Paweł Tuchlin was convicted of killing nine women in the Gdańsk region of northern Poland between the mid-1970s and 1983. The courts also found him responsible for at least ten attempted murders; one detailed account counts eleven. The press and the militia called him "Skorpion", the Scorpion. His victims were women between 18 and 35 in what was then the Gdańsk voivodeship. The series lasted eight years, from a first reported attack in 1975 to his arrest on May 31, 1983, and it left a region afraid. TVN24 later noted that the authorities took the unusual step, for the Polish People's Republic, of warning the public through television, and that women stopped going out alone.
He was tried by the Gdańsk Voivodeship Court, sentenced to death in August 1985, and executed in May 1987. He is described in Polish accounts as the last person executed in Gdańsk and as one of the last executed in Poland before the death penalty moratorium of April 1988. The trial files have been studied by a lawyer and criminologist at the University of Gdańsk, Adrian Wrocławski, who wrote a book about the case, but the press accounts of the dates, the number of victims and the sequence of the attacks differ in several places.
Paweł Tuchlin was born in April 1946 in Góra, a village in the Kociewie part of Pomerania near Starogard Gdański. According to a profile published in Detektywonline, he was the eighth of eleven children of a farmer, Bernard Tuchlin, and his wife Monika. His father drank heavily. Tuchlin told the court that he was beaten as a boy for wetting his bed, a problem that continued into his teens, and Super Express, reporting on the trial testimony, wrote that the people of the village knew of it and that friends turned away from him.
He was discharged from military service because of damage to his hearing. He moved to Gdańsk, where he worked as a driver and took other jobs, among them a short period at the ZNTK, the railway rolling-stock repair works. Super Express reported that he worked there for only two weeks. He married, and he and his first wife had two children; the marriage did not last, and he married again and had a further child, according to Super Express. People who knew him described him as quiet and withdrawn. At his arrest he was 37, married, with two children, in the words of Super Express.
Theft ran through his life from childhood. Patryk Gochniewski, writing in Zawsze Pomorze, lists thefts of nineteen cars, goods from workplaces and farm animals. He served a prison sentence for theft from late 1976 to mid-1979, according to Detektywonline. That interval matters to the chronology: the reported attacks of 1975 and 1976 stop, and the next series begins only in late 1979, after his release.
After his arrest he gave an explanation of his own. TVN24 reported that he said girls had rejected and mocked him in adolescence because of a urinary problem, and presented that as the reason for what he did. The court did not find him insane. Over twenty experts examined him, according to Zawsze Pomorze, and a stay of about six months in a psychiatric facility in Szczecin ended, in Detektywonline's account, with the finding that he could control his conduct and understood the consequences of his actions.
The first reported attack took place on October 31, 1975, in Gdańsk-Orunia. The woman, who was 21, survived. According to Zawsze Pomorze, two more women, aged 26 and 19, were attacked in 1975 and 1976 and survived. The accounts do not agree on whether anyone died in this first period. A 2017 Super Express feature gives the autumn of 1975 as the date of the first murder, while the three more detailed accounts describe the first attacks as ones the women survived and place the first death in November 1979. The court's findings are known only in totals, and which of the nine killings fell in which year has never been published.
After his release from prison in 1979 the attacks resumed. On November 9, 1979, a woman of 18, Irena H., died at Niestępowo, according to Detektywonline. It is the first death that the more detailed accounts name. Super Express gives the same place and date for what it calls his first attack.
Anastazja E. died at Zakoniczyn on February 1, 1980, according to Detektywonline; Zawsze Pomorze gives her age as 30. Her husband became a suspect, confessed to killing her, and was sent to a psychiatric facility. The investigation later established that he was not the person responsible.
The accounts describe 1979 and 1980 as the peak of the series. Zawsze Pomorze names other women attacked in those months, some of whom survived; the reports of these incidents are fragmentary and do not always say whether the woman lived. The Zawsze Pomorze feature mentions a 31-year-old woman attacked on December 11, 1980, without stating the outcome, and she is not counted among the dead.
Zawsze Pomorze reports that in the period from 1981 to 1983 three women were killed and seven survived. A 19-year-old, Halina, died in November 1981. On December 8, 1982, a 24-year-old woman, Bożena, died at Skarszewy; Super Express says the attack on a woman of that name was the one that led police to connect the cases. His last reported attack was on May 6, 1983, according to Zawsze Pomorze. Zawsze Pomorze and Super Express both describe an attack in March 1983 after which he abandoned a vehicle stuck in mud; Zawsze Pomorze says it held an item from the railway works, which became evidence.
The age of the victims as a group is stated consistently: the youngest was 18 and the oldest 35, according to TVN24, Super Express and Zawsze Pomorze. A press report from 1983, quoted by Detektywonline, gave their ages as 18 to 54 and counted eight women killed and four attempts; the figures in the court's verdict were larger.
The authorities did not announce a serial offender at the start. By 1983 the pattern was impossible to ignore. On January 6, 1983, according to Super Express, a special group of eleven officers was formed at the provincial police headquarters in Gdańsk, and Detektywonline says the commander of the Gdańsk voivodeship police set up a special operational and investigative group that month. Stefan Chrzanowski led it, and Stanisław Ćwiek was one of its members. The name "Skorpion" is credited by Zawsze Pomorze and Detektywonline to Captain Ryszard Małaszka of the Gdańsk militia's criminal division, who gave it to the case because the attacker came without warning. The investigation also carried the codename, according to Super Express.
