The Hannibal Lecter Who Wasn’t: A Case of Diminished Responsibility
Anatomy of a Polish murder, a divided diagnosis, and a mask that slips on its own
What is most misleading about the case of Kajetan Poznański is what is easiest to remember: the cannibalistic essays, the severed head, the fascination with Lecter, the life sentence. These details sell themselves. The trouble is that this is precisely the image their author wished to leave behind. Ten years after the killing, the press is still helping him.
Material from his interrogation, released in 2024 by Gazeta.pl, reveals something less cinematic and more disquieting. It reveals a personality structure that does not produce geniuses of evil. It produces an ordinary man with a degree in Polish literature, a man who could not manage rejection and who decided, in the end, to settle the question on his own terms.
The case
On the morning of February 3, 2016, a thirty-year-old Italian tutor named Katarzyna J. opened the door of her rented flat on Skierniewicka Street, in Warsaw’s Wola district, to a young man calling himself Antoni Słomiński. He was in fact Kajetan Poznański, twenty-seven, a graduate of Polish philology who worked at the Wola District Public Library. He had been planning, for two months, to kill a stranger. Any stranger. He killed her with a knife, dismembered the body, and attempted to incinerate the remains in a rented room across town. By evening he was on a train to Poznań. Within a week he had passed through Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Naples, and Sicily. On February 17 he was arrested at the City Gate bus terminus in Valletta, Malta, a country in which it is illegal to carry a knife.
The matter was prosecuted by the Warsaw Regional Prosecutor’s Office; the trial took place at the Warsaw Regional Court. On January 26, 2021, Poznański was sentenced to life imprisonment (case file XII K 25/18); the verdict was substantively upheld on June 2, 2023 by the Warsaw Court of Appeal (II AKa 243/21).
The case is singular in Polish criminology for several reasons. Question of his sanity, of whether he was answerable in law for what he had done, divided two teams of court-appointed psychiatrists and formed the spine of a two-year trial.
What he actually said
The interrogation ran two and a half hours. Poznański declined a defense lawyer. He spoke without coercion, without affect, and at moments with the theatrical pleasure of a man who at last had the attention of several people all to himself. What he described forms a coherent sequence. The sequence leads somewhere other than where its author intended.
He spoke of himself as a man torn between two opposing poles. On one side, the demands he placed on himself: sport, fasting, cold showers, solitary trips into the forest. On the other, what he called his sentimentality toward women and his too-modest demands on his own conduct. The second pole humiliated him. He resolved to cut it out. First through asceticism. Then through breaking with the girlfriend to whom, by her own account, he had never been able to show affection. Then through beating his father with a belt, in his own phrasing, to be “more equal with him.” Finally through the killing of a stranger, to see, as he put it, how it was done.
This is not the description of an illness. It is the description of a personality unable to contain its own affective life, which resolves the matter by destroying the affective life of another. The victim is transparent. Katarzyna was chosen, in part, because her advertisement carried no photograph. “I did not want to know my victim beforehand,” Poznański told the prosecutor. “So as not to produce emotions.” She might have been anyone. Judge Danuta Kachnowicz captured this in a single sentence of the verdict: any of us, in the end.
The diagnosis the court defended
The first panel of court-appointed psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia and pronounced Poznański legally insane under Article 31 § 1 of the Polish Penal Code. The second panel, which included Professor Janusz Heitzman, long-serving head of the Forensic Psychiatry Clinic at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw, reached a different conclusion: significantly diminished but preserved responsibility under Article 31 § 2. The diagnosis that prevailed was personality disorder, not psychosis. The difference decided everything. Poznański went to prison rather than to a psychiatric facility under Article 93g, from which, on a finding of remission, he might one day have walked out.
The stakes of the distinction were higher than they may appear. Polish penal law uses what is known as the mixed method in Article 31 § 1, requiring the simultaneous presence of a psychiatric premise (mental illness, intellectual disability, or another disturbance of psychological function) and a psychological consequence (the inability to recognize the significance of an act or to govern one’s conduct), linked by the statutory phrase z powodu, as a result of. A causal relation. The disease alone does not suffice, if it cannot be shown to have eliminated the capacity for judgment or control. Poznański’s two months of preparation, the second mobile phone, the three SIM cards, the reconnaissance visit the day before, the false name given to the first cab driver, do not testify to a loss of control. They testify to its cool, deliberative presence.
The Warsaw Court of Appeal (II AKa 243/21) made the point with unusual precision: as to the murder, the diminished responsibility ran specifically to the capacity for volitional control of conduct, not to the cognitive recognition of the act’s significance, a distinction the popular press tends to flatten. Tellingly, as to the second charge — Poznański’s in-flight assault on a police officer escorting him from Malta — the court of appeal removed Article 31 § 2 from the qualification entirely, holding that both capacities had been fully preserved. The disorder expressed itself in the act that fulfilled his pathological fantasy. It did not express itself in the reactive moment of escort.
