He fantasized about torturing women, raping dead bodies and smearing them with blood. He attacked people weaker than himself - women and children - and threw himself at them with a knife. He slaughtered a little boy in cold blood. Karol Kot, the most famous murderer from Krakow, unleashed a psychosis of fear in the city.
In the fall of 1964, someone started to attack women in Krakow. The attacker attacked them from behind, stabbed the narrow blade brutally, and then ran away.
The first was Helena Węgrzyn, who was attacked on September 21 in the vestibule of the church.
After that, the victim of an unknown perpetrator was Franciszka Lewandowska, who fed over a hundred people in the kitchen every day. She was attacked on the stairs. She even saw the attacker. As she later said, it was a young boy in a light trench coat, with a red school shield sewn on (the color of high schools and technicians). Even though she had a large sum of money with her, nothing was lost.
On September 29 there was another attack. This time the victim was an old woman, Maria Plichta, who was cleaning the church of St. John. The nuns found the unfortunate. She was also stabbed, but unlike previous attacks, the wound was fatal.
The madman is on the prowl
Krakow in the 1960s is a quiet, almost provincial city where sensational news spread like wildfire. A few days after the attacks, the whole neighborhood was already buzzing with rumors of ghosts. The situation escalated at an alarming rate. As Przemysław Semczuk writes in the book “M jak morderca. Karol Kot - a vampire from Krakow ” :
Panic is breaking out in the city. The number of victims of the cutthroat increases to a few. Terrified women report to the police that someone has threatened them in recent days. Many desperately try to protect themselves. They put pot lids on a string under their coats to protect their backs.
Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Krakow at Garncarska Street. It was here that Karol Kot attacked for the first time (photo:Cancre, license CC BY-SA 4.0)
In addition to the sea of useless rumors, some disturbing information was also beginning to reach the militia. Several women reported that a young man was following them as they were walking alone on the street. There is even a note from a policeman who, on October 5, 1964, described the confrontation of his cousin with a man who was clearly following her. There was a scuffle, the type escaped. However, a month after the murder of the old woman, Maria Plichta, she saw him again. His appearance matched that of the first assault.
After all, the mere attacks on single women were no longer enough for the degenerate. On February 13, 1966, he intentionally killed for the first time and watched the victim die. He chose Leszek Całek as his target:a primary school student who dreamed of taking part in a tobogganing competition at Kościuszko Mound, but was not allowed to participate. Soon after the resigned kid left, his body was found with 11 stab wounds in the bushes. At the news of this brutal murder, the inhabitants of Kraków began to storm. Meanwhile, the militia very quickly organized a conference, which was also attended by a high-ranking representative of the Polish United Workers' Party. Everyone wanted the results and the murder case solved as quickly as possible, while the investigation stalled ...
Eight stab wounds
On April 14, 1966, after a week's illness, little Małgosia P. was eager to leave the house. Seeing the postman, she took the key and went down to the letterbox. When she returned home after a moment, all she could say was that a gentleman had beaten her, then she fell to the floor. Parents saw blood. The girl was wounded eight times with a knife. Fortunately, help was quickly brought in and the girl was hospitalized. She was rescued.
A team of twenty policemen has carried out searches on a large scale. They arrested more people and, after checking the alibi, release them, and finally began to comb through Krakow's high schools, checking which students were absent during the days of the attack. Eventually they hit something.
One of the teachers, and at the same time a member of the shooting section of SKS "Cracovia", told them about a young man named Kot, a student of an energy technical school. Charles was fascinated by knives, he loved to throw them at the target, and he always carried one blade that looked more like a bayonet. Investigators looked at him closely.
At first glance, he was a polite and polite young man whom the teachers had no objection to. After graduating from high school, he planned to enter the officer school, and from 1965 he was even a member of ORMO. The coach from the shooting club treated him like a pet and persuaded one of the players, 22-year-old Danusia Włodarczyk, to take care of Karol, who was a bit younger than her.
When the Cat unexpectedly opened up to her, at first she interpreted the words about killing as a distasteful joke and fantasizing ...
Monster's friend
However, the panic was growing, and Włodarczyk began to guess that it was none other than the young knife lover Karol Kot that was causing it. She managed to persuade Karol to visit a psychiatrist, specifically at Wanda Półtawska, who was known to be a friend of Karol Wojtyła.
The doctor examined the boy, prescribed him vitamin B and told him to come with his mother the next time. That's all. And the Cat, of course, did not show up on the second visit. Finally, Danusia reported to the Provincial Headquarters, where she made a testimony against her colleague. Now the policemen were sure. There was a search in Kot's apartment.
