Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / The Scorpion Serial Killer: Pawel Tuchlin's 8-Year Terror Spree

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The Scorpion Serial Killer: Pawel Tuchlin's 8-Year Terror Spree · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: I want you to picture a scene with me for
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a second.
0:01
Speaker 2: Okay.
0:02
Speaker 1: It is a bitter, freezing cold December night in nineteen
0:08
eighty two. We are in this small Polish town called
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scar Zooey, right, and the temperature is hovering right around zero.
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But worse than the cold, there is a fog, a
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fog so incredibly dense, so absolutely suffocating, that you literally
0:23
cannot see your own hand in front of your face.
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Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah, that kind of weather is just depressive, exactly.
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Speaker 1: It's the kind of weather that just swallows sound and
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light whole. And in this freezing, blinding mist, a brutal,
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unspeakable attack is happening. A twenty six year old woman
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is being bludgeoned and dragged into the bushes. And the
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most chilling detail of all this, this unimaginable act of violence,
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is happening right next door to the local Communist party headquarters.
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Speaker 2: It is just it's so brazen.
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Speaker 1: It is because for years a shadow had been stalking
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the region. And when this man, this shadow, is finally caught,
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the prosecutor asks him a really simple question, ask what
1:00
would you do if you were released?
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Speaker 2: And his answer to that is just, it is beyond.
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Speaker 1: Words, it really is. It strips away any illusion you
1:07
might have about human remorse. He just looks at them
1:09
and says, well, I'd probably go for another hunt.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. It is a quote that just completely freezes the blood.
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I mean, it perfectly encapsulates the absolute terrifying void of
1:19
empathy we are looking into today.
1:21
Speaker 1: Today we are tracking a ghost. We're going on a
1:24
deep dive into the anatomy of an eight year reign
1:27
of terror of a man named Paul Tucklan.
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Speaker 2: The press and the police eventually dubbed him the Scorpion, right.
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Speaker 1: So we are diving into a really comprehensive stack of
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documentary evidence, psychological profiles, and police records to understand exactly
1:43
how we operated.
1:44
Speaker 2: Because it wasn't just the crimes themselves, it was the
1:46
entire ecosystem around him exactly.
1:49
Speaker 1: We are going to look at his deeply disturbed psychology,
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his incredibly brutal methods, and the specific geopolitical climate of
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nineteen seventies and eighties Poland that inadvert only gave him
2:00
this massive cloak of invisibility.
2:02
Speaker 2: And of course the frankly incredible, entirely analog detective work
2:07
that finally brought him.
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Speaker 1: Down which is my favorite part of this whole thing.
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So to really set the stage for you listening, we
2:12
have to grasp the sheer scale of the horror we're
2:15
discussing here.
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Speaker 2: Right, Because, between nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty three,
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in and around the busy port city of d Dansk,
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a man armed with nothing more than a heavy metal
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hammer viciously attacked twenty women.
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Speaker 1: Twenty women, that is just a staggering number.
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Speaker 2: It is. He murdered nine of them, callously beating them
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to death, and he left eleven others with incredibly severe
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life altering injuries.
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Speaker 1: And every single one was sexually assaulted.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, but our goal in this deep dive isn't simply
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to recount a list of crimes.
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Speaker 1: No, not at all. We really need to understand the
2:51
underlying mechanisms here, like how does a predator like this
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hide in plain sight for nearly a decade?
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Speaker 2: And crucially, how did these specific political and social and
3:00
environment of that era create the perfect ecosystem for a
3:03
monster to roam completely unchecked?
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Speaker 1: Right, So let's start with the anatomy of his isolation,
3:08
because you know, monsters don't just drop out of the
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sky fully formed.
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Speaker 2: They absolutely do not.
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Speaker 1: Tushlin was born in nineteen forty six in a highly isolated,
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very rural village called Gura, which is about forty miles
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from Gadansk, and he was the eighth of eleven children.
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Speaker 2: Just try to imagine the sheer chaos of a house
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with eleven kids in a post war rural agricultural setting.
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Speaker 1: I can't even fathom it. But it wasn't just a
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crowded farmhouse, right, It was a deeply violent one.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. His father was an alcoholic farmer who basically ruled
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the house with his fