In July 1988 four boys from Piotrków Trybunalski, a city south of Łódź in central Poland, were killed in the home of a 26-year-old former physical education teacher named Mariusz Trynkiewicz. The first, a 13-year-old, died early in the month. Three younger boys, aged 11 and 12, died together later that July, and their bodies were found in a forest outside the city at the start of August. Trynkiewicz was out of prison at the time on a break from a sentence for sexually abusing boys, granted because his mother was ill.
He was sentenced to death four times in September 1989. Three months later an amnesty converted every death sentence in the country into 25 years in prison, because the penal code of the day had no life term. When that sentence ran out in February 2014, the government and parliament had just passed a law that let courts hold dangerous offenders in a secure centre after their release. Trynkiewicz became the first person sent there. The centre, in the town of Gostynin, and the law behind it, often called "lex Trynkiewicz," are still debated in Poland's courts and in Strasbourg. Trynkiewicz himself died in custody in January 2025.
Few details of his early life appear in reliable sources. Piotr Pytlakowski, writing in the weekly Polityka in 2012, described him in 1988 as a 26-year-old former teacher and the son of a school inspector, who lived in Piotrków Trybunalski close to his parents. His parents also had a holiday home in Przygłów, a village near the city, according to Andrzej Matuszczyk, a former militia officer who worked on the case. The psychologist Teresa Gens later described him to RMF FM as highly intelligent, with an IQ of about 121, and as a man who could adapt himself to what children wanted.
His offending against children began before the killings. Polityka reported that during his military service he was repeatedly caught molesting minors, and that a military court gave him a suspended sentence for one act and a short prison term for another. The magazine Focus, in a 2020 account by Kazimierz Sikorski, gave the first sentence as one year, suspended, and said that a later attack on a 12-year-old boy, committed while he was on leave, brought him a prison term of a year and a half. Matuszczyk told RMF FM that the conviction concerned two boys in Przygłów. None of these surviving victims has been publicly named.
A year before the murders, in 1987, a militia officer from the station in Sulejów, Jerzy Szymański, detained a man in the village of Włodzimierzów on suspicion of sexual acts with minors, Polityka reported. That man was Trynkiewicz. In the summer of 1988 he was granted a break in serving his sentence. Rzeczpospolita reported in 2013 that the break was granted because of his mother's illness.
The four boys were all from Piotrków Trybunalski, and all were 13 or younger. Polish media have named them in different ways over the years; most use a first name, often the familiar form a family would use, and some add a surname initial. Wojciech, called Wojtek, was 13. Tomasz, called Tomek, was 11. Artur was 12, and Krzysztof, called Krzyś, was also 12. Eugeniusz Iwanicki, a journalist who covered the case for the Łódź magazine Odgłosy, told RMF FM that Trynkiewicz met the three younger boys at the Bugaj reservoir, a lake by the city.
Little else about the boys' lives has been published, and the families have rarely spoken in public. One father, Stanisław Kaczmarek, did speak. Iwanicki recalled that when investigators took Trynkiewicz back to the scene, the boys' parents were present, and that Kaczmarek was kept away for fear he would attack the suspect. Years later Kaczmarek told Polityka that he did not believe Trynkiewicz had acted alone.
The first boy to die was Wojtek P. Trynkiewicz met him by chance, Focus reported, giving the date as July 4. He took the boy to his flat and killed him there, and then took his body to the forest, according to his later confession as reported by Rzeczpospolita and Polityka. Focus wrote that after this first killing Trynkiewicz waited 25 days before he killed again.
Later that month Trynkiewicz brought three boys, Tomek Ł., 11, and Artur K. and Krzyś K., both 12, to his home. He attacked them there with a knife, Rzeczpospolita reported in 2013. Matuszczyk told RMF FM that the investigation found no evidence that anyone had heard the boys call for help. Trynkiewicz later took the bodies to woodland outside Piotrków. Polityka reported that someone had tried to burn them, but that rain put out the fire.
The two attacks were separate events. One boy was killed early in July; the other three died together later that month, at a different time and in a separate attack, and their bodies were found apart from his.