From a clinical perspective, the second opinion describes a configuration well known in the literature, though still rare in Polish jurisprudence: mixed personality disorder, with dominant narcissistic and schizoid features built upon a psychopathic core in the interpersonal-affective dimension: grandiosity, sadistic desire for control, paranoid mistrust, an absence of an internalized superego, all behind a facade of self-control and principle.
The narcissistic component, in Poznański’s case, is textbook for narcissistic personality disorder. The conviction of intellectual superiority. The literary ambitions disproportionate to ability. The inability to tolerate rejection: every editor refused his essays on cannibalism. The prison correspondence with a woman who admired his intelligence and his prose. This is narcissism in its fragile, not grandiose, variant; the contemporary clinical literature distinguishes the two subtypes. Beneath the shell is not confidence but a permanent sense of humiliation.
The schizoid component explains the rest: the longing for isolation, the discomfort with another person occupying his territory, the rules he imposed on flatmates about where to place their shoes, the search for quiet at the edges of civilization. The psychopathic component explains the shallow affect during and after the killing, the absence of remorse, the manipulative charm exerted on the elderly hostel owner in Valletta, the instrumental lying.
What is missing is the classic profile of early antisocial behavior. No court record. Stable employment in a library. Good education. A prosecutor’s household. This is not the picture of the ordinary psychopath one meets in medium-security prisons. It is a rarer and more disquieting variant, what the English-language literature has come to call the successful psychopath (Babiak and Hare, “Snakes in Suits,” 2006). A man who functioned within the norm for twenty-some years, until decompensation set in.
Four moments where the mask slips
One understands the structure best not through theory but through four concrete dissonances that emerged in the case, dissonances Poznański himself, in the dock, attempted to disguise.
First: the supposed rationality of the plan versus the amateurism of its execution. The killer liked to think of himself as a strategist. Two months of preparation, the second phone, the three SIM cards, the reconnaissance, the false name. Then the execution. He had not anticipated how much blood would flow from a body. The shower turned out to be clogged. He left the victim’s apartment door open. He gave the second cab driver his real name. He attempted to burn the remains in a rented room in a Warsaw tenement, in winter, on a day when the neighbors were also burning coal in their tile stoves. Smoke was noticed. This is the classic dissonance of narcissistic pathology. The grandiose self does not anticipate consequences, because it lives in the space of self-admiration, not in the physical world.
Second: the thrift on the day of the killing. He chose the cheaper meeting option, at her flat rather than his own. A few hours after the murder he argued with a cashier at a shop in Poznań station about a single grosz of change. The grosz is the Polish equivalent of a cent. This detail, grotesque in the moment, is the one the police later used to confirm his trail; the cashier remembered him because of the quarrel. From the standpoint of psychopathology it is something more. Poznański’s affect is not deficient in the direction of absence. It is deficient in the direction of displacement. He cannot feel sympathy for the dead woman, but he can become indignant about a coin. The emotions are present. They have simply lost their address.
Third: the theatrical performance in court. When the schizophrenia defense began to collapse after the third forensic opinion, Poznański began to act the disease. Screams, howls, foreign languages, and then, in the middle of a symptom, an abrupt pause, a sip of water, and a question to the court clerk about whether all that had been recorded. Diagnostically, the moment settles the question. A genuinely psychotic person does not control the beginning, the end, or the audience of an episode. The performer of psychosis controls all three, because that is the point of the performance.
Fourth: the prison correspondence. The man who killed in order to liberate himself from his “sentimentality toward women,” in the conditions of solitary confinement, formed a correspondence with a woman who admired his intelligence and his literary work. He wrote back. The contempt for women was never a philosophical position. It was a defense against the fear of being unworthy in a relation of equals. When the relation became asymmetric, she admiring, he receiving, the fear dissolved and the philosophy ceased to be needed. The phenomenon of women drawn to convicted killers has in Poznański’s case an additional dimension. It closes the narcissistic fantasy he had failed to consummate outside the prison walls.
Three myths worth taking apart
The case has accumulated around itself a few persistent narratives. Each of them is, for the purpose of understanding the mechanism, unhelpful. Some are positively harmful.
This is not the Polish Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal is a literary creation by Thomas Harris, constructed for the reader’s entertainment, equipped with a consistent aesthetic philosophy and inhuman operational competence. Poznański is the amateur who set fire to a Warsaw tenement trying to dispose of a corpse. He wanted to be Lecter. He wrote to magazine editors about “the famous gourmet.” But that was not a diagnosis. It was an aspiration. The romanticization of the offender is his final narcissistic success, and, it should be said plainly, the only gratification still available to him after the verdict.
This is not a killing with a mental illness. The first psychiatric opinion in this case has the value of a teaching example. It shows how easily an intelligent patient with a personality disorder can mislead experienced examiners, particularly when given access to diagnostic vocabulary and eight weeks of observation in which to rehearse. The case is also a reminder that, in the Polish system, the substantive check on a first opinion depends in practice on the initiative of a particular prosecutor.
