Krystian Bala

not to be confused with Christian Bale.

Krystian Bala (born 1973) is a Polish writer, photographer, and convicted murderer.

In 2007, Bala was sentenced to jail for 25 years for planning and committing the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski, a Polish small business owner, in Wrocław in 2000. For a number of years the Wrocław police had failed to solve the murder, until a detective found some physical clues linking the murder to Bala. More sensationally, clues to the killing were found in Bala's first novel Amok (2003), published several years after Janiszewski's killing.[1] It was as if Bala had written a "fictional" version of the real-life killing into his novel, using information only the killer could have known.[1] The case drew widespread media coverage in Poland and resulted in increased sales of the novel as readers looked for clues in the novel to the real-life events of Janiszewski's killing.[1] In 2007, while Bala stayed in prison, an appeals court ordered a retrial of the case.[1] In December 2008, Bala had a new trial and was again found guilty and continued to serve a twenty-five year sentence.[2] Bala is working on a second novel tentatively titled De Liryk.[1] Police report evidence found on his computer of plans for killing a new victim to tie in with his second novel.[3]

The case was the subject of a 2008 investigative article by David Grann in The New Yorker, called "True Crime",[1] later published in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010). In 2010, Grann's article was optioned to be made into a movie by Focus Films.[4] The crime was also the subject of a dramatization in one segment of "True Nightmares", Season 1, Ep.6, "No Way to Die", first aired November 18th, 2015.

Bala's case has similarities to that of Dutch writer Richard Klinkhamer.[5]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 David Grann, "Letter from Poland: True Crime", The New Yorker, Feb. 11 & 18, 2008, pp. 120–135.
  2. ↑ David Grann, "True Crime" in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, 2010.
  3. ↑ "Deception And 'The Devil And Sherlock Holmes'", NPR, Talk of the Nation, March 9, 2010.
  4. ↑ "Mastromauro finds Identity", Variety, February 15, 2010.
  5. ↑ Klinkhamer

External links


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