In early August 1988 a man picking mushrooms in a forest near Piotrków Trybunalski found the bodies of the three younger boys and reported them to the militia. He was questioned and became, for a time, the main suspect. Matuszczyk, who joined the investigation after the discovery, said the finder was one of many people the militia looked at in the first days. The local militia command in Piotrków led the early work, and an operational group was formed. Officers were told to write down anything that might help identify the killer.
Rumors spread through the city that satanists were behind the killings. Iwanicki said his own interest in the story began with those rumors. Matuszczyk said the militia checked them and found nothing to support them.
Investigators concluded that the motive was sexual. The militia sent a telegram to stations across the country, asking whether any had recorded the abuse of minors. In Sulejów, Szymański's note about the 1987 detention in Włodzimierzów was found, Polityka reported, although it was read only some days after it was sent. Focus wrote that the delay meant the man could have been stopped sooner. Matuszczyk told RMF FM that the note written by the Sulejów officer was what led them to Trynkiewicz.
The militia arrested Trynkiewicz at his home, where he was alone, and took him to the station. Officers seized many of his belongings, including drawings, sketches, sculptures, paintings and notebooks, and some of these were later used as evidence at trial. Matuszczyk said the cloth in which the bodies were wrapped carried embroidered initials that his mother had sewn, and that the same initials appeared on curtains and other fabric in the flat. Polityka described the evidence as fabric with a stitched letter that matched the curtains in his flat, traces of blood, and a watch that had belonged to one of the boys.
Accounts differ on how quickly he confessed. Polityka, naming the prosecutor, Małgorzata Ronc, and members of the militia team that questioned him, including Captain Janusz Sielski, reported that he denied involvement at first and confessed only when confronted with the evidence. The article added that he seemed to have been expecting the visit. Matuszczyk told RMF FM that he confessed at once and gave a full account without visible emotion or apology, and that he claimed gaps in his memory when asked about the attack itself. According to Focus, it was about a month after his arrest that he confessed to killing Wojtek P. Rzeczpospolita likewise reported that he admitted the fourth killing after confessing to the first three.
Because Piotrków had no pre-trial detention facility, he was held in Łódź while he awaited trial, Focus reported.
From the start some people doubted that Trynkiewicz had acted alone. Iwanicki pointed out that he had no driving license, yet he was said to have driven the bodies to the forest in his father's old car and come back at night. Kaczmarek, the father, held the same doubt. Matuszczyk said the militia tested both theories. They checked Trynkiewicz's only friend, who had an alibi. Because of the rumors about the license, they also looked at his father, and then tested whether Trynkiewicz himself could drive. He could, Matuszczyk said, and there was enough room in the forest to maneuver a car. No evidence of an accomplice was found, and no one else was ever charged.
Before the trial, psychiatrists examined him. They found no mental illness and no diminished responsibility, Polityka reported, and described a sadism combined with sexual motivation. They judged that he would probably kill again if conditions allowed. The sexologist Zbigniew Lew-Starowicz found pedophilic traits and considered further killing for sexual reasons probable.
The trial in Piotrków Trybunalski lasted eight days, Polityka reported. Crowds gathered outside the court, and Rzeczpospolita reported that people tried to get to him and that police had to protect him from being lynched. Iwanicki, who watched from the courtroom with a militiaman seated between them, described a calm, controlled defendant who showed no visible emotion. The press reported no sign of remorse. Asked in court whether he would invite young boys to his home again if he were ever released, he answered, "Tak, na pewno" (yes, certainly).
On September 29, 1989, the court sentenced him to death four times, once for each murder, Rzeczpospolita reported. He appealed, and the sentences were upheld. By then an unofficial halt on executions was already in place in Poland.
Andrzej Rzepliński, who later led the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and the Constitutional Tribunal, told Polityka that Trynkiewicz had written to him complaining that the trial was unfair, and that the complaint was untrue: the trial had been fair. Rzepliński did wonder whether the psychiatrists had been influenced by the fact that a finding of illness would have spared him the gallows and sent him to a psychiatric hospital for an indefinite period instead.
The death sentences were never carried out. An amnesty that came into force on December 7, 1989, converted all death sentences in Poland into 25 years in prison, because the penal code then in force had no sentence of life imprisonment. Rzeczpospolita, Polityka and RMF FM all describe this as the reason he received a fixed term rather than life. Iwanicki, who interviewed him by letter in the death cell, said Trynkiewicz refused to promise that he would never kill again.
