The Vampire of Galkówek - Couverture souple

Buckley, Patrick

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798237400434

Editeur : Goldenback, 2026

Synopsis

In July 1952, a sixty-seven-year-old woman named Józefa Pietrzykowska set out along a forest path east of Lódź and did not return. She was the first. Over the next four years, five more women died in the same corridor of spruce woodland and blackberry thicket - strangled, sexually assaulted, concealed. The killer left no witnesses and no trail. The investigation, crippled by ideological misdirection, institutional fragmentation, and political pressure, collapsed without an arrest. The files were closed in 1957, and the forests kept their secret for another decade.

Then, in September 1967, an eighty-seven-year-old woman in a Warsaw apartment building fought back. The scratches she left on her killer's face led police to a fifty-four-year-old military driver named Stanislaw Modzelewski - and from there, through an interrogation that would become one of the most clinically remarkable in Polish criminal history, to the full extent of what the forests east of Lódź had held.

The Vampire of Galkówek is the definitive account of one of postwar Poland's most disturbing and most consequential criminal cases: a portrait of a predator whose psychology confounded the frameworks of his era, an anatomy of an investigative failure that cost six women their lives, and a reckoning with the questions of justice, responsibility, and memory that the case has never fully resolved.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Patrick Buckley is an Irish writer and researcher specialising in twentieth-century European criminal history and the intersection of political systems with criminal justice. Born in County Clare, he has spent two decades studying how ideological frameworks and institutional design shape - and sometimes catastrophically fail - the investigation of serious crime in authoritarian and post-authoritarian societies. His interest in the Modzelewski case grew from a broader fascination with the People's Republic of Poland and the specific conditions under which predatory violence flourished unseen in the early years of socialist construction. The Vampire of Galkówek is the most extensive treatment yet written of a case that has remained largely unknown outside Poland. Buckley is the author of several works of narrative criminal history.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Goldenback
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798237400434
• Reliure: Paperback
• Nombre de pages: 478
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible