The Red Spider

A map of Poland

He may be Poland's most prolific serial killerat least since 1922, when a still-unidentified slasher left 11 mutilated women scattered in the woods outside Warsawbut state-imposed censorship leaves much of this grim case a tantalizing mystery. We know the killer's name, his year of birth, and that he nurtured a morbid penchant for art. He stands convicted of six brutal murders and reportedly confessed to 14 more, but some sources suggest that those confessions were coerced in an attempt to clear the books of unsolved homicides. The slayer offered a motive of sorts to police, but it dealt only with the first of his crimes and failed to explain the ensuing three-year rampage. Commitment to a lunatic asylum for life has silenced his voice for the past quarter-century, perhaps for all time.

Lucian Staniak, the Red Spider

Inevitably, from the nature of his crimes and red-ink correspondence with the press, Lucian Staniak has been compared to London's Jack the Ripper. The comparison is imprecise on several points. Although both killers disemboweled their female prey, none of Staniak's identified victims were prostitutes. If Staniak's confessions are true, he claimed four times as many victims as the Ripper, operating over three years' time (compared to Jack's ten weeks). Both killers took their famous nicknames from letters written to the press, but Staniak's was thrust upon him by a journalist viewing his "spidery" scrawland unlike the Ripper, he certainly wrote his own letters. Finallyand criticallythe "Red Spider" was identified, arrested and incarcerated.