Trynkiewicz served most of his sentence in the therapy ward of the prison in Strzelce Opolskie, in southern Poland, Polityka reported. He had a studio for painting there and was allowed to edit the prison newsletter. He sent poems under a pseudonym to a literary monthly, which published several. He asked to change his surname to Komornicki, his mother's maiden name, saying his own name would expose him to discrimination; the civil registry office in Piotrków, the regional court in Opole and the provincial governor all turned him down.
He refused therapy, so the director of the Strzelce Opolskie prison asked a court to order compulsory treatment, Rzeczpospolita reported. In January 2012 he was moved to the prison in Rzeszów, in a ward for inmates with non-psychotic mental disorders, including disorders of sexual preference, according to Polityka and RMF FM. He appealed against the court-ordered therapy and lost. In Rzeszów he took part in a course on empathy.
That year Pytlakowski's article in Polityka, titled "Krótka przerwa w zabijaniu" (A short break from killing), warned that Trynkiewicz would leave prison in 2014 with no probation supervision and no monitoring of any kind. A Central Prison Service official, Luiza Sałapa, suggested releasing him early, a week before his sentence ended, because that would bring five years of probation supervision with it. The article brought the case back to national attention.
In May 2013 Rzeczpospolita reported that, according to Justice Ministry figures, 18 prisoners convicted of especially cruel crimes would leave prison by 2023 while still showing sexual or other mental disorders, some of them men whose death sentences had been commuted by the 1989 amnesty. The former justice minister Jarosław Gowin had drafted a law allowing courts to send such offenders for compulsory treatment in a closed national centre, or to put them under police supervision. Gowin said the measures would be preventive, not a further punishment. Piotr Kładoczny of the Helsinki Foundation warned that the law would probably be challenged before the Constitutional Tribunal and the European Court of Human Rights.
Parliament passed the Act on Proceedings concerning Persons with Mental Disorders who Pose a Threat to the Life, Health or Sexual Freedom of Others on November 22, 2013. The act applied to people serving a prison term, or a 25-year sentence, in the therapeutic system, who had an intellectual disability, a personality disorder or a disorder of sexual preference that made a serious violent or sexual offense highly probable. If a court found that probability "high," it could order preventive police supervision; if it found it "very high," and isolation necessary, it could send the person to a new National Centre for the Prevention of Dissocial Behavior (Krajowy Ośrodek Zapobiegania Zachowaniom Dyssocjalnym, or KOZZD), with a review at least every six months. A prison director started the process, and a civil court, not a criminal one, decided. The Helsinki Committee noted in February 2014 that the law was modeled on a German law of 2011, but that Germany had taken nearly two years to build its treatment centres while the Polish centre was set up in a few weeks.
The law was published late. Politicians argued about the delay on television that January. Gowin, who no longer held the ministry, said the draft had sat for months in the Prime Minister's Chancellery and then waited 25 days for publication after the president signed it. A member of the left said publication had been held up by about three weeks over the holidays. Gowin said that although he had co-written the law, it should go before the Constitutional Tribunal because it raised doubts. The law came into force on January 22, 2014. The same day, the director of the Rzeszów prison asked the court to declare Trynkiewicz a person posing a threat and to send him to the centre.
The Regional Court in Rzeszów took the case in its civil division. Under the law, a civil court heard it so that the measure could not be called a second punishment for the same crime, RMF FM explained. On February 6, 2014, the court refused the prison's request to keep him confined until the case was decided, but ordered him not to leave the country, to report to the police, and to accept police surveillance. A former justice minister, Zbigniew Ćwiąkalski, told RMF FM that no legal tool allowed him to be sent straight to a closed centre before a ruling became final, and that he would therefore walk out of prison.
Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Trynkiewicz had agreed to chemical castration and said he would take every therapy recommended to him if released. The expert opinions conflicted: a sexologist put the probability of reoffending as "high," a psychiatrist as "very high," and a prison therapist said it depended on the help he would get outside. Lew-Starowicz told RMF FM that for untreated offenders of his type the risk was above 70 percent, while adding that he believed people could change. Marcin Lewandowski, a young lawyer from Rzeszów, was assigned by the local bar to represent him. He told Wprost that he had a duty to take the case and that he was acting in a civil matter, not defending the crimes.
