What caught Václav Mrázek was a theft of almost no importance. On March 17, 1957, a miner at the Nejedlý I pit in Kladno who had hurt himself went to the changing room to see to the injury and found a colleague going through the pockets of the other men's coats. Thefts had been common there, and the police were called and searched Mrázek's home. In the cellar, hidden in the hollow leg of a workbench, was a 7.65 mm Walther pistol. Ballistics showed it was the gun used in a series of killings of women around Chomutov that had gone unsolved for six years, despite the first special investigative team in the history of Czechoslovak criminal policing and checks on some twenty-five thousand men. The flat was also full of stolen goods, among them property taken in a robbery and murder the previous November.
He was born on October 22, 1925, at Svinařov near Kladno, one of twelve children of an extremely poor family that for a time lived in a railway wagon. He left school after the fifth grade, and from early childhood his father and older siblings taught him to steal, above all food and clothing. As a young man he served a short prison term for theft. After the war he signed on as an armed guard for an UNRRA relief convoy in Romania and Bulgaria, and he later admitted that he and others in it had fired from the train at living targets. He moved to the former Sudetenland for work, took a job at the tube rolling mills in Chomutov and rose to foreman. People who knew him described a small, slight, shy, conscientious man and a tireless worker. In private he read sadistic pornography.
He liked to ride a bicycle around the countryside, and when he met a woman alone he felt, by his own account, an urge to attack her so strong that it gave him headaches. In August 1951, near the village of Drahonice by Kadaň, which no longer exists, he beat fifteen-year-old Hana Chloubová to death with a stick as she grazed cows on the bank of the Ohře and abused her body. The date is given as both August 22 and August 28. On September 16, 1951, Bronislava Pajúrková, thirty-two, missed her bus and set out on foot from Jirkov to Kyjice. By then he had bought the Walther from an acquaintance. He fired three times, dragged her from the road, abused and robbed her, and threw her into the Bílina river, where boys on their way to school found her.
Two women who were attacked that autumn survived. In October, by the Kamencové lake, he tried to stab Anna Šestáková in the throat; the blade struck her face and lodged against her jaw, and she ran. A month later Erna Meinlová was stabbed near a factory, but the knife did not go deep through her heavy coat. On the night of June 1, 1952, he stole a bicycle outside a dance at Hořenec and shot at nineteen-year-old Elena Marmanová on her way home. The first bullet passed through her collar and the second through the back of her coat, the third round jammed, and he pushed her away and let her go. Her description gave the police their only picture of him. The same night he shot Marie Dvořáková, sixteen, also leaving the dance, and abused her body beside a brick transformer house near Přečáply.
After a pause of two years he shot Jiřina Helmichová, a sixteen-year-old student, in the face near Horní Jiřetín on July 14, 1954, after calling out to make her turn around. On August 9, 1955, on the road between Chomutov and Březenec, he came upon a young couple out walking on a warm evening, Karel Trlifaj, twenty-six, and Libuše Dufková, nineteen. He shot Trlifaj three times. Dufková lay still and pretended to be dead, then ran when she thought he had gone, and he shot her in the back. He dragged her into a field and abused her, and took everything of value from both, down to the small coins.
Afraid of being caught, he changed jobs and moved to Kladno. On November 9, 1956, he broke into the house of a man he knew in his home village of Svinařov, wanting his property. The man's wife, Alžběta Beranová, fifty-seven, woke to find him there, and he killed her with an ax, stole what he could, and on his way out raped her young granddaughter, whose age is given as ten or eleven. The girl later told the police, "He was small, weak and had evil eyes."
He was taken to Prague on March 19, 1957, and in the end confessed to everything, describing each case with a precision that surprised the investigators years after the fact. He was quoted as saying that what satisfied him most sexually was bringing a woman down with a shot. The file ran to sixteen volumes. He was charged with 127 offenses: besides the seven murders and four attempted murders, fourteen cases of sexual abuse, thirty-three burglaries of shops, flats, nursery schools and cellars, twelve thefts of laundry, sixteen of small livestock, six of bicycles and dozens of petty thefts at work. He was suspected of further killings of women near where he lived but never charged with them for lack of evidence.
The court in Chomutov sentenced him to death by hanging on November 9, 1957. He had not expected it, and he begged on his knees for his life. He was hanged at Pankrác prison in Prague on December 29, 1957, at the age of thirty-two; some accounts give December 30. A death mask was taken the same day and is displayed at the Police Museum in Prague. Some later writers have called the trial hurried.