The Skinning of Katarzyna Zowada

 

0-1.jpgOur story begins on January 7th, 1999, in Kraków, Poland. A large tugboat is chugging down the Vistula river when one of the operators has to open the hatch to the propeller to get something out. It seems as though something had been stuck in it since the night before &  but hadn’t worked itself out yet. Expecting to find debris or branches the operator is stopped in his tracks. Not sure what he’s looking at, he thinks it is a pale sack. Then he noticed the human ear at the top of the sack & the rancid smell. 

 

00.PNGUpon further investigation, it was confirmed that those were the remains of a Polish 23-year-old religion study student named Katarzyna Zowada (cat-er-a-zee-na). Her legs were missing as well as her arms & face. What was found was just her torso connecting her neck & ear. But what was even weirder was that it was like a skin suit. As in she was skinned, & a bodysuit was made out of it, leaving all the internals behind. This is why the operator thought the body was a sack. The medical examiner concludes that this portion of her skin had been in the water for roughly 2-3 weeks before getting stuck in the propeller. Investigators found a part of her sweater at the scene & one of her legs was found nearly a week later in a dam. 

 

The Investigation

It’s concluded that Katarzyna was Skinned alive & a lot more. It is also discovered that she was reported missing on November 12th, 1998 but police told her mother to hold off. They assumed she had just run away. She was going to Jagiellonian university but two weeks prior had stopped attending. At the time though she wasn’t missing because people were still seeing her, she just wasn’t going to class. She had been diagnosed with depression as well after the death of her father in 1996. All of these combined led her mother to be extremely worried about her wellbeing for those two months before her body was found. 

Investigators & experts from other counties were eventually asked to help because they had no leads. Even the FBI helped for a while but still nothing. The case was then dropped about a year later & considered cold. It isn’t until 15 years later, in 2014, when the FBI decides to take another look at the case. 

 

The reopen

In 2016 they decide that the murderer must have been trained in a specific type of martial arts because of the way she was beaten but they never disclose how she was beaten or what that has to do with martial arts. In 2017, 19 years after the murder, police finally arrest after finding new evidence. 

The man was 52-year old Robert Janczewski. He lived off of the bank where Katarzyna’s body was found, he fit the profile, & was trained in martial arts in this specific category. He also knew Katarzyna before the murder. In the past, he worked in a dissection lab so he knew how to dissect human bodies. He had also worked at a zoology lab, specifically how to prepare animal skins. He was even fired from that same job for killing all of the test rabbits during one of his shifts for no reason. He was even a person of interest in 1999 but was not looked into enough.

The police were made aware of Robert because one of Robert’s friends had written them a letter about him and the case. The contents of the letter were never disclosed publicly beyond that quick summary. 

 

What we do know (TW)

Although much of the case remains a mystery, we do know how it all went down or at least, how she was killed. Experts concluded that she was beaten profusely, had her groin, armpits, & neck cut, had her organs taken out, limbs cut off, skinned, and mind you, all of this occurred while she was still alive so she felt all of it. She would eventually die of blood loss. 

 

Current status

To this day, Robert has still not been charged & is in jail until his inevitable trial. So we still don’t truly know why he did it or if it was even him. The case is still going but justice is yet to come. 

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