In September 1955 Władysław Mazurkiewicz shot a man named Stanisław Łopuszyński in Warsaw and left him for dead. Łopuszyński lived, went to the police, and identified him. It was the first time in twelve years that anyone Mazurkiewicz had tried to kill had been in a position to say who did it, and it ended one of the longest runs of murder for profit in the history of postwar Poland. When the investigators searched a garage he had rented at 49 Marchlewskiego Street in Krakow, they found two bodies under the concrete floor.
The man they arrested was one of the best-known figures in Krakow's cafés. He lived in a comfortable apartment at 14 Biskupi Square, kept a second apartment in Warsaw for a time, and drove an Opel Olympia to the mountains at a time when a private car in Stalinist Poland marked its owner out. He dressed well, ate in the expensive restaurants, played excellent bridge and had good manners. Krakow called him the handsome Władek, and the press, once the case broke, called him the elegant murderer. His money came from trading in gold, dollars and diamonds outside the law, and from arranging things for people who could not arrange them through official channels.
He was born in Krakow on January 31, 1911, the only child of a printer. His mother died when he was three. He enrolled in law at the Jagiellonian University and left without finishing, and in September 1939 he was called up for the campaign against the German invasion. By his own later account, during the occupation he became friendly with Rudolf Arnold, the personnel chief of the Gestapo in Krakow, who gave him papers identifying him as a barber to the Gestapo, which let him move about freely. That story is his; it has never been independently confirmed.
The first murder the court held him responsible for came in December 1943. Wiktor Zarzecki was a fellow gambler. Mazurkiewicz gave him tea laced with potassium cyanide and took the $1,200 he was carrying. It is possible that he had killed earlier: Polish accounts of the case record a strong suspicion that his first victim, in 1940, was a Jewish man, though no court ever tried that killing. After the poisoning he changed method. He shot the next three victims he was convicted of killing with a 7.65 mm Walther pistol, and the last two, and one of the attempts, with another Walther.
The victims were people who had come to him with money. Władysław Brylski and Józef Tomaszewski were among them. So was Jerzy de Laveaux, a very rich man by the standards of the time, who died with his wife Jadwiga and her sister Zofia Suchowa. Those who dealt with Mazurkiewicz tended to be carrying what he wanted: foreign currency, valuables, the proceeds of property they were trying to move out of reach of the state. That was also what made them easy to lose. Their families could hardly tell the police what business had taken them to see him, and in the early 1950s the police were more concerned with the enemies of the regime than with citizens who went missing.
After the war he worked for the Polish Red Cross, sold wine, and taught driving, and none of it explained his standard of living. People in Krakow talked about him for years. The explanation many of them settled on was that he was protected. It was said that he had informed for the Gestapo during the war and for the Ministry of Public Security after it, and that those who knew what he was doing assumed he was carrying out sentences on behalf of his masters. The Institute of National Remembrance later went through the records and found no document showing that he had worked for either.
The trial opened in August 1956 before the Voivodeship Court in Krakow, in the court building at 1 Senacka Street. He was charged with six murders, of four men and two women, and two attempted murders, along with currency offenses and forging documents. Crowds gathered outside every day, whole families at a time, and the authorities feared an attempt at lynching. Accounts differ on how he answered the charges. Polish sources say he admitted them; he also told the court that he had been beaten and blackmailed during interrogation, and that the confession he signed was extracted under torture. His revolver had been found, and the surviving victims recognized him.
His lawyer, Zygmunt Hofmokl-Ostrowski, tried an argument shaped to the moment. The people his client had killed, he told the court, were speculators and parasites, persons of little value to a socialist society; ending such a life was less harmful than killing a worker and did not deserve the highest penalty. The court was not persuaded. The trial was widely seen as an embarrassment for the justice system, with witnesses afraid to speak and a prosecutor who kept changing the subject, and two of the best writers in the country covered it: Lucjan Wolanowski reported it in a series for the weekly Świat and the Express Wieczorny, and Marek Hłasko wrote about it in a piece called "Trial Against the City."
The verdict came on August 30, 1956. The court sentenced him to death eight times, once for each crime he was convicted of, and people in the street applauded when it was announced. The Supreme Court upheld the judgment two months later. He was hanged at Montelupich prison in Krakow at 4:30 in the afternoon of January 29, 1957, two days before his forty-sixth birthday. His last words are recorded as a farewell to the men who had come to watch: goodbye, gentlemen, we will all meet there soon.
The six killings proved in court are the only ones that can be counted. The press and public opinion of the time credited him with as many as thirty, and that figure has followed him ever since, but nobody has ever shown it to be anything more than a rumor. The case became part of Polish popular culture almost at once. A novel based on it, Walther No. 45771, came out in 1956 with the killer renamed Żurkiewicz. Cezary Łazarewicz published a book about him, Elegancki morderca, in 2015, and in 2017 Krzysztof Lang made the film Ach śpij kochanie, with Andrzej Chyra as Mazurkiewicz.