Andrzej Kunowski: The Little Doctor
He Walks Again
On Aug. 12, 1992, he raped another 11-year-old girl in Mlawa, then moved to Warsaw, where he raped two more adolescents. He was arrested in 1993, but escaped prison yet again and was on the lam for two years.
In March 1995, the Little Doctor is believed to have abducted Agnieszka Grzybicka, 14, who disappeared while walking home from school in Mlawa.
Two months later, he was arrested in Warsaw in connection with two attacks that occurred on consecutive days — both against adolescent girls who, like young Agnieszka, were followed home from school.
As he awaited trial, Kunowski began filing medical complaints about persistent pain in his left hip. X-rays showed no problem, but doctors finally acquiesced in his insistence that he be scheduled for hip-replacement surgery.
Perhaps no one was more stunned than Kunowski when, in June 1996, Polish authorities announced that he would be freed on a medical furlough to await the operation.
It turned out Kunowski's hip was not bad enough to deter him from running from justice.
He sold his apartment and used the profits to buy a fake Polish passport. He then boarded a bus in Warsaw and was waved through border security checks across northern Europe, through Germany and Belgium and into Calais, France, where he boarded a ferry that crossed the Strait of Dover to England.
On Oct. 15, 1996, he arrived by bus at London's Victoria Coach Station on Buckingham Palace Road.
No one would have noticed him.
Each day, more than 300,000 people pass through Victoria, a bustling amalgam of bus, train and Underground stations.
Then as now, Polish nationals poured into London each day on tourist visas to look for work. Kunowski blended right in.
When Polish authorities realized that Kunowski had left, they issued an international warrant through Interpol. His photograph and fingerprints were made available via Interpol's crime database to its 125 member countries — the United Kingdom among them.
But Kunowski was not fingerprinted when he arrived in the United Kingdom, so British authorities had no way of knowing that a notorious sex fiend had arrived there.
He had a clean slate to find new victims in a fresh country.