Amok

Dariusz Janiszewski was thirty-five and ran a small advertising agency in Wrocław, Poland. On November 13, 2000, he took a call at his office from a man who wanted to talk business, walked out and never came back. Four weeks later his body was pulled from the Oder River. His hands had been tied behind him and linked to a noose at his neck, and he had been beaten and starved before he died.

The investigation stalled for three years. In 2003 a Wrocław detective, Jacek Wróblewski, reopened it and found that Janiszewski’s mobile phone had been sold on an internet auction site four days after he vanished. The seller was Krystian Bala, a philosophy graduate who had self-published a novel called Amok that same year. Its narrator kills a woman using details the police had never released, and the victim had briefly been involved with Bala’s estranged wife.

Bala was arrested in September 2005. He confessed to prosecutors in 2006, retracted within minutes and has denied the killing since. A court convicted him of murder on September 5, 2007, and sentenced him to twenty-five years. An appeals court ordered a retrial, which ended in a second guilty verdict on December 18, 2008, and the same sentence, upheld again in May 2009. Polish reporting says he asked a court for early release in 2021 and was refused.