Zdzislaw Marchwicki was a labourer in the Zaglebie Dabrowskie industrial region of southern Poland.
Between 1964 and 1970 women were attacked and killed in the region, most of them beaten to death near their homes at night. Twenty deaths were attributed to the series, which the Polish press called the Zaglebie Vampire, and which produced the largest manhunt in the history of the People's Republic. The pressure was political as well as criminal: one of the victims was a relative of a Communist Party official, and the failure to solve it became an embarrassment to the state. Polish reporting called him the Silesian Vampire.
Marchwicki was arrested in 1972 on an informant's tip. He was tried in 1974 in a proceeding that was broadcast and treated as a public spectacle, along with his brother Jan and four others.
He was convicted of fourteen murders and hanged on April 29, 1977. His brother was also executed.
The case has been reopened by Polish historians and journalists since 1989 and is now widely regarded as unsafe. The confession was obtained after prolonged detention, the physical evidence was slight, several of the killings continued in a pattern he could not have produced, and the political need for a conviction was enormous. Nothing has been formally quashed. This entry records the conviction and the doubt together, and readers should treat the fourteen as a verdict rather than a finding of fact.