IN COLD BLOOD
Sex maniac teen serial killer dubbed ‘Vampire of Krakow’ went on stabbing spree so he could drink victims’ blood
Vampire Karol Kot terrorised the city of Krakow with a series of horrifying stabbings
WALKING down a quiet back street in the Polish town of Krakow, 17-year-old Karol Kot draws his knife up to his mouth and licks the warm blood of his latest victim from the blade.
It might sound like a scene from a horror film, but it’s not.
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In the 1960s, teenage serial killer Kot roamed the streets of Krakow, trying to brutally murder women and children with knives, before drinking their blood.
His savage actions earned him the nickname ‘the Vampire of Krakow’, and left his hometown living in fear - with ordinary citizens wearing boards beneath their shirts to protect them from blades.
His sick fantasies included finding a girl to rape, skinning her and setting her on fire.
Sexually frustrated Kot also said he wanted to gouge out a girl's eyes and put explosives inside her vagina.
Before his trial, Kot said, “Suffering is beauty and inflicting pain and suffering on someone is a work of art. Not everyone can do it.”
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Here, Sun Online reveals his horrifying catalogue of crimes.
Obsessed with Auschwitz and drinking human blood
Kot was born to an engineer father and stay-at-home mother who gave him a stable and loving home.
He was lavished with attention for the first eight years of his life, but when his baby sister was born in 1953, Kot became jealous and filled with rage.
On a family holiday, Kot went to a butcher's to see animals being carved up and visited a slaughterhouse and where he helped kill a pig.
Once it was dead, Kot produced a cup from his backpack and filled it with the blood gushing from the hapless animal's slit throat and drank it greedily.
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Called a 'sex maniac' by his peers because he had a habit of groping female classmates, Kot was an isolated child without any friends.
The menacing serial killer was obsessed with Auschwitz and torturing animals, and killed frogs, crows, moles, calves and chickens for his own sick amusement.
After seeing Auschwitz on a school trip, Kot wrote in his history book that he was 'amazed' by the organisation and the idea of a concentration camp. Later, he told a professor that he wished he had been born earlier so he would've had a chance to run a concentration camp himself.
Killed at the altar
Kot was only 17 when he decided to turn his attentions to humans.
His first victim, 48-year-old Helen Velgen, was stabbed several times from behind while she knelt in church to pray.
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Once Kot had plunged his knife into Velgen, he fled the scene. Vampire Kot recounted later that he relished licking every drop of blood from the knife after stabbing Helen Velgen.
Velgen survived, as did his second victim Franciszka Lewendowska - who was knifed in the back on the stairs leading to her apartment two days later.
But his next victim was not so lucky.
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Stabbing an 86-year-old to death
Vulnerable pensioner Maria Plichta, 86, was Kot's next target.
Kot stabbed her brutally from behind after following her from church, and she was rushed to hospital where she later died.
Even more disturbingly, the twisted killer visited the hospital to ask how she was doing because he wanted to revel in the pain and suffering he had caused.
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The girlfriend Kot terrorised
Kot described a friend, Danuta, as his 'girlfriend' - although it's unclear whether she reciprocated his feelings.
He would confide in her, telling her of his lust for blood, but she didn't take him seriously.
He even held a knife to her throat, to, in his words, “to see the insane fear in her eyes,” - but she thought he was just messing about.
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It was only when Kot showed Danuta a pocketful of glass shards that he was planning to slice her up with that she convinced him to see a doctor.
The medical professional sent Kot away with vitamins.
A dabble in arsenic
With his lust for blood not yet satisfied, Kot experimented with poison, leaving drinks laced with deadly arsenic in popular pubs, hoping that someone would get unlucky.
He even left a poisoned bottle of beer outside the door of a girl he found attractive - but no one succumbed to his poisoning attempts.
Frustrated, Kot returned to his true love – blood and knives.
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Murder in the snow
Watching a group of children running up and down a hill as they competed in a sledging contest, Kot felt bored with targeting old ladies and decided to try his hand at children.
He selected an 11-year-old boy and murdered him in the snow, filling the small body with brutal knife wounds, far more than were necessary to kill the child.
His badly mutilated body was found at the bottom of the sledging hill, the snow around it soaked red with blood. Little Leszek Calek had been stabbed 16 times.
A horrifying attack on an eight-year-old girl was what finally prompted Danuta to finally contact the police.
Kot had bragged about his latest victim to Danuta - but she didn't believe him until she read a news article about the stabbing of a young girl.
Danuta contacted the authorities and Kot was arrested shortly afterwards.
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Kot’s final victim, an innocent little girl, was on her way to check the family's mailbox when Kot stabbed her eight times in the back and stomach.
Miraculously, she survived. Kot was arrested in June 1966 and hung in March 1968 after being found guilty of two murders, ten attempted murders, and four arson attacks.
While waiting to receive his sentence, Kot was remorseless.
He said, “The pleasure I felt when the knife was cleaving the meat… It’s impossible to describe the feeling. The experience is worth the gallows.”
Kot underwent many psychological tests, with experts amassing more than 8,000 pages of evidence. He was, however, found of sound mind to face the full consequences of his murderous actions.
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He even suggested that he should be used to rid society of more 'undesirable people' and his murderous impulses could be harnessed to perform a public service.
After his hanging, an autopsy uncovered a brain tumour. Whether this influenced Kot's psychotic impulses and lust for human blood - or if he simply was an evil psychopath - we will never know.