Szczepan Paśnik

Szczepan Paśnik was born in 1887 in the village of Aleksandrów, in the Masovian Voivodeship, the only son of Krzysztof Paśnik. Little is known about his early life, but around 1907, he married Józefa Talarek, who was a couple of years older than him.^[1]

Sometime around the early 1900s, Paśnik was arrested on a theft charge in Saint Petersburg. While being escorted to prison, he murdered one of the guards, which earned him a 12-year sentence at a gulag in Siberia.^[1] However, after serving 7 years of said sentence, he managed to escape after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. In early 1919, he returned to Poland, and made a living out of robbing people.^[1]

For a brief period of time, he abandoned his wife for a new lover, Józefa Gendek, who allegedly encouraged him to continue his criminal activities. Over the next few years, Paśnik was repeatedly imprisoned and left destitute, leading him to develop a resentment towards Gendek, whom he blamed for his problems.^[1]

In early January 1922, Paśnik committed his first known murder in Parzniew after he stabbed Józefa Gendek to death with a penknife. He then stripped her of her clothing, and sold them in Warsaw. Fearing that her mother, Maria Wiśniewska, would expose him for this crime, he would kill her a few days later after he lured her to the Helenowski grove outside of Pruszków.^[1]

Shortly after these killings, he reunited with his wife, and the pair started killing together.^[1] The couple's modus operandi consisted of Józefa seeking out poor female migrant workers at the Warsaw Main Station and introducing them to her husband. Szczepan would come up with various ruses in order to lure the victims to an isolated area, where he would often rape, murder, and rob them.^[2] The killings were usually carried out with a blunt instrument or via slitting the victim's throat, and the corpses were often dismembered post-mortem.^[3] Józefa would later sell the victim's clothes at Kercelego Square.

Following his arrest, Szczepan would confess to killing at least five additional women throughout the month of February. The first known victim is Rozalia Garlicką, a cousin of Gendek's who was beaten to death with an iron bar near Duchnice.^[3] A few days later, Szczepan lured a female visitor from Kalisz to Włochy, where he slit her throat with a razor. When asked, he was unable to recall her name, as he claimed to "have had so many lovers" that he never bothered remembering what they were called.^[3]

In mid-February, Szczepan murdered another woman between Miłosna and Wawer, but the only details he was able to recall was that her name was "Stasia" and that she originated from Płońsk. Shortly afterwards, he murdered another woman, Maria Justyniak, whose body was found near the village of Teresin.^[3]

On 20 February, Józefa was at the station when she came across Michalina Matwiejawa and Maria Moroz, two Rusyn emigrants who were looking for work so they could move to Canada.^[4] Józefa offered to meet them on the following day, and once they did, she introduced them to Szczepan, who presented himself as a wealthy farmer who had recently returned from the USA and owned a farm in Ożarów. After having a dinner with the two women, they "hired" Moroz, while Matwiejawa returned to the station to look for work.^[4]

On that same evening, Szczepan took the train with Moroz to Płochocin, from where they traveled on foot along the tracks to Błonie.^[4] He then threatened her into having sex with him, after which he strangled her with a belt. He then robbed her of all her valuables, and gave Moroz's scarf to Józefa. The victim's body was found four days later by the son of a railway official.^[4]