volumes, including volumes of case documents and photographs for 1967 and for 1967 to 1968. The catalog entries record the charge and the court. They do not record the verdict, any appeal, or the execution.
The killings the charge covers were therefore separate events spread over roughly seven months, from the autumn of 1966 to the spring of 1967. RMF24 dates them to mid-October 1966, March 1967, April 1967 and May 1967. Super Express gives the same months in a different order, and it too places the first killing in October 1966. The reports agree on the span and on the number of women, four, and Super Express and Eska both describe the case as one of four victims. One report, in RMF24, adds that one of the women was never identified.
RMF24 and Super Express agree that on June 14, 1967 Arnold gave himself up to the militia in Katowice and confessed. Super Express says he confessed to killing four women. RMF24 reports that in his statements he also spoke of his first wife; that remark was not part of the charge on which he was tried, and the reports do not give a court finding on it.
Before the trial he was examined by psychiatrists. According to RMF24, the examination found a psychopathic personality and found no mental illness. His defense counsel asked for a second examination, with the aim of arguing that he was not criminally responsible for what he had done. The court refused the request. The reason for the refusal is not known, and the second examination did not take place.
The trial opened in March 1968 before the Voivodeship Court in Katowice. RMF24 says it lasted six days. The same report gives the date of the sentence as March 9, 1968, and says he was 35 when the court sentenced him to death. The legal information site Infor, in a list of people sentenced under the People's Republic, also gives March 9, 1968 as the date of his sentence, though it describes the conviction as one for the murder of two women, not four. Super Express (the Katowice article) says the court passed three death sentences and a sentence of life imprisonment, and does not give the verdict date. Super Express in another overview says only that a Katowice court sentenced him to death in 1968.
These accounts do not agree with one another on the number of killings covered by the verdict. The court file catalog gives the charge as four women. The press retrospectives mostly repeat four. One legal site says two. The judgment itself has never been quoted, so the number of killings the court found remains uncertain. What the reports do agree on is the court, the year, the month and the outcome: death.
The reports describe him as showing no remorse at trial. Super Historia, a section of Super Express, quotes him as saying he regretted most that he had not managed to kill his former wife as well. No transcript of the trial has been published, and the words rest on that press account alone.
None of the reports mention an appeal to the Supreme Court or a request for clemency to the Council of State, the two steps that normally followed a death sentence in Poland in those years. Whether either was made is not known. The reports are consistent about the end. Eska and Super Historia both give the date of the execution as December 16, 1968, and Super Express gives the same date. RMF24 says December 16 and, without naming the year, places it after the March trial.
The Institute of National Remembrance holds the Arnold files in the same Katowice archive as the files of the later Silesian murder case against Zdzisław Marchwicki. The history portal Dzieje.pl lists him with Zdzisław Marchwicki and Paweł Tuchlin as one of the solved high-profile murderers of the People's Republic whose crimes spread fear in the region. That page gives no figures for him.
The number of killings covered by the verdict is reported as four in most accounts and as two in Infor, and no court document confirms either. The order and exact months of the killings differ between RMF24 and Super Express. The press retrospectives are the only source for his remarks about his first wife, for the psychiatric findings and for his reported words at trial; none is backed by a published court record. Birth, marriages and sons rest on Super Express and on the archival catalog.
February 17, 1933: Bogdan Eugeniusz Arnold born; the press places his birth in Kalisz.
1960: settles in Katowice.
October 1966 to May 1967: the period of the four killings named in the charge.
June 14, 1967: gives himself up to the militia and confesses.
March 1968: trial before the Voivodeship Court in Katowice, case IV K 9/68; it lasts six days.
March 9, 1968: sentenced to death.
December 16, 1968: executed.