Stanisław Modzelewski was born on March 15, 1929 at Szczepankowo near Łomża. He completed three years of primary school, worked as a driver, and was employed in Warsaw.
Between 1952 and 1956 he killed six women and girls in the countryside around Gałkówek, outside Łódź, and attempted to kill six others. He strangled them with a scarf or with his bare hands. Their ages ran from eighteen to sixty-seven. He took things from them, valuables and worthless objects alike, and threw them away. The killings had a sexual motive; the lower halves of the bodies were left bare and arranged. He was described as a sadist, and it was never established whether he tortured them before or after death. Polish reporting called him the Vampire of Galkowek.
The victims of that series were Józefa Pietrzykowska, sixty-seven, strangled by hand in woodland at Zielona Góra near Gałkówek in July 1952; Maria Kunka, thirty-two, in a wood near Tuszyn in December 1952; Teresa Piekarska, twenty-one, in a field by woodland at Nowy Józefów in March 1953; Irena Bernadetta Dunajska, twenty-four, in a field beside the road at Gałkówek on the first or second of January 1955; Helena Walos, eighteen, near a country road at Gałkówek in March 1956; and Helena Klata, twenty-two, by the road near the railway line between Andrzejów and Gałkówek in August 1956, with a fragment of the material used to strangle her still round her neck.
The investigation was discontinued in 1957 without him being identified, and the local population went on living in fear. What defeated it is the substance of the case. Some of the women who survived him said their attacker had been wearing a uniform, and because the attacks had happened near the railway line the police concluded they were looking for a Polish State Railways employee. They looked for that man for years.
Eleven years later, on September 14, 1967, Maria Gałecka, eighty-seven, was found dead in a flat on Sienna Street in Warsaw, strangled or drowned, her body left half out of the bath and cut with a sharp implement. The case was reopened and the suspect was found quickly, because he was her former neighbour and was known to have quarrelled with her repeatedly.
He was convicted in 1969 of seven murders and six attempted murders and sentenced to death. He was hanged in Warsaw on November 13, 1969.
He also confessed to an eighth killing. It was never proved, because the body was never found, and it is not in the count here.
An earlier version of this entry said he had been convicted and imprisoned for the 1950s killings and then released, and treated that release as the substance of the case. That is wrong. He was never caught for those killings: the investigation was abandoned in 1957 and he remained free without ever having been charged. The archive's release facet has been removed from this entry accordingly.