The first full hearing, on February 10, was held behind closed doors under heavy guard, with armed officers on the streets around the historic courthouse. Prison staff searched his cell on February 8 and 10, and the director reported to prosecutors that they had found drawings and photomontages that might be child sexual abuse material, and items that looked like human remains, Wprost reported, citing TVN24. Justice Minister Marek Biernacki confirmed that the notice had been filed.
Trynkiewicz left the Rzeszów prison on February 11, 2014, at the end of his 25-year term. He remained under police supervision and protection. Two officers stayed with him at all times, his address was kept secret, and until the case was decided he had to stay at home between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., tell the police an hour before going out and say where he was going, according to RMF FM.
On March 3, 2014, at a second closed hearing, the Rzeszów court found that he posed a threat and ordered his placement in the Gostynin centre. Lewandowski appealed. He argued that the four experts, two psychiatrists, a sexologist and a psychologist, had relied on one interview, his files, his medical records and a 25-year-old report from Strzelce Opolskie, and that he should first have been observed. In early March President Bronisław Komorowski asked the Constitutional Tribunal to review the law. The Court of Appeal in Rzeszów heard the appeal in closed session on April 29, 2014, and the appeal court decided on his placement, Wprost later reported. In April 2014 Trynkiewicz entered the KOZZD in Gostynin, near Płock, the first person admitted under the new law.
The material that led to his first new conviction came from his years in Strzelce Opolskie. After the prison allowed him a private computer in his cell, he sent three hard drives to his mother in Piotrków Trybunalski in February 2012. In February 2014 she told the authorities that they might contain child sexual abuse material, and police seized them, Gazeta Prawna reported, citing PAP. He confessed during the investigation. Court-appointed experts found him fully sane at the time of the offenses.
In October 2014 prosecutors in Strzelce Opolskie charged him with possessing 1,318 files of such material between 2006 and 2014, in prison and at his family home, with possessing 18 altered images of children, and with possessing ten illegal computer programs. The trial before the District Court in Gostynin ran from April to July 2015 behind closed doors. In July 2015 the court sentenced him to five years and six months in prison. His lawyer appealed, calling the sentence grossly disproportionate, but the Regional Court in Płock upheld it, and no cassation appeal was filed.
He was still living in the centre when the police searched it in 2016. Prosecutors in Płock opened an investigation that April after material was found on his devices and on those of his roommate, and they seized 68 data carriers in all, some from three women who had visited him, RMF FM reported. Trynkiewicz denied having any prohibited material. The prosecution filed an indictment in 2018, and the trial began in April 2019.
By then he had left Gostynin. Wprost reported that he stayed in the centre until 2019, and RMF FM that he had been in prison since September 2019, serving the 2015 sentence. On April 6, 2021, the District Court in Gostynin convicted him of possessing child sexual abuse material and an altered image of a minor, and imposed a combined sentence of six years. His roommate received one year. The verdict was not yet final when it was reported.
Trynkiewicz died on Thursday, January 9, 2025, in the hospital ward of a prison, where he had been held for health reasons. He was 62. The local portal gostynin24.pl reported the death first. Lieutenant Colonel Arleta Pęconek, spokeswoman for the director general of the Prison Service, confirmed it to RMF FM and to TVN24 on January 13, saying she could give no further details because of legal restrictions. Neither Rzeczpospolita nor Wprost named the prison or gave a cause of death. At the time he was serving the sentence for child sexual abuse material, not a placement in the Gostynin centre, OKO.press noted.
The law he prompted outlived him and remains contested. On November 23, 2016, the Constitutional Tribunal, ruling on motions from President Komorowski, the Ombudsman and two courts in case K 6/14, upheld most of the act. It found the measures to be preventive and therapeutic rather than penal, so that they did not punish anyone twice, and accepted the terms "high" and "very high" probability. It struck down only one provision: the rule that a single psychiatrist's opinion could decide whether a person's stay in the centre should continue. Two forensic psychiatrists, and a psychologist or sexologist where relevant, were required instead. In 2020 the Ombudsman's office complained that this ruling had still not been put into effect.
