On July 20, 1951, children went to a sand pit near Senec, outside Pilsen, to collect sand for scouring pots and found a woman's body. She had been knocked out with a bag of sand, strangled with a rope and buried. The police identified her by an unusual dental inlay, going from dentist to dentist in Pilsen until one recognized his own work and looked up the patient's name. She was Renata Balley, who had run a photographic studio until it was nationalized, and she had not been seen since she set out to cross the border into West Germany.
Her boyfriend told detectives that after she vanished he had gone to see her aunt in Pilsen, who said Renata and her father had got across safely. The aunt at first refused to help, thinking the police were after an illegal border crossing. When she learned that the bodies of her relatives had been found, she gave them the address of the guide, whom she knew only as Uncle. On September 6, 1951, police sealed off the neighborhood, two officers came to the door on the pretext of changing the electricity meter, and they arrested Hubert Pilčík.
He was sixty, born on October 14, 1891, at Nový Hrozenkov, a locksmith at the Škoda works in Pilsen who lived in a family house at Senec with his wife, Antonie, eleven years younger. The marriage was childless. He had a very good name locally as a herbalist and lover of the outdoors, and claimed to have survived the sinking of the Titanic. After the communist takeover of February 1948, people who wanted to leave had no legal way out, and a trade grew in guides who knew the border country. He earned extra money as one of them. He also burgled his neighbors' houses, which came out only after his arrest. At home he kept a small arsenal: a British Sten gun, an Austrian Roth-Steyr 8 mm pistol, a Czechoslovak CZ 7.65 mm pistol, a British revolver, a German paratrooper's gravity knife and a cosh with a metal core.
Renata Balley had met him at her studio and probably recommended him to some of her clients; in the end she asked him to take her across too, with her father, Emanuel, and her niece, Daniela, sometimes named as Dagmar, to the German village of Grosskonreuth. On March 6, 1951, Pilčík took Emanuel Balley to the Lipovka gamekeeper's lodge, telling him an accomplice would drive him the sixty kilometers to the border. There he knocked him out with a blow of the cosh to the back of the head, poured motor oil over him and set him on fire. The autopsy found signs in the blood vessels that he had been burned alive. Renata was killed later in the forest.
The niece was alive. He had kept her tied to a wooden board in a goat shed, abused and tortured her, and to muffle her screams put over her head a box with double walls stuffed with rags. He made her write letters to convince the family that Emanuel and Renata had got across and that he was looking after her for the time being. Several neighbors had seen the starved girl, because he sometimes let her out when his wife was away. Police found her during a search of nearby woods, alive but in a poor state in body and mind, and she described what he had done. The device is now on display at the Police Museum in Prague.
The belongings in the house led to three more victims. Lubomír Krauz, an engineer, and his wife, Eva, had also hired him; Eva's body was found in the burned-out Stoh gamekeeper's lodge near Mariánské Lázně, and their suitcases were in his house. The last known victim was a Pilsen merchant, Jan Hůrka, whom Pilčík had put up for several weeks; his identity card and false teeth were found among the property. Hůrka had planned to escape with a friend, also named Jan Hůrka, and Pilčík really did take the friend across. The friend had no money and nothing worth stealing.
He was charged with five murders, endangering the public, aiding illegal emigration, illegal possession of arms, rape, deprivation of liberty, cruelty to a person in his care, endangering the moral upbringing of a minor, fraud and theft. He gave the investigators nothing. He confessed to murders that had never happened, insisted the Krauzes were living abroad although Eva's body had been found, and said of Hůrka that without a body he could not be convicted. He said he had planned to kill his wife, Emanuel Balley's wife, the captive niece and her aunt. The house was full of other people's clothes, luggage and papers, some half burned in the garden; he said they were payment for his services, but they were exactly what emigrants carried, jewelry especially, as currency for the other side. The true number of victims was never found. Searching for missing people abroad was nearly impossible, relatives of illegal emigrants were reluctant to talk, and estimates run to ten.
He never came to trial. On September 9, 1951, three days after his arrest, he was found dead in his cell at Plzeň-Bory prison, officially a suicide by hanging with a noose made of two handkerchiefs. The first report described the handkerchiefs knotted around his neck; the autopsy found they had not gone around the whole neck and pressed only at the front, consistent with hanging. The reporter Jaroslav Mareš has argued that the guards beat him to death, pointing among other things to the unnatural position in which he was found. After his death a story spread that he had been an informer for the State Security in Operation Stone, which used fake guides and a fake border to catch emigrants and the people who helped them. He had held a special permit for the border zone that ordinary citizens did not get, and he had somehow been given two handkerchiefs instead of one. Neither the State Security connection nor foul play in the cell has been confirmed.
Antonie Pilčíková first denied knowing anything; when neighbors noticed how many different clothes she wore, she admitted part of it, said she had taken no part and had been too afraid of him to report him. All her property was confiscated, and she was sentenced to five years for her part in the border crossings. She was released in 1955, and what became of her is not known.
For reasons no one recorded, his head was cut from the body, preserved in spirit and kept at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Pilsen; in 2022 it passed to the Police Museum of the Czech Republic. Nobody wanted to live in his house, and people were afraid even to walk past it, until the investigator on the case, Jan Znamenáček, moved in himself. The case inspired the episode Bestie in the television series Thirty Cases of Major Zeman.