As it is described by Przemysław Semczuk in the book “M jak morderca. Karol Kot - a vampire from Krakow ” :
Officers find sixteen knives. Not the ones used in the kitchen. Bayonets, daggers, hunting cutlass, fishing knives, assembly knives, blocking knives, and even one springboard. Some of them are hidden on the kitchen sideboard. They thoroughly search the room where Karol spends the most time. Among the school textbooks they can find Professor Witold Sylwanowicz's Small Anatomical Atlas with clear traces of a knife puncture. On the page with the picture of the circulatory system, the arteries are marked. There are also some other drawings that show the most important organs - heart, liver, kidneys. Drawings of knives decorate most of the notebooks. One of them, with the wings, even has a name:The Liquidator.
On July 14, 1966, Karol was arrested. Meanwhile, his parents were shocked. They emphasized that knives are such a harmless hobby. Besides, Karol does not drink, he is not particularly interested in girls, he is so polite ... All this was contrary to the testimony of his school friends. They did not like Kot, they called him a bum and said that he offered the girls from school twenty zlotys for sex, or he harassed them by grabbing their breasts or buttocks. During his trip to the Auschwitz camp, he was delighted with the stories of a wonderful organization and dreamed of becoming the commander of a similar place ...
Wanda Półtawska in 1963. Soon after, she met Karol Kot, whom she considered a compulsive onanist, but did not notice any signs of neurological problems in him photo:public domain)
A few days after the arrest of Karol Kot, Robert Mika was interrogated. His testimony, initially similar to others, grew more shocking with every minute. The cat wanted to meet a girl, and at the same time kept saying that they were all "whores, sluts and sluts". Once he even offered to organize "orgies". The friends were supposed to bring the girls, and he was supposed to arrange an apartment. As Przemysław Semczuk writes :
The orgies were supposed to have everyone undress and chase the girls around the table, patting their buttocks. Then he will give his friends his knives and they will hurt the girls wherever they fall, so that a lot of blood will flow. Finally, there will be sexual intercourse.
However, this was not the end of Kot's sick fantasies. He dreamed further that they would set up a cooperative in which the same girls would be the goods, and they would kill them, cut them up, separate their flesh from their bones, and burn their insides and bones. The meat was to be delivered to a store specially opened for this purpose.
Cooperative trading in meat of murdered women?
The second colleague, Maciej Partyka, gave further drastic details. Previously, he treated it as a sick sense of humor, but now he repeated to policemen Kot's stories about raping women, murdering them, torture. His testimony is quoted by Semczuk :
Before rape this girl with a knife, he did not say what kind of knife, he was supposed to cut her belly into mesh, pull her insides out, wrap these insides around his my neck and smear my face with this blood. […] When he was telling me this, he was laughing with a lascivious and gloomy laugh, sticking his tongue out over his chin, opening his mouth and patting his thighs with delight with his hands.
Entrance to the tenement house where Karol Kot lived (photo:googe maps)
After Leszek Całek's murder, Kot came home to Partyka with a newspaper in his hands with information about the crime. He even told him that he had murdered the boy. Why did Partyka not report to the militia? He thought the Cat was fantasizing again.
Finally, investigators began to confront Karol Kot with the testimony of his friends. At first he pretended to be surprised and surprised that everyone was lying so terribly. He realized, however, that the militia knew much more than he had imagined. Officers, to upset him, carried out presentations in the following days, and almost all witnesses identified him as the perpetrator of the seizures. At first, the Cat said it was ridiculous; he was ironic, he laughed in the face of witnesses and policemen. Eventually, however, it broke and decided to tell the truth.
When he was thirteen he became fascinated with knives. He bought the first blades, began to torment frogs and other small animals with pleasure. When he went on vacation to the countryside, he would go to a local slaughterhouse, where he volunteered to kill calves (the investigators checked this information:it turned out to be another murderer's fantasy) and drank their warm blood. The idea of attacking a man came to his mind as early as 1960, but he did not implement it until four years later. He described with terrifying accuracy how he followed his victims, how he chose them, how he attacked. He talked about the fact that he once obtained arsenic and tried to poison people with it ... He also confessed that he tried to murder Danusia Włodarczyk twice. He revealed that he planned to kill two more friends, but somehow it didn't happen. He stressed that had he not been detained he would have continued to attack, but now, while in custody, he did not feel the need to kill.
The case of Karol Kot went to trial on May 3, 1967. Psychiatrists issued a ruling that the boy was sane and fully responsible for his actions. The trial took place in the same room where Rita Gorgonowa and Władysław Mazurkiewicz ("Beautiful Władek") were tried. Mainly journalists and specialists in various fields of medicine got admission to the trial, and the court was packed to the brim anyway. The sentence was handed down on July 14, 1967. Death penalty. The second-instance court changed her to life imprisonment, but as a result of an extraordinary appeal, another death sentence was passed. Execution by hanging was carried out on May 16, 1968. Two hours later, the funeral took place.
Source:
- Przemysław Semczuk, M for a murderer. Karol Kot - a vampire from Krakow , World of Books 2019.