A Plague of Murder by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781682300121
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

While the Boston Strangler was still at large, an unusual case of serial sex murder was taking place behind the Iron Curtain.

In July 1964, the communist regime in Poland was getting prepared to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw by Russian troops; a great parade was due to take place in Warsaw on the 22nd. On 4 July the editor of Przeglad Polityczny, the Polish equivalent of Pravda, received an anonymous letter in spidery red handwriting: ‘There is no happiness without tears, no life without death. Beware! I am going to make you cry.’ Marian Starzynski thought the anonymous writer had him in mind, and requested police protection. But on the day of the big parade, a 17-year-old blonde, Danka Maciejowitz, failed to arrive home from a parade organized by the School of Choreography and Folklore in Olsztyn, one hundred and sixty miles north of Warsaw. The next day, a gardener in the Olsztyn Park of Polish Heroes discovered the girl’s body in some shrubbery. She had been stripped naked and raped, and the lower part of her body was covered with Jack-the-Ripper-type mutilations. And the following day, the 24th, another red-ink letter was delivered to Kulisy, a Warsaw newspaper: ‘I picked a juicy flower in Olsztyn and I shall do it again somewhere else, for there is no holiday without a funeral.’ Analysis of the ink showed that it had been made by dissolving red art paint in turpentine.

On 16 January 1965, the Warsaw newspaper Zycie Warsawy published the picture of a pretty 16-year-old girl, Aniuta Kaliniak, who had been chosen to lead a parade of students in another celebration rally the following day. She left her home in Praga, an eastern suburb of Warsaw, and crossed the river Vistula to reach the parade. Later, she thumbed a lift from a lorry driver, who dropped her close to her home at a crossroads. (The fact that a 16-year-old girl would thumb a lift like this indicates that the level of sex crime in Poland must be a great deal lower than in England or the US.) The day after the parade, her body was found in a basement in a leather factory opposite her home. The killer had removed a grating to get in. The crime had obviously been carefully planned. He had waited in the shadows of the wall, and cut off her cry with a wire noose dropped over her head. In the basement, he had raped her, and left a six-inch spike sticking in her sexual organs (an echo of the Boston Strangler). While the search went on another red-ink letter advised the police where to look for her body.

Olsztyn and Warsaw are one hundred and sixty miles apart; this modern Ripper differed from his predecessor in not sticking to the same area. Moreover, he was a man with a strong dramatic sense: the selection of national holidays for his crimes, the letters philosophizing about life and death.

The Red Spider—as he had come

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