An amendment of 2015 limited the act to people who had begun their sentences before July 1, 2015; later offenders face the security measures of the Criminal Code. In January 2019 a panel of the Supreme Court ruled that courts could not send people to the centre as a temporary civil measure while their cases were pending, but the Ombudsman reported that courts kept doing so.
The centre was designed for 60 people. It held 80 in early 2020, with only one patient discharged by then, and 112 by January 2025, including 30 in a branch opened in 2022 in a former women's prison in Czersk, OKO.press reported. Ewa Dawidziuk, an expert at the Ombudsman's office, described overcrowded rooms with up to eight beds, constant guard presence and cameras throughout, and said therapy was hard to deliver under those conditions. In her view the centre operates unconstitutionally; that is her assessment, not a court ruling. Poland's national torture-prevention body found in 2021 that conditions there breached the ban on inhuman and degrading treatment.
Patients took their complaints to the European Court of Human Rights. By 2022 five cases had been communicated to the Polish government, and the Ombudsman filed third-party submissions in three of them. By January 2025 the number communicated had reached nine, OKO.press reported. One of them, H.A. v. Poland, was struck out in January 2024 because the applicant stopped replying to the Court. No judgment on the centre appears in the Court's own country profile of Poland as updated in July 2026. The Ministries of Justice and Health have been working on reform, but slowly; "Opinia publiczna nie naciska" (the public is not pushing), Dawidziuk said.
Proven by final conviction: the murders of the four boys in July 1988, in two separate attacks.
Never proven: that anyone helped him. Iwanicki and Stanisław Kaczmarek doubted that he acted alone; the investigators found no accomplice and said he could drive. Also unproven: the satanism rumors of 1988, which the militia investigated and found no basis for. Iwanicki reported that an inscription found at the Bugaj reservoir spoke of killing four more boys; no source links it to any further crime.
Reported but not established: the items resembling human remains listed in the Rzeszów prison director's notice of February 2014. The Helsinki Committee suggested at the time that the authorities were looking for grounds to hold him. No charge arising from that part of the notice has been reported.
Details that vary between sources: whether he denied the killings at first (Polityka) or confessed at once (Matuszczyk); whether the fabric carried one stitched letter (Polityka) or his initials (Matuszczyk); the length and timing of his earlier prison terms; and his age at the time of the murders, given as 26 by Polityka and Rzeczpospolita and as 27 by Wprost.
1980s: convicted by a military court and then by another court of sexual offenses against boys.
1987: detained by a Sulejów militia officer in Włodzimierzów on suspicion of sexual acts with minors.
Summer 1988: granted a break in his sentence because of his mother's illness.
Early July 1988: kills Wojtek P., 13.
Later in July 1988: kills Tomek Ł., 11, Artur K., 12, and Krzyś K., 12.
Early August 1988: a mushroom picker finds the three boys' bodies; Trynkiewicz is arrested and later confesses to all four killings.
September 29, 1989: sentenced to death four times in Piotrków Trybunalski; the sentences are upheld on appeal.
December 7, 1989: amnesty converts the death sentences to 25 years.
1990s to 2011: serves most of the term in the therapy ward at Strzelce Opolskie.
February 2012: sends hard drives to his mother; moved to the Rzeszów prison in January 2012.
March 2012: Polityka article warns of his unsupervised release.
May 2013: Rzeczpospolita reports the draft law on dangerous offenders.
November 22, 2013: parliament passes the act.
January 22, 2014: the act takes effect; the Rzeszów prison director files his motion.
February 6, 2014: court refuses to hold him pending the case, orders police supervision.
February 11, 2014: released from prison.
March 3, 2014: Rzeszów Regional Court finds he poses a threat and orders his placement in Gostynin.
April 2014: appeal heard on April 29; enters the Gostynin centre, its first patient.
October 2014: charged with possessing child sexual abuse material.
July 2015: sentenced to 5 years 6 months by the Gostynin District Court; later upheld in Płock.
April 2016: Płock prosecutors open a new investigation after a search of the centre.
November 23, 2016: Constitutional Tribunal upholds most of the act (K 6/14).
September 2019: returns to prison.
April 6, 2021: sentenced to six years in the second case.
January 9, 2025: dies in a prison hospital ward, aged 62; the Prison Service confirms on January 13.