"Is the accused a murderer?" Judge Władysław Ochman asked him in the packed hall of the Silesia zinc works club in Katowice, where the trial of the Zagłębie Vampire was being staged before as many as eight hundred spectators admitted by special pass. "From what I've heard, from what I've found out, well, yes," Zdzisław Marchwicki answered. It was that kind of trial. It opened on September 18, 1974, and ran until July 28, 1975. The indictment ran to more than two hundred pages and took four days to read, and the case file filled 141 volumes with the testimony of 550 witnesses. Press, radio and television covered it throughout. Marchwicki and his brother Jan were sentenced to death, and on April 26, 1977, both were hanged in a militia garage in Katowice.
The killings had begun more than a decade earlier. On November 7, 1964, Anna Mycek was killed in Dąbrówka Mała. Over the next six years there were twenty-one attacks on women in the coal and steel towns of Zagłębie Dąbrowskie and neighboring Upper Silesia, fourteen of them fatal, eleven in 1965 alone. The method rarely varied: a woman walking alone at dusk was followed to a quiet spot and struck on the head from behind with a heavy blunt instrument. The victims ranged in age from sixteen to fifty-seven. On a single day, June 15, 1966, there were two attacks.
One of the dead was a niece of Edward Gierek, then the Communist Party chief in the Katowice region and from December 1970 the party's first secretary for all of Poland. From then on the case could not be allowed to fail. A special militia group, code-named Anna, ran the largest manhunt in the history of the People's Republic. The authorities offered a reward of a million złoty, which produced a flood of false tips, and used the Odra computer to sift suspects. For long stretches the press was told to say nothing, so that the public would feel safer. The last victim was Jadwiga Kucianka, a scholar of Silesia and the first lecturer in Silesian literature at the University of Silesia, found on March 4, 1970.
Marchwicki was not arrested until January 6, 1972, almost two years after that last killing. He was forty-four, born in Dąbrowa Górnicza on October 18, 1927, a laborer with a police record for theft and fighting, and it was his wife who went to the authorities, accusing him of abusing the family; by some accounts she told the commander outright that her husband was the vampire. In tests he was found to share more features with the offender's profile than any other suspect, and the Odra was said to have picked him out. Three days after his arrest the papers announced that a man suspected of a series of monstrous crimes had been caught. His brothers Jan and Henryk were arrested months later and charged as accomplices in the killing of Jadwiga Kucianka, along with others, among them Jan's partner Józef Klimczak.
The doubts started inside the investigation. The first prosecutor on the case, Leszek Polański, refused to indict Marchwicki and was taken off it; Józef Gurgul of the Prosecutor General's office took over and prosecuted at trial. Many officers in the Anna group had doubts of their own. The case against Marchwicki was circumstantial. By one account he had no defense lawyer before the trial. Years later his children said publicly that their father had been a violent man but that they did not believe him capable of the killings, and that their mother had pressed them into giving evidence against him.
There were other candidates. Piotr Olszowy, a house painter with schizophrenia, was questioned on the very day Jadwiga Kucianka's body was found; he had been at a name-day party near the scene, and some investigators thought it highly likely he was the killer. He died later in 1970. And in 1974, after Marchwicki was in custody, Joachim Knychała, later called the Vampire of Bytom, began attacking women in the same region in a strikingly similar way: at dusk, alone, a heavy blunt instrument, the victim partly undressed. He was caught in 1982 and sentenced to death.
Opinion is divided on what that means. Writers including Przemysław Semczuk, whose reportage on the case won several awards, and Maciej Pieprzyca, who made the 2016 film I Am a Killer about the investigation, have argued that Marchwicki was innocent and was charged to satisfy the central authorities and calm public fear. Others who have studied the files, among them the former policeman and historian Andrzej Cichy, accept that he committed some of the killings and dispute only whether he committed all of them. The conviction has never been overturned. In 2025 a law firm in Toruń, acting for the family, began preparing an application to Poland's Supreme Court to reopen the case.
The brothers were buried in an unmarked grave at the Panewniki cemetery in Katowice, beside another executed serial killer, Bogdan Arnold. After the execution, casts were made of Zdzisław Marchwicki's face.