Martin Lecián was born in 1900 at Uherský Ostroh in Moravia. Czech accounts describe a violent father and a mentally ill mother, and a childhood spent in a reformatory until he was eighteen. He went straight into crime on release, and became a capable safebreaker. He was conscripted, hated it, and deserted repeatedly.
He escaped from a hospital in Olomouc with two other prisoners, Jan Deutsch and Jan Szekely. He and Szekely broke into a gun shop at Hranice, armed themselves, and worked their way through a series of robberies across Moravia.
The killings all followed the same pattern: he shot the men who got between him and what he was stealing, or who tried to arrest him. In January 1927 he shot a municipal constable, Rudolf Hanák, who caught him during a burglary. The next day he tried to kill a sergeant who found him robbing a shop. He killed a night watchman, František Marčík, at a works in Jihlava. He shot a gendarme who recognised him on a train and then jumped from the moving carriage and survived. He was wounded in a gunfight near Polešovice and still got away. A reward of ten thousand crowns was posted for information leading to his capture.
Parts of the public enjoyed all this. He was compared to Jánošík, the highwayman of Slovak legend, and there were broadside ballads about him. That turned when he shot a young gendarme sergeant, Antonín Stuchlý, at Veselí nad Moravou. Stuchlý had been married a short time and his wife was heavily pregnant.
He was arrested at Nový Bohumín in April 1927 by two plain-clothes officers, together with an accomplice. Sources give the date as either the 24th or the 27th.
His trial opened at the military divisional court in Olomouc on August 29, 1927, the military court having jurisdiction because he had never completed his national service. It lasted six days. He was charged with ten murders, described in the record as partly completed and partly attempted, along with ninety-four other offences including desertions. On September 3 he was sentenced to death by hanging, and stripped of his rank, his weapons and his voting rights.
Three weeks later, on September 25, he tried to escape with another prisoner. They got hold of a weapon and killed a guard before being recaptured after a long exchange of fire. That killing is why President Masaryk refused his petition for clemency, and it is the reason sources sometimes give his total as eleven rather than ten.
He had tuberculosis. He was treated for it first, because a man too ill to stand could not be hanged, so the state nursed him back to a condition in which it could execute him. His last requests were a large schnitzel with potatoes, a dessert and cigarettes, and he is said to have smoked eighty of them. He would not see his brother and left no messages. Asked what he wanted to say, he had already remarked that he would get plenty of rest in hell.
He was hanged at six in the morning on October 6, 1927 in the courtyard of the Olomouc military prison by Leopold Wohlschläger, the state executioner for Bohemia and Moravia, for whom it was the last execution before he retired. A large crowd gathered outside. Lecián's reported comment was to ask whether there were really that many people. After the autopsy he was buried in an unmarked grave in the military cemetery at Olomouc-Černovír. It was the only execution carried out in Olomouc during the interwar republic.
The legend outlasted him. Women are said to have found the unmarked grave and turned it into a place of pilgrimage, and a few years later local Communists marched behind a banner reading under Lecián's flag. Czech police records of the period list him as the murderer with the highest number of victims since the founding of the republic in 1918.
Details vary between Czech sources: the first murder is dated both January 19 and January 27, 1927 and placed at both Uherský Ostroh and Slavkov u Brna; the investigation is given as four months and as six; and the number of desertions as four and as five.