In July 1952, a sixty-seven-year-old woman named Józefa Pietrzykowska set out along a forest path east of Lódz and did not return. She was the first. Over the next four years, five more women died in the same corridor of spruce woodland and blackberry thicket ? strangled, sexually assaulted, concealed. The killer left no witnesses and no trail. The investigation, crippled by ideological misdirection, institutional fragmentation, and political pressure, collapsed without an arrest. The files were closed in 1957, and the forests kept their secret for another decade.

Then, in September 1967, an eighty-seven-year-old woman in a Warsaw apartment building fought back. The scratches she left on her killer's face led police to a fifty-four-year-old military driver named Stanislaw Modzelewski ? and from there, through an interrogation that would become one of the most clinically remarkable in Polish criminal history, to the full extent of what the forests east of Lódz had held.

The Vampire of Galkówek is the definitive account of one of postwar Poland's most disturbing and most consequential criminal cases: a portrait of a predator whose psychology confounded the frameworks of his era, an anatomy of an investigative failure that cost six women their lives, and a reckoning with the questions of justice, responsibility, and memory that the case has never fully resolved.