Krystian Bala

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by tpksstories

by tpksstories

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

Murder of Dariusz Janiszewski

In 2007, Bala was sentenced to jail for25 years for planning and committing the murder of DariuszJaniszewski, a Polish small business owner, in Wrocław in 2000.Janiszewski's dead body was discovered floating in a lake. For threeyears the Wrocław police had failed to solve the murder, until adetective found some physical clues linking the murder to Bala. Moresensationally, clues to the killing were found in Bala's first novelAmok (2003), published three years after Janiszewski's death. It wasas if Bala had written a "fictionalized" version ofthe real-life killing into his novel, using information only themurderer could have known. The case drew widespread media coveragein Poland and resulted in increased sales of the novel as readerslooked for clues in the novel to the real-life events ofJaniszewski's death.

Prosecutors believed the motive for thekilling was tied to jealousy, as Bala had assumed that his estrangedwife was having an affair with Janiszewski.

In 2007 while Bala was in prison, anappeals court ordered a retrial of the case. In December 2008, Balahad a new trial and was again found guilty and continued to serve a25-year sentence. Bala is working on a second novel tentativelytitled De Liryk. Police report evidence found on his computer ofplans for killing a new victim to tie in with his second novel.

Media

The case was the subject of a 2008investigative article by David Grann in The New Yorker, called "TrueCrime", later published in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes:Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010). In 2010, Grann'sarticle was optioned to be made into a movie by Focus Films. Thecompleted film, Dark Crimes (formerly titled True Crimes), was shownat the Warsaw Film Festival in October 2016, and the BerlinInternational Film Festival the following February before beingpicked up for US distribution in April 2017. The crime was also thesubject of a dramatization in one segment of True Nightmares, Season1, Ep.6, "No Way to Die", first aired November 18,2015.

The case was also covered by CasefileTrue Crime Podcast on 15 October 2016.

In 2017, Krystian Bala's book Amok wasthe inspiration for the feature film Amok directed by Kasia Adamik.It was released theatrically in Poland on March 24, 2017. At the 42ndPolish Feature Film Festival in Gdansk, Lukasz Simlat won an awardfor Best Supporting Actor.