The group worked from a limited set of physical leads. Investigators had boot prints from several of the cases, a composite portrait of the man, and information on his blood group. Janusz Skosolas, who headed the criminalistics laboratory of the Gdańsk police headquarters, told TVN24 in 2012 that the laboratory's part in the arrest was very large, and that the central evidence was the prints of the boots together with a link between an insole inside a boot and the foot of the man who wore it. He added that the weather in which the offences took place hampered the work.
The boots led the inquiry to the railway repair works. Super Express reports that the prints matched the footwear issued there, and that Tuchlin had worked at the works for only two weeks. A profile of the offender, according to Detektywonline, described a man between 25 and 45, blond, over 175 centimeters tall, with a shoe size of 8 or 9 and blood group A, possibly a former railway worker. More than 5,000 men were checked against it.
On May 31, 1983, officers came to Tuchlin's home in Góra. Super Express and Zawsze Pomorze say that they found belongings that had been taken from the women, and Zawsze Pomorze adds that shoes at the house matched the footprints from the cases. Detektywonline gives a different setting for the arrest, a farm near Stara Kiszewa, and says he was first detained on suspicion of an unrelated theft of wood and a piece of farm equipment. Police recovered gold rings and women's watches, according to the same account.
He was questioned. In the Super Express account he confessed after several hours; Detektywonline says it took about three hours and that he confessed to all twelve acts with which he was first charged. One killing was described in an interrogation on May 31, 1983, and an inspection of one site took place on June 29, 1983. TVN24 noted in 2025 that the militia had secured many items he had taken from the women, but that the inventory of what had been taken was incomplete, because the families often could not say which jewelry a woman had been wearing; investigators concentrated on the most valuable pieces, such as wedding rings, which could be identified if found with the offender.
The deputy provincial prosecutor in Gdańsk, Ryszard Zegar, led the prosecution team, according to Detektywonline. In court Tuchlin withdrew his confession and said that officers had threatened him. According to Zawsze Pomorze he had at first admitted two of the crimes and then retracted his statements and denied the murders. Twenty-six experts testified, Detektywonline reports.
The Gdańsk Voivodeship Court, the Sąd Wojewódzki w Gdańsku, found him guilty of nine murders and eleven attempted murders, in Detektywonline's account; TVN24 gives "at least ten" attempted murders. It sentenced him to death. TVN24 and Detektywonline give the date as August 5, 1985, while Zawsze Pomorze and Infor.pl give August 6, 1985. The Supreme Court, the Sąd Najwyższy, upheld the verdict. The Council of State, which handled clemency requests in the Polish People's Republic, declined to grant clemency, according to TVN24 and Detektywonline.
Journalists Michał Pruski and Zbigniew Żukowski of the Gdańsk newspaper Głos Wybrzeża reported on the case, according to Zawsze Pomorze.
Paweł Tuchlin was executed in May 1987 at the remand prison on Kurkowa Street in Gdańsk. The date is given as May 25 by Super Express, Zawsze Pomorze and Detektywonline, and as May 27 by TVN24.
TVN24 observed that he came very close to escaping execution: the moratorium on the death penalty in Poland took effect in April 1988, about a year later. Infor.pl dates the last execution in Poland to April 1, 1988. Detektywonline and Zawsze Pomorze both call Tuchlin the second-to-last person executed in the country, and Zawsze Pomorze calls his execution the last in Gdańsk's history.
The number of victims differs between reports. The court's findings, as TVN24 and Detektywonline give them, are nine murders and ten or eleven attempts. A 2017 Super Express feature says he confessed to eleven murders but was convicted of nine. A 2026 Super Express profile gives a different breakdown, with about twenty women attacked and nine killed, but also states that six women were killed in the single year of 1980; that does not match the detailed accounts.
Wrocławski, the University of Gdańsk researcher, told TVN24 in May 2025 that one crime and probably one other case have not been attributed to Tuchlin. He argued that investigators in 1983 clarified what they needed to close the case and secure the conviction, and that digging deeper might have blurred the evidence beyond resolution. Detektywonline lists other cases Wrocławski has raised, from 1976 and 1977, none of them proven. Nothing links Tuchlin to them in any verdict.
In 2025 a piece of jewelry that had recently been found was shown to former officers who had worked the case. They could not connect it to any person, and Wrocławski's review of the files did not identify an owner. He said that biological traces are unlikely to help, because the item passed through many hands and fingerprints were not preserved at the time.
The case is still covered in regional history features, such as Zawsze Pomorze's "Pomorskie zbrodnie" series, and in Super Express profiles of Polish serial offenders. Wrocławski's book on the case appeared in 2020.
April 1946: Paweł Tuchlin born in Góra, Pomerania.
October 31, 1975: first reported attack, in Gdańsk-Orunia; the woman survives.
Late 1976 to mid-1979: prison sentence for theft.
November 9, 1979: Irena H. dies at Niestępowo.
February 1, 1980: Anastazja E. dies at Zakoniczyn; her husband falsely confesses.
November 1981: Halina, 19, dies.
December 8, 1982: a 24-year-old woman dies at Skarszewy.
January 6, 1983: special police group formed at Gdańsk police headquarters.
May 6, 1983: last reported attack.
May 31, 1983: arrest in Góra; he confesses.
August 5 or 6, 1985: sentenced to death by the Gdańsk Voivodeship Court.
1985 to 1987: Supreme Court upholds the verdict; Council of State refuses clemency.
May 1987 (May 25 or 27): executed in Gdańsk.
April 1988: moratorium on the death penalty in Poland.
May 2025: researcher reports one crime and probably one other case unattributed.