This is not a criminal genius. Poznański’s intelligence was above average, but he used it to rationalize an emotional deficit, not to produce work. His essays were refused by editors not because they were too radical but because they were derivative: Nietzsche recycled, Sade recycled, and a recycling of the popular-culture Lecter. Outstanding intelligence produces originality. Here we have an able intellect harnessed to compulsion.
The broader context
Poznański’s case is not unique in European criminology, though it belongs to a narrow category: killings without a conventional motive. For comparative purposes, a few European cases of similar offender structure are worth recalling. Anders Behring Breivik (Norway, 2011) was first diagnosed as schizophrenic and, on a second opinion, declared sane with narcissistic-antisocial personality disorder; the parallel with the Polish dispute over Poznański’s opinion is striking. Issei Sagawa (Japan and France, 1981), the cannibal of the Sorbonne, intellectualized his crime in philosophical terms much as Poznański did, and went on, after a strange diplomatic resolution, to a minor career as a Tokyo media figure with a sideline in food writing. Luka Magnotta (Canada, 2012) constructed from his crime a media spectacle that now serves as a textbook example of an offender seeking fame.
In the criminological literature these cases are studied under the heading of motiveless murder or expressive homicide. The classical analytical frames come from the work of Reid Meloy (“The Psychopathic Mind,” 1988) and from the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit typology of organized and disorganized offenders. Poznański belongs to the organized category, with elements of executional disorganization, a profile more common than popular typologies suggest.
Polish crime statistics record annually some dozen or so homicides without an established motive or with no prior acquaintance between killer and victim. Most are eventually resolved into the conventional categories: robbery, intimate-partner violence, escalating quarrel. The cases in which the motive is the killer’s own identity are, in a country of Poland’s size, a small handful per year. Each of them presents the courts with the same two difficulties: the forensic psychiatric opinion and the recidivism forecast.
What follows
In 2041, when Poznański turns fifty-two, the formal path to parole will open under Article 78 § 3 of the Polish Penal Code, which permits life inmates to apply for early release after twenty-five years served. Whether the path is taken will depend on the risk assessment the experts conduct at that time. A 2022 amendment to the Polish Penal Code permits courts to impose life imprisonment without parole, but in Poznański’s case, decided under the earlier legal regime, the principle of lex retro non agit (Article 4 § 1) prevents its application.
There is here a further element rarely noticed in the public commentary on the case. The compulsory protective measure of detention in a psychiatric facility (Article 93g § 1 and § 2 of the Polish Penal Code), following the amendment of 20 February 2015, is now available only against offenders whose insanity or diminished responsibility results from mental illness or intellectual disability, not from “another disturbance of psychological function,” the category into which doctrine and case law place personality disorders. The Warsaw Court of Appeal, in the very ruling that upheld Poznański’s sentence, articulated the principle in its published headnote: “The most severe protective measure cannot be applied to persons whose insanity, or significantly diminished responsibility, results from causes other than mental illness or intellectual disability; against such persons, only non-custodial protective measures may be applied.” In practice this means that, if Poznański were ever released and were still to present a documented high risk of further violence, Polish criminal law would have no detention mechanism available under Article 93g. The lacuna appears to be an unintended consequence of an amendment whose drafters were concerned with protecting offenders with physiological disturbances of consciousness, not with safeguarding society from decompensating psychopaths.
From a clinical perspective the answer to the question of recidivism risk is uncomfortable but simple. A personality structure of this kind does not yield to psychiatric treatment. There is no remission of a narcissistic-psychopathic disorder, only varying conditions of expression. The contemporary instruments of violence risk assessment yield stably high forecasts for this offender group. In confinement, under strict routine, without access to potential victims, Poznański may function adequately and, paradoxically, may even find a kind of contentment. Rhythm, solitude, reading, correspondence, a single-occupancy cell. It is, in essence, close to the life he aspired to before the killing. Were he ever released, he would return to the same drive structure, older, with diminished executional capacity, but with the same basic configuration.
The most unsettling conclusion of the case is systemic rather than individual. It demonstrates that a person without antisocial markers in his history, with stable employment, good education, and a prosecutor’s household, may in his late twenties decompensate in a way that no existing early-warning system will detect. There had been a single hospital contact in the autumn of 2015, an unkept follow-up after Poznański beat his father with a belt. No one pursued it, because there were no grounds on which to pursue it.
This is not an argument for broader psychiatric surveillance of the population. It is an argument for humility in the face of the predictive limits of psychiatry and clinical psychology, limits that Monahan and colleagues had already signaled in the Violence Risk Assessment Study. Some personality structures reveal themselves only in an act that cannot be taken back. The rest is narrative, and if one allows him, the offender will write it himself.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
