Between September 1964 and April 1966, a series of knife attacks frightened Kraków. Elderly women were stabbed from behind as they prayed in church vestibules or climbed the stairs of tenement houses. In February 1966 an 11-year-old boy was killed near the Kościuszko Mound on a morning when children were holding a sledding competition there. Two months later a young girl was stabbed in a Kazimierz stairwell and survived. The press called the unknown attacker a vampire, and the name stuck.
The man arrested in 1966 was Karol Kot, a student at a Kraków technical school for the power industry and a leading marksman in the Cracovia sports club's shooting section. He was charged with two murders, ten attempted murders, six of them by poisoning, and four arsons. He pleaded guilty. Psychiatrists disagreed sharply over whether he was fully responsible, and the court sided with those who found him sane. He was sentenced to death in July 1967. On appeal the sentence was changed to life imprisonment, and then, after the Prosecutor General intervened, it was restored. Kot was hanged on May 16, 1968.
Karol Szczepan Kot was born in Kraków on December 18, 1946, according to the Polska Press portal i.pl, and lived his whole life in the city. He grew up with his parents in an apartment at ul. Meiselsa 2 in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter. His father was an engineer and his mother a social activist; Gazeta Krakowska said she was active in the Liga Kobiet (Women's League). He had a younger sister. Dziennik Polski reported in 2011 that both parents were unaware of what their son was doing.
From childhood he was drawn to knives. He collected them, including switchblades and fishing knives, and had some made to his own designs by acquaintances. He practiced throwing them and, by his own later account to the legal scholar Bogusław Sygit, could drive a blade through a board three centimeters thick. He told Sygit that the knife was, in effect, himself. Dziennik Polski reported that as a boy he destroyed things and killed small animals, and that during family visits to Pcim, a village south of Kraków, he went to the local slaughterhouse, where workers at first chased him away and later let him take part. The Krakow Post, an English-language Kraków paper, reported the same story in 2014.
In the documentary series Polscy. Seryjni, quoted by Dziennik.pl in 2023, his sister described violent outbursts at home during which she hid in a wardrobe, and said he mistreated cats. She said their parents were rarely home because of work and treated the knives as a harmless hobby.
Kot attended the Technikum Energetyczne on ul. Loretańska. A teacher described him to investigators as polite, calm and disciplined, Gazeta Krakowska reported. Classmates gave a different picture. They called him "Lolo Pirotechnik," "Krwawy Lolo" (Bloody Lolo) and "Lolo Rozpruwacz" (Lolo the Ripper), and he talked openly about how he would use his knives. The Krakow Post reported that classmates also called him an informer.
He was a member of the shooting section of KS Cracovia and its best shot with the small-bore rifle. His trainer invited him home and held him up as an example to his own son, Dziennik Polski reported. According to Przemysław Semczuk's 2019 book on the case, as summarized by the history site CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl and by Dziennik.pl, Kot joined ORMO, the volunteer militia reserve, in 1965 and planned to go on to an officer school.
He also read medical atlases and textbooks of forensic medicine. Investigators later found his copy of a small anatomy atlas by Witold Sylwanowicz with arteries marked. Several sources report that during a school trip to Auschwitz he admired the way the camp had been organized and said he would have liked to command it.
Kot later told Sygit that on the day of the first attack an urge had followed him from the morning. On September 21, 1964, after leaving school, he went into the church of the Sercanki sisters on ul. Garncarska and stabbed a woman in the back as she knelt in prayer. Gazeta Krakowska, in a 2013 series on people sentenced to death, described her as a 48-year-old domestic worker. Her coat was cut and a doctor found only a small wound. She described a young man of about 17 with a round face. Two Dziennik Polski articles by Marcin Banasik date this attack to September 20; the IPN historian Rafał Opulski, Gazeta Krakowska in 2019 and Dziennik.pl give September 21.
Two days later, on September 23, a woman of 78, according to Gazeta Krakowska, was stabbed in the back in a gateway on ul. Skawińska as she went up to the canteen she ran there. She also survived. She saw her attacker and described a young boy in a light raincoat with a round, rosy face and a red school badge on his sleeve. Nothing was taken from her. The surviving women are not named here.
Maria P. was the third woman attacked and the first to die. Sources describe her as short and slightly stooped. She cleaned or looked after a church in the city center; Dziennik.pl, drawing on Semczuk, says she cleaned at St. John's, and Gazeta Krakowska in 2019 called her the caretaker of the Presentation Sisters' church on ul. św. Jana. Her age is given as 77 by Rafał Opulski of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), writing in Gazeta Krakowska in 2018, as 86 by Gazeta Krakowska in 2013, and as 65 by i.pl in 2023.
