Marcin K. confessed to committing this double crime while being questioned as a suspect following the murder of the couple from Głogowska Street, which occurred on August 27, 2015. Immediately after the questioning, a crime-scene reconstruction was conducted at the site of the murder on Oświęcimska Street with his participation. During it, he described in detail and with great emotion how he had committed the crime.
Because he gave an incredibly difficult-to-believe motive for his actions, the prosecutor from the Legnica District Prosecutor’s Office conducting the investigation into the murders on Oświęcimska Street carefully verified the circumstances of the crime described by Marcin K. against the findings collected in the case. This verification made it possible to conclude that his confession was sincere and voluntary.
Marcin K. provided details of the incident that he could not have known without being the perpetrator of the murders. On September 10, Marcin K. was charged with murdering the married couple K. by striking them repeatedly on the head with a hammer, causing multiple skull fractures and brain damage, which led to their deaths.
The bodies of the K. couple—a woman aged 86 and a man aged 84—were discovered by the victims’ son on Sunday, February 1, 2015, at approximately 8:00 p.m. An examination of the scene was immediately conducted, and a large-scale investigation was launched. During the investigation, more than a dozen hypotheses were considered, each of them being carefully verified. Various motives were taken into account: from robbery, even though the apartment showed no signs of being ransacked, through financial motives, to revenge driven by personal reasons. It was considered that the murder could have been commissioned, committed by a random person, carefully planned, or carried out in the heat of the moment.
Police officers from a team specially established for this purpose by the Lower Silesian provincial police chief in Wrocław checked and accounted for several hundred people: family members, acquaintances, people with whom the deceased had conducted business, and even construction workers employed in the area. Everyone who might have had a rational reason to kill was checked. Homeless people and individuals rummaging through vacant properties and garbage bins were questioned; the area around the tenement building was searched and investigated within a radius of several hundred metres. Garbage bins, clothing containers, garages, vacant properties, the park adjoining Oświęcimska Street, the riverbed, and sewer manholes were checked.
During the first days after the bodies were discovered, an attempt was made to work with specially brought-in dogs from Germany trained to pick up a trail from traces collected at the scene. The dogs led investigators to the city centre, where the trail ended.
Surveillance footage was secured from every location relevant to the hypotheses under consideration, and telephone records were checked. Without result.
Because he had no apparent motive and was a stranger to the victims, Marcin K. was not considered a suspect in the crime. During questioning, Marcin K. explained that he did not know the victims. He had only heard about them in earlier stories told by his father, who was supposed to have shown him where they lived. He had no rational motive to kill the victims. The motive he gave at this stage of the proceedings cannot be disclosed.
In carrying out his plan, Marcin K. took a hammer and gloves from home. First, he attacked the 84-year-old man while he was standing in one of the rooms; then he struck the man’s wife, who was in another room, with the hammer. He delivered the blows intending to kill.
When leaving the apartment, he took the murder weapon with him. At home, he burned the clothes, gloves, and shoes he had been wearing when he committed the crimes. He also destroyed and then discarded the hammer with which he had struck them.
He told no one about the murder. He did not follow reports about the incident. He has neither a television nor internet access. He read something about it once in a local newspaper.
He had never worked as a construction worker for the deceased or near their apartment. He claims that he regrets what he did. Regarding the murder of the couple on Głogowska Street, Marcin K. explained that the female victim, for whom he had worked, had been very kind to him. She had looked after him while he was carrying out renovations at her home.
On the day of the incident, she angered him with an unflattering remark. That was enough for him to start striking her with a hammer. He killed the woman’s husband so there would be no witnesses. After the murder, which took place at approximately 5:00 p.m., he changed clothes and went home, then went to visit a female acquaintance.
When he returned, at approximately 11:00 p.m., police stopped him outside his home. In view of Marcin K.’s behaviour and the motive he provided, serious doubts arose as to his mental capacity at the time he committed the crimes. He will soon undergo a psychiatric examination by two expert psychiatrists. If the doctors are unable to express an opinion after a single examination, they will certainly request an examination as part of psychiatric observation. In that case, the prosecutor will ask the court for permission to conduct it.
Marcin K. faces a sentence of up to life imprisonment for the murders. The investigation is ongoing.
Legnica District Prosecutor’s Office/ii