Krystian Bala

not to be confused with Christian Bale.

Krystian Bala (born 1973) is a Polish writer, photographer, and believed to be a 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 3 years after Janiszewski's death.^[1] It was as if Bala had written a "fictional" version of the real-life killing into his novel, using information only the murderer 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 death.^[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 25-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 18, 2015.

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

References

External links

• Polish author jailed for murder, BBC, September 5, 2007.