On September 29, 1964, she was reading the death notices posted outside the Presentation Sisters' convent on ul. św. Jana. Kot followed her inside, carrying his school satchel, and stabbed her in the vestibule. A nun found her. Before she lost consciousness she managed two words: "młody chłopiec," a young boy. Opulski writes that she died in hospital the next day without regaining consciousness.
The militia went on high alert. A police note dated October 5, 1964, cited by Semczuk, recorded a woman's report of a young man who had followed her; she saw him again a month later, and his appearance matched the first description. The trail went no further. The investigation into the autumn attacks was later discontinued, Dziennik Polski reported.
The attacks changed how people in Kraków moved through their own city. Several sources describe women strapping metal pot lids, sheets of metal or cushions to their backs under their coats. The social psychologist Zbigniew Nęcki, then a student, told Dziennik Polski in 2011 that he and his classmates visited the gateways and churches where the attacks had happened and checked the newspapers every day for news, and that people in the Planty park at night walked quickly and kept looking over their shoulders.
The ethnologist Czesław Robotycki of the Jagiellonian University told the same paper that crimes of this kind were not unknown under communism but were usually kept out of the press by censorship. Kot's attacks happened in daylight in public places and could not be hidden, so the authorities let newspapers report them. The lack of hard facts, and the lack of any motive such as robbery, filled the gap with rumor. Papers used labels such as "knife collector," "madman" and "Jack the Ripper," Opulski writes, and asked readers not to spread gossip.
In 1965 Kot turned to other methods. He bought sodium arsenate and mixed small amounts into bottles of beer, orangeade and vinegar, which he left in the street and in restaurants, Gazeta Krakowska reported in 2019. He then searched the city papers for reports of poisonings. None appeared, and no one is known to have drunk from the bottles. He also put arsenic into a schoolmate's thermos of tea and tried to poison customers at the "Przy Błoniach" bar. The indictment counted six of his ten attempted murders as poisonings. It also charged him with four arsons, about which the sources opened give no detail.
Leszek C. was 11 years old and a pupil at Primary School No. 4 on ul. Smoleńsk. On Sunday, February 13, 1966, he went to the slope near the Kościuszko Mound, where schools were holding sledding competitions. He wanted to compete, but his old iron sled had a broken rung, and he was not allowed to take part. Gazeta Krakowska, quoting a Dziennik Polski report, says he was found in the snow a little after 11 in the morning by a man who worked for an oil company and happened to pass by. He had been stabbed and could not be saved.
The killing of a child in broad daylight, with people walking nearby, turned fear into anger. Residents protested, and the militia called a meeting that included a senior representative of the ruling party, who pressed for a quick result, but the investigation stalled, CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl and Dziennik.pl report from Semczuk's book. The only physical trace police had was a line of footprints in the snow that ended in nearby bushes, Interia reported.
The family of Leszek C. are not named in any source opened. Kot's sister later said in the documentary quoted by Dziennik.pl that a man attacked her in a building entryway, stopped and ran away, and that she came to believe he was the boy's father. That account is hers alone.
On April 14, 1966, a girl went down the stairs of her tenement house on ul. Sobieskiego to check the mailbox. Kot was sitting on a step and stabbed her. Most sources give her age as 7; i.pl, CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl and The Krakow Post say 8. She survived after surgery at the hospital in Nowa Huta, Opulski writes. She described her attacker as a man younger than her father, a little taller, in a gray coat, white shirt and dark trousers. She is not named here.
After this attack investigators began to link the stabbings of elderly women with the attacks on children, Dziennik Polski reported. Even so, they still had no witness who could name the attacker and no motive.
The Jagiellonian University criminologist Tadeusz Hanausek advised the militia to look for a person with sadistic tendencies who gained sexual gratification from attacking and tormenting victims, Gazeta Krakowska reported. A team of about 20 officers worked the case, detaining several people and releasing them when their alibis held, CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl reports from Semczuk; press reports at the time spoke of 130 officers in the Zwierzyniec district alone, Opulski writes. Officers checked absences at the city's secondary schools.
Opulski argues that the press of the time blamed caretakers, residents and teenage hooligans rather than the authorities, and that the militia ignored several leads. Semczuk, who read the case files about 50 years after the crimes, told Gazeta Krakowska in 2019 that the documents show the officers acted properly and took the case seriously, against the common claim that militia errors let the attacker run free. The Jan Sehn Institute of Forensic Expertise in Kraków, introducing a documentary episode on the case, describes an investigation that chased false leads and did not check clues properly, and says journalists helped investigators.
