Hubert Pilčík was born on October 14, 1891 at Nový Hrozenkov. He worked as a locksmith at the Škoda works in Pilsen and lived at Senec, about ten kilometres out of the city, with his wife Antonie, eleven years younger than him. The marriage was childless. He was known locally as a herbalist and a lover of the outdoors, and the neighbours called him uncle Hubert.
After the communist takeover in February 1948, large numbers of people wanted to leave for the West and there was no legal way to do it. That created a trade in guides who knew the border country and would take people across for a fee. Pilčík knew the border country and put himself forward as one of them.
He took the fee and then killed his clients in remote forest and robbed them, leaving with their suitcases. The people who came to him were carrying whatever they meant to start a new life with, and they had told nobody where they were going. That is the whole design of the case: the victims had already arranged their own disappearance.
Five murders were proved against him: two members of the Balley family, a merchant named Jan Hůrka, and a married couple, the Krauses. He was charged with those five along with rape, fraud, and assisting illegal border crossings. Czech accounts are consistent that the real number is likely to be considerably higher, and equally consistent that it cannot be established. Many people from that period remain missing, and cross-border enquiries at the time were close to impossible.
He was caught because police identified two of the victims and went to see a relative of theirs. She had been planning to cross the border herself and had put it off, which saved her life. She had already visited Pilčík's house, and could give the police a description and an address. They came to the door on the pretext of changing the electricity meter, and he left with them in handcuffs on September 6, 1951.
The house search turned up weapons and a quantity of other people's property. It also turned up a living victim. A niece of the Balleys was found alive but starved, having been held for two months. In the cowshed was a device he had built: boards with straps for the hands and feet, and a sort of double box for the head to muffle the noise. She said she had spent most of her days in it when she was not being made to write cheerful letters home. He had abused her, and intended to kill her, and to kill his wife as a witness.
Antonie had known and had been too frightened of him to go to the police. She was sentenced to five years for assisting him.
He was never tried to a verdict. He gave the investigators nothing, denied the killings, and confessed to murders of people who turned out to be alive. On September 9, 1951, three days after his arrest, he died in his cell at Bory prison in Pilsen. The recorded cause was asphyxiation with two knotted handkerchiefs.
That account has not held up well. The autopsy established that the handkerchiefs were not tied around the whole neck and pressed only at the front, which is not a hanging. Czech commentary raises two questions that have never been resolved: how a prisoner three days into custody in 1951 had the means to do it, and whether the finding of suicide covered a beating by his guards.
After his death his head was removed, preserved in spirit and kept at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Pilsen. No reason for this was ever recorded. Since 2022 it has belonged to the Police Museum of the Czech Republic.
The case is well known in the Czech Republic and has been dramatised, including as an episode of the television series Thirty Cases of Major Zeman.