On March 8, 1927, at Veselí nad Moravou, a young gendarme sergeant named Antonín Stuchlý stopped a man he had reason to think was Martin Lecián, and Lecián shot him twice and killed him. Stuchlý had been married only a short time, and his wife was expecting their first child. Until that day a good part of the Czechoslovak public had enjoyed the career of the man the papers called the terror of Moravia. Broadside ballads sold at fairs sang of a gallant safebreaker who robbed the rich, and he was compared to Jánošík, the highwayman of Slovak legend. After Stuchlý the songs stopped, the gendarmerie and the army were put on alert, and the hunt for him became one of the largest the young republic had mounted.
He was born on October 31, 1900, at Uherský Ostroh in Moravia. Czech accounts describe a violent father and a mentally ill mother, and he was brought up in a reformatory until he was eighteen. He went straight into crime on his release, was twice convicted by the regional court at Uherské Hradiště, and during his military service deserted five times. After the last desertion he met Marie Křenovská, and the two of them began breaking open cash safes all over Moravia. He had a method of his own. He stripped back the four- or five-millimeter steel skin of the safe, destroyed the lock mechanism and opened it without cutting through the tamped ash packed between the walls, because he had tuberculosis and could not breathe the dust that other safebreakers put up with.
He and Křenovská were caught at Prostějov, and he was taken to a hospital in Olomouc. On December 10, 1926, he escaped from it with a dangerous criminal named Jan Szekely, and the two wounded two guards getting out; some accounts name a third escapee, Jan Deutsch. They committed a string of thefts together until December 21, when they split up at Bučovice, Szekely heading for Slovakia and Lecián staying in Moravia. The gendarmerie command at Vyškov put out a search for both.
On January 19, 1927, at Slavkov u Brna, a municipal constable named Rudolf Hanák disturbed him in the middle of a burglary, and Lecián killed him with four shots. The next day, caught robbing a shop, he tried to kill the owner and a gendarme sergeant named Poledňák. A month later he killed František Marčík, the night watchman at the Grafona works in Jihlava. In mid-February a gendarme named Šilhavý recognized him on a train; Lecián fired at him several times and jumped from the moving carriage. A reward of 10,000 crowns was posted. He began to disguise himself and kept stealing.
Shortly after Stuchlý's death he shot and wounded an army sergeant major, Chvalovský, at a railway station, having taken him for a gendarme. There were several gunfights. In one, near Polešovice, he was wounded and still got away. On April 23, 1927, two plainclothes policemen, Halíř and Kaluža, arrested him at Nový Bohumín; other sources give the date as April 24 or 27.
After a four-month investigation, his trial opened before the military divisional court at Olomouc on August 29, 1927. The army had jurisdiction because he had never completed his national service. The trial lasted six days. He was charged with ten murders, described in the record as partly completed and partly attempted, and ninety-four other offenses, among them his desertions. On September 3 he was sentenced to expulsion from the army, forfeiture of his weapons, loss of his voting rights and death by hanging.
On September 25, with a fellow safebreaker and deserter named Ladislav Kašpařík, he tried to break out. They got hold of a weapon and killed a guard, Ferencz Kiss, before they were taken after an exchange of fire. Because of that killing, President Masaryk refused his petition for clemency. It is also why his total is sometimes given as eleven.
His tuberculosis was treated first, so that he would be fit to hang. For his last meal he asked for 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. At six in the morning on October 6, 1927, in the courtyard of the Olomouc military prison, he was hanged by Leopold Wohlschläger, closing a thirty-nine-year career in which Wohlschläger had served first as executioner for the Czech crown lands under Austria-Hungary and then as state executioner for Bohemia and Moravia. A large crowd gathered outside, and Lecián is said to have asked 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 between the wars.
The legend outlived him. Women are said to have found the grave and made it 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 time list him as the murderer with the most victims since the founding of the republic in 1918. Six years after his execution František Ondráš, who called himself Lecián's heir and had boasted while Lecián was alive that he would be worse, killed two gendarmes before two of his own accomplices, the Gerspitzer brothers, murdered him out of fear; both were sentenced to death. Later a safebreaker named Jozef Prekop, from Červený Kameň near Púchov, tried to imitate him, and was soon wounded in a shootout and arrested in a hospital in Vinohrady where he had gone for treatment.
Czech sources disagree on details: the first murder is dated both January 19 and January 27, 1927, and placed at both Slavkov u Brna and Uherský Ostroh; the investigation is given as four months and as six; and his desertions are counted as four or five.