Polish police made a grim discovery in September 1955 when a Warsaw doctor removed a bullet from the skull of a patient complaining of a severe headache. The patient, Stanisław Wopiński, told police he had been shot while asleep in a car driven by his business associate, a charismatic man named Władysław Mazurkiewicz. That bullet led authorities to one of postwar Poland’s most notorious serial killers. Mazurkiewicz, known as the “Gentleman Murderer” for his impeccable dress and charming demeanor, was arrested in the spring of 1956 at a hotel near Zakopane.
A search of his garage in Kraków revealed freshly laid concrete covering an uneven floor. When investigators broke through, they found the bodies of two women, both shot in the back of the head. The women were identified as Jadwiga de Lovo and her sister, Zofia Suchoń. Both had been buried beneath the concrete for approximately three years.
A revolver recovered from Mazurkiewicz matched the bullet removed from Wopiński’s skull, and surviving victims came forward to identify him and describe his schemes. Born on January 31, 1911, in Kraków to a printer and his wife, Mazurkiewicz lost his mother at age three and was raised by his father. He was intelligent and enrolled in law at Jagiellonian University, but dropped out, lacking the discipline and the money to continue. He developed a taste for gambling and luxury he could not afford, and he maintained the appearance of a gentleman despite his limited means.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Mazurkiewicz reportedly obtained a Gestapo identity card through an officer named Rudolf Arnold, which gave him freedom of movement while others suffered under curfew and restriction. He traded gold, diamonds, and foreign currency on the black market and grew wealthy while Jewish citizens were being dispossessed and deported. In December 1943, he committed his first known murder, poisoning a fellow gambler named Wiktor Zarzecki and dumping the body in the Vistula River. The war’s end did not stop him.
In May 1946, he shot and killed Jerzy de Lovo, a wealthy black-market figure known as the “king of the black market,” during a business trip, weighted the body, and consigned it to the river. He then courted de Lovo’s widow, Jadwiga, telling her he was a secret security officer and offering to safeguard her valuables. She gave him everything. When she asked for it back in May 1953, he shot her in the back of the head in his garage and buried her beneath the floor.
Her sister, who knew about the valuables, was lured to the garage the same day and met the same fate. Mazurkiewicz continued his pattern of befriending men of means, murdering them, and taking their property. Two more men, Władysław Bielski and Józef Tomaszewski, were killed under suspicious circumstances, their deaths recorded but their bodies never fully accounted for. His final victim was nearly his undoing: when he shot Wopiński in September 1955, the bullet missed the brain, and Wopiński survived to identify his attacker.
Under interrogation, Mazurkiewicz initially confessed to six murders and the attempted murder of Wopiński, along with another attempted poisoning. Some sources suggest he claimed responsibility for as many as thirty killings, though he later recanted, saying his confessions were obtained through torture. His trial began in August 1956 at the regional court in Kraków and drew enormous public interest. As many as eighty journalists covered the proceedings, and tickets were reportedly sold on the black market for two thousand zlotys, roughly three months’ wages for a worker.
The prosecution presented the recovered bodies, the matching revolver, testimony from Wopiński, and financial records showing sudden wealth following each disappearance. Mazurkiewicz pleaded not guilty, maintaining his innocence. During the trial, when confronted with accusations that he might have killed as many as fifty people, he reportedly responded: “People are crediting me with too much. I planned only eight murders.
I want the record straight. ”
The jury found him guilty on all six counts of murder. On August 30, 1956, he was sentenced to death by hanging. He was forty-five years old.
Time magazine covered the case in the West, noting the dark irony that so many people had disappeared at the hands of state security that no one thought to suspect private enterprise in murder. Mazurkiewicz was held at Montelupich Prison in Kraków, a facility that had served as a Gestapo prison during the occupation and was later operated by the NKVD and Polish communist authorities. He was hanged there on January 29, 1957, two days before his forty-sixth birthday. His body was buried in an unmarked grave.
The official count of his victims stood at six. He claimed eight during the trial. Rumors suggested thirty or more. Many disappearances from the wartime and postwar chaos could never be fully investigated, and bodies lost to the Vistula River were never recovered.
The truth of how many he killed died with him on the gallows. The house at Biskupia Square stood silent after his death, and the garage where the two women were buried was eventually demolished. Montelupich Prison remained in operation, and the gallows that took Mazurkiewicz’s life were used one final time in 1988 before being dismantled. Poland abolished the death penalty in 1997.
The court files on Władysław Mazurkiewicz remain sealed in the archives of the regional court in Kraków, a record of charm and violence walking hand in hand through the ancient streets of the city.