On September 14, 1967, Maria Gałecka, eighty-seven, was found dead in her apartment on Sienna Street in Warsaw, fully clothed and submerged in the bathtub. She had been strangled, and her body had been cut with a razor blade. Witnesses said she had last been seen with a former neighbor, a thirty-eight-year-old driver named Stanisław Modzelewski, who was known to have quarreled with her again and again. On September 24 the militia arrested him at his home in the village of Patoki, in Łowicz county. He denied everything at first. After a few days he began to talk, and boasted that his old neighbor was not his first victim.
She was not. Between 1952 and 1956, in the villages and woods around Gałkówek, outside Łódź, six women had been strangled and six more attacked and left alive. The first was Józefa Pietrzykowska, sixty-seven, found in the Gałkówek woods on July 31, 1952. Maria Kunka, thirty-two, was killed in a wood near Tuszyn in December 1952; Teresa Piekarska, twenty-one, in a field at Nowy Józefów in March 1953; Irena Bernadetta Dunajska, twenty-four, beside the road at Gałkówek at New Year 1955; Helena Walos, eighteen, near a country road at Gałkówek in March 1956; and Helena Klata by the railway line between Andrzejów and Gałkówek in the summer of 1956. Accounts give Klata's age as twenty-two or twenty-four and the month as July or August. Most of the women showed signs of an attempted rape, and the bodies were left half undressed. The Polish press called the killer the Vampire of Gałkówek, and the village itself came to be known as Wampirówek.
The investigation was enormous and went wrong from the start. Because several attacks took place near the railway and some survivors said the man wore a uniform, the militia concluded they were looking for a railway employee, and questioned hundreds of people who rode the trains into Łódź. In 1957 the prosecutor discontinued the case. The fear in the villages did not end with it.
After his arrest the uniform made sense. Modzelewski, born near Łomża in March 1929 into a family of fairly prosperous farmers, had done his military service from November 1950 to December 1952 in a construction battalion, and from February 1951 he was posted to Gałkówek as a driver of army vehicles. He began killing while he was stationed there and kept coming back after his discharge. He had married a woman from Łódź in 1952 and later lived and worked in Warsaw. Accounts of his schooling differ, three years of primary school in some and six in others. He drank, he beat his wife, often with a cable or cord as he beat his victims, and he told investigators that he had never had intercourse with her and was not the father of her daughter.
His trial before the Voivodeship Court in Łódź began in January 1969 and lasted eleven days. He was charged with seven murders and six attempted murders; he had also confessed to an eighth killing, in Łódź, which could not be proved because no body was ever found. His lawyer, Juliusz Leszczyński, argued that he was insane. The court's psychiatrists and sexologists found brain damage, which they called encephalopathy, along with explosive temper, stunted higher emotions and sadism in its most extreme form, but concluded that none of it had impaired his responsibility. In court he said, "I suffered because I could not have a woman like other men, and that is where the corpses near Gałkówek came from." In his last words he told the judges, "I won't convince anyone. I can't show you my soul."
On February 5, 1969, he was sentenced to death. An appeal to the Council of State for clemency failed. Most accounts say he was hanged on November 13, 1969, in the prison on Rakowiecka Street in Warsaw; one gives the date as July 7, 1969.