The breakthrough came through people who knew Kot. A teacher who was also a member of the Cracovia shooting section pointed investigators to a student at the power-industry technical school who was fascinated by knives and carried one, according to Semczuk's account.
The person whose evidence did most to bring Kot in was Danuta W., an art student at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts a few years older than him, whom he had met at the shooting club. Kot called her his girlfriend. Dziennik.pl, citing Semczuk, says a coach had asked her to keep an eye on him, and that the press later wrongly called her his girlfriend.
Kot told her about his urges and plans, and she at first took it as a sick joke. During a walk on the Tyniec embankments outside the city he knocked her to the ground and held a knife to her throat, then let her go when she did not take the threat seriously. He later showed her a piece of glass he carried, which he said he meant to use to make her death look like suicide. She persuaded him to see the psychiatrist Wanda Półtawska, who prescribed vitamin B and asked him to come back with his mother. He did not return.
She went to the voivodeship militia headquarters after he talked about the attack on the girl. Dziennik Polski says she had dreamed that Kot told her he had killed a little girl, that when she threatened to go to the police he threw burning matches at her and fired a rifle, and that the next day she learned an attack matching the dream had really happened. Dziennik Polski also reported that after the sentence she wrote a diary about their friendship. Kot later confessed to attacking her twice.
Kot was detained in 1966, just after he had passed his matura, the school-leaving examination. Several sources say investigators allowed him to sit the exam so that his mental competence could not later be questioned; i.pl and The Krakow Post report this. The date of the arrest is given differently. i.pl says June 1, 1966; Gazeta Krakowska in 2013 describes a search and photographs at the militia station in June 1966; Gazeta Krakowska in 2019 says early June but also gives July 14, 1966, as the day he was taken and confessed; Dziennik Polski in 2011, CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl and Dziennik.pl give July 14, 1966.
When the militiamen came for him, Kot told them, as Sygit later recorded, to be quick about it because he had applied to a military officer school and wanted to sit its entrance examinations on time. He never went. Czesław Robotycki, speaking to Dziennik Polski, noted the gap between what officers found at the Kot apartment, a polite and pleasant-looking young man, and the image of the vampire in the papers.
The search of the apartment found 16 knives, among them bayonets, a hunting knife and a switchblade, together with the marked anatomy atlas and notebooks of knife drawings, one of them titled "Likwidator." The front page of Echo Krakowa announced that after many months of painstaking investigation the man responsible for the attacks on Leszek C. and the girl had been arrested, and official commentary praised a special militia group for its patience, Opulski writes.
At first Kot denied everything and mocked the witness statements. Classmates gave evidence against him: one said Kot had told him he had killed the boy at the Kościuszko Mound, which he had taken for fantasy and not reported, and others described violent fantasies Kot had shared with them. Then one of the elderly women he had stabbed in 1964 identified him in person, calling him a brute. Kot answered with an insult and confessed within minutes, Dziennik Polski reported.
He then gave detailed accounts of the stabbings, the poisonings and the arsons. He admitted the two attacks on Danuta W. and plans to attack two classmates, and, according to Semczuk as quoted by Dziennik.pl, said he would have gone on attacking if he had not been caught. He dated the first idea of attacking people to 1960. At the militia station he said that he would have been a bad man if he drank vodka and spent time with prostitutes; in his own view he was not one. Dziennik Polski reported the remark in 2020.
The central question before the court was Kot's state of mind. Two groups of experts examined him. According to Dziennik Polski, the Kraków group found that his ability to control his behavior was limited for reasons rooted in his inheritance; Gazeta Krakowska in 2019 described the Kraków Medical Academy experts as concluding that he was mentally ill and not fully aware of what he was doing. A second group, from Grodzisk Mazowiecki, found his intellect intact enough to restrain his urges and pointed to errors in his upbringing. Experts quoted by Dziennik Polski in 2020 described the attacks as so-called equivalent crimes, which gave him sexual arousal.
The press called the clash a duel of experts. The court accepted the view that Kot was sane and acted with full awareness. Dr. Maria Grcar, who attended the trial for the Kraków forensic expertise institute and later became president of the Polish association of forensic psychologists, told Dziennik Polski in 2011 that she did not regard the Grodzisk assessment as objective and believed it had been commissioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which wanted a harsh sentence. That is her opinion; no source opened documents such a commission.
The trial opened at the Kraków Voivodeship Court on May 3, 1967, in the same courtroom where Rita Gorgonowa and Władysław Mazurkiewicz had been tried, according to Semczuk's account. Kot pleaded guilty to all charges. Crowds packed the courtroom, people traded entry passes, and some tried to push in through doors and windows, Dziennik Polski reported. Students from the Technikum Energetyczne watched part of the trial as a civics lesson.
