On May 6, 1976, in Chorzów, thirty-eight-year-old Mirosława Sarnowska was beaten to death on Nowa Street near her home. She had been the principal witness against Zdzisław Marchwicki, the Vampire of Zagłębie, who was then sitting on death row; she had identified him at a lineup in March 1974 and again at a reconstruction a few weeks before she died. She was killed exactly as the vampire's victims had been, close to her home, by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, her lower body stripped, the sexual motive plain. To a public that had just watched Marchwicki convicted, it looked as if the vampire were still at work. The militia was told from above not to publicize the case. Marchwicki was hanged on April 26, 1977.
The man who killed her had sat in the public gallery at Marchwicki's trial. Joachim Knychała later told investigators that what he heard there had inspired him to become the next vampire. He was born in Bytom on September 8, 1952, the son of a Pole, Wiktor, and a German woman, Anna, née Golly, and was raised in a Protestant household by his mother and a tyrannical grandmother who never forgave her daughter for marrying a Pole and took it out on the boy. Both women called him a Polish bastard, and other children called him the Kraut. He finished primary school in Bytom on June 14, 1967, qualified as a miner-carpenter in 1970, and went to work at the Andaluzja colliery in Piekary Śląskie, where he lived at Skłodowskiej 91. Until his arrest he was an activist in the Union of Socialist Youth.
At eighteen he was sentenced to three years for taking part in the gang rape of a young girl. He insisted she had framed him, and in prison he developed a deep hatred of women. Afterward he married, had two children, and was considered a model husband and father.
His first attack was on November 3, 1974, on the staircase of an apartment block on Wrocławska Street in Bytom. He hit Maria Borucka, twenty-one, hard on the back of the head; her thick hat saved her life, and she saw his face. On September 20, 1975, also in Bytom, he attacked Stefania M., who died in the hospital. After Sarnowska, on October 30, 1976, he killed Teresa Ryms on the staircase of her own building at Rostka 21 in Bytom as she came home from work and dragged her body into the cellar; the building stood opposite a militia station, and no one saw anything. On January 20, 1977, he attacked a woman named Barbara in Siemianowice Śląskie, who saw him and remembered his face. He struck again in Bytom on February 2, 1978, and on July 31, 1978, in the amusement park in Chorzów, where he attacked two girls of about fourteen.
The militia linked the attacks and saw that all of them had happened near Upper Silesian tram line 6. A task force of seven experienced officers, several of them veterans of the Marchwicki investigation, was set up under the name Szóstka, the Six. From the survivors' descriptions they made a composite portrait and then a mannequin with a modeled face and a wig, dressed in clothes like the attacker's, including a distinctive checked wool jacket. Officers rode the evening trams with its photograph and watched the stops. Hundreds of men with records for indecency were questioned.
After another attack in March 1979, on June 23, 1979, he attacked two girls of ten or eleven, Kasia Sosna and Halinka Syda, in woods at Piekary Śląskie, striking them more than a dozen times with a hatchet. A passerby found them undressed in the bushes the next day. Halinka was dead. Kasia had taken twenty-seven blows to the head and survived. She described an older, balding man, and it later turned out she had described the militiaman who rescued her. The task force split in two: the Six stayed in Bytom, and a new group, codenamed Frankenstein, worked in Piekary.
He was careful in ways the investigation found hard to beat. He never attacked after drinking, avoided public transport on the way home, used weapons that were not his own, and put himself down for night shifts. In September 1979 he was detained for the first time. One of the survivors, Barbara Rzepka, identified him, and he looked strikingly like the composite. But the attendance lists at the Andaluzja mine showed him at work on the days of the attacks, and he was released. Then martial law turned the militia's attention to the opposition, and for two years the attacks stopped, probably because he feared he was being watched.
On May 8, 1982, on a walk in a lonely place, he killed his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Bogusława Ludyga. He himself told the family, then called the ambulance service and the militia, to say a young woman had collapsed and died. A careful examination found that she had died from a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, in a place high on the skull that a fall could hardly explain, and there was semen on her underwear. He had been sleeping with her, and she had been about to tell her sister. He was arrested at her funeral and taken straight from the cemetery to militia headquarters.
At first he admitted nothing. The polygraph examiner Jan Widacki tested him twice, first on Ludyga's death and then on the attack on the two girls at Piekary, which he claimed to know nothing about; on the peak-of-tension tests he recognized the details and reacted every time. Under pressure he described the killings of the 1970s in detail and at the scenes gave facts that had never been published. The unbreakable alibi turned out to be fiction: as a youth activist he often worked overtime and was later given days off for it, and his foreman marked him present on those days as if he had worked a normal shift. The militia learned this only in 1982.
To his lawyer he said he had a double nature, knew he had to be punished, expressed remorse and admitted the killings, and was ashamed of the sexual motive, especially before his wife. When at her request he told her about the murders, leaving out the rapes, she answered calmly that she would not forgive him the little girls, and that for them he should hang. He began writing memoirs, pleased to be counted among the great killers of the postwar era. On April 19, 1984, the provincial court in Katowice sentenced him to death for five murders and seven attempted murders; he heard it calmly and had expected it. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence that October. He tried twice to kill himself in custody. He begged to see his children and was refused; his mother and wife visited.
The Katowice court set the execution for 5:30 in the evening on May 21, 1985. He was hanged at the prison at Montelupich 7 in Krakow, at thirty-two, and buried in the Prądnik Czerwony cemetery in Krakow; the grave has not survived. The book Pamiętniki Wampira, The Vampire's Memoirs, by Eddy Kozak, was built from his statements together with the views of psychologists and investigators.