Dziennik Polski described a defendant who behaved like a celebrity at a press conference: when a microphone was set up he asked whether he could be heard and whether he could begin, and when the judge asked how he was, he said he ate well, slept well and had put on weight in prison. He kept turning round and was uneasy when anyone stood behind him. At other times, Semczuk told Gazeta Krakowska, he became hysterical, shouting and hitting his head, and appeared to enjoy hearing his victims testify. Survivors called him a beast in court, The Krakow Post reported. Asked whether he felt sympathy for anyone, he answered that he did, for himself. The Krakow Post said the prosecution's file ran to 8,000 pages in 18 volumes; the case records are held in several volumes at the National Archives in Kraków, Dziennik Polski reported.
Grcar described a smooth-faced boy who could have been sent to school in a uniform and whom she would never have suspected on the street. Kot's parents did not take part in the trial and kept their distance from him, she said.
On July 14, 1967, the court sentenced Karol Kot to death and to the loss of his civic rights. The presiding judge, Adam Olesiński, said that the acts showed the defendant to be more dangerous than a wild beast, because he was endowed with reason. Dziennik Polski reported the sentence on July 15. Dziennik Polski said in 2011 that about 95 percent of the written grounds dealt with psychiatric questions. In court Kot said he regretted nothing and would kill again if he could, Opulski writes.
Semczuk has argued that a finding of insanity and indefinite detention in a psychiatric institution was a real legal possibility, and that dozens of letters from angry residents influenced the outcome. He told Gazeta Krakowska that even the judge acknowledged that no other sentence was possible in that atmosphere.
The sentence then went through two further rulings. According to Gazeta Krakowska's 2013 account by Artur Drożdżak, the Supreme Court, acting as the court of second instance, changed the death sentence to life imprisonment on November 22, 1967. The Prosecutor General then filed an extraordinary review (rewizja nadzwyczajna), and on March 17, 1968, the Supreme Court, on this second hearing, restored the death sentence. i.pl gives the same sequence and the date of March 17, 1968, noting that some sources give March 11. Dziennik.pl and CiekawostkiHistoryczne.pl describe the same steps without naming the court or the dates: the second-instance court changed the sentence to life, and the extraordinary review brought back the death penalty. A Gazeta Krakowska magazine piece of 2015 dated the death sentence itself to March 17, 1968, which appears to refer to this final ruling.
While his lawyers' appeal against the first sentence was pending, Kot gave a long interview to Bogusław Sygit, later a professor of law at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Bydgoszcz. It was published more than 20 years later in Sygit's book Kto zabija człowieka (1989). Gazeta Krakowska summarized it in 2013: he said he never regretted his crimes, only what he had failed to carry out, described fantasies of mass killing, and said that after an attack he felt relief and could behave normally for a time. The Krakow Post reported that he told his last interviewer he would meet his victims after death, and declined to send any message to them or their families.
The Council of State did not use its power of clemency, Opulski writes. Karol Kot was hanged on May 16, 1968. Dziennik Polski reported that letters he wrote to his mother from prison survive, and that shortly before the execution he asked her for warm clothing, which the paper suggested could mean he did not expect to die.
Sources disagree on where the sentence was carried out. The Jan Sehn Institute of Forensic Expertise says it was carried out in the prison in Katowice. Interia's feature says the detention center in Mysłowice. A 2017 Gazeta Krakowska gallery describes him as hanged in Kraków, and a 2020 Dziennik Polski article includes him among killers hanged at Montelupich prison in its introduction without stating the place in his own entry. Dziennik.pl reports, from Semczuk, that he was buried about two hours after the execution in a Kraków cemetery, in a grave without a headstone.
Kot's sister told the documentary makers that after the arrest their parents blamed each other. Dziennik Polski found in 2011 that the family's old apartment at ul. Meiselsa 2 was rented by students who had learned its history from a television program. The principal of the school's successor, Technikum Energetyczno-Elektroniczne No. 9, told the paper that the old desks had long been replaced and that the school did not keep any memory of the murderer, despite repeated stories that a desk bore his knife marks.
Experts kept returning to the case. The Jagiellonian University psychologist Krzysztof Gierowski told Dziennik Polski that a criminal mind of this kind appears roughly once in several million people, and said Kot had atrophy of the cortex near the forehead. The Jan Sehn Institute describes him as a psychopath and notes that people close to him had seen warning signs that he never turned on them as he did on strangers.
The case entered Polish culture. The poet Marcin Świetlicki wrote a poem titled "Karol Kot" and referred to the case in his novel Dwanaście. Maciej Żurawski made the documentary Maturzysta, rzecz o Karolu Kocie, and in 2008 Discovery Historia broadcast "Był sobie chłopiec," an episode of its Seryjni mordercy series by Aneta Chwalba and Maciej Muzyczuk. Law students in Warsaw staged a reenactment of the trial. Kot is the subject of the first episode of the documentary series Polscy. Seryjni, which the Jan Sehn Institute lists on its website.
Marcin Koszałka's feature film Czerwony pająk (The Red Spider), released in 2015, draws loosely on the case; its teenage main character, Karol, played by Filip Pławiak, is a fictional figure, RMF FM and PAP reported. A screenplay about Kot by the writer Marta Bębenek won a prize in a Małopolska film competition and was reported in 2011 and 2017 to be in development with Zentropa, the Danish company co-owned by Lars von Trier. Przemysław Semczuk's book M jak morderca: Karol Kot, wampir z Krakowa (2019), based on the case files, was reissued in 2025, and in 2019 he led a walking tour of Kazimierz following the case during the Kraków book fair. Max Czornyj's Wampir z Krakowa. Historia seryjnego mordercy, Karola Kota appeared in 2026. In July 2026, marking 60 years since the arrest, Dziennik Polski and Gazeta Krakowska republished Marcin Banasik's account of the case.
Proven by final conviction: the murders of Maria P. and Leszek C., ten attempted murders (six by poisoning) and four arsons, as charged. One popular source (Interia) gives four attempted murders; the Polish press sources all give ten.
The brain tumor: Opulski, writing with the IPN in 2018, states that an autopsy found a brain tumor. Semczuk, who worked from the case files, says no autopsy was performed and calls the tumor a myth. Dziennik Polski reported in 2011 that a brain X-ray was admitted as evidence and later removed from the evidence list without explanation, and Grcar said she believed it might have shown a tumor, without claiming to know. Gierowski spoke of cortical atrophy. No source opened prints medical findings.
The place of execution: Katowice (Jan Sehn Institute), Mysłowice (Interia) or Kraków (a 2017 Gazeta Krakowska gallery description).
Dates and ages that vary between sources: the first attack (September 20 or 21, 1964); the arrest (June 1 or early June, or July 14, 1966); the ruling restoring the death sentence (March 17 or March 11, 1968); Maria P.'s age (65, 77 or 86); the age of the girl attacked in April 1966 (7 or 8); Kot's own age at the first attacks, which sources give variously as 17, 18 or 19; and whether Maria P. died at the scene or in hospital the next day.
Legend: one story in circulation, reported by Dziennik Polski as a legend, holds that the execution was staged and that Kot was given a new identity and sent to fight with special forces abroad. Nothing supports it. Claims that he drank human blood rest on his own statements and on the press label; the reports of his drinking animal blood come from his own and others' accounts of his childhood.
December 18, 1946: Karol Szczepan Kot is born in Kraków.
Childhood: family visits to Pcim; collects knives; joins the Cracovia shooting section later in his teens.
1960: the year he later gave for his first idea of attacking people.
September 21, 1964 (some sources September 20): stabs a woman praying in the Sercanki sisters' church, ul. Garncarska; she survives.
September 23, 1964: stabs a woman in a gateway on ul. Skawińska; she survives.
September 29, 1964: stabs Maria P. in the vestibule of the Presentation Sisters' convent, ul. św. Jana; she dies.
October 5, 1964: a police note records a woman's report of a young man following her.
1965: leaves arsenic-laced drinks in the city and in restaurants; joins ORMO.
February 13, 1966: kills Leszek C., 11, near the Kościuszko Mound during school sledding competitions.
April 14, 1966: stabs a girl of 7 or 8 on a stairwell on ul. Sobieskiego; she survives after surgery.
1966: Danuta W. reports him to the voivodeship militia headquarters.
June 1 or early June 1966, or July 14, 1966: arrested after passing his matura; confesses.
May 3, 1967: trial opens at the Kraków Voivodeship Court.
July 14, 1967: sentenced to death.
November 22, 1967: Supreme Court changes the sentence to life imprisonment.
March 17, 1968 (some sources March 11): after the Prosecutor General's extraordinary review, the Supreme Court restores the death sentence.
May 16, 1968: hanged; buried about two hours later in an unmarked grave in Kraków.
1989: Bogusław Sygit's book Kto zabija człowieka publishes his interview with Kot.
2008: Discovery Historia broadcasts "Był sobie chłopiec."
2015: Czerwony pająk, a film loosely inspired by the case, is released.
2019: Przemysław Semczuk publishes M jak morderca.
July 2026: Kraków papers mark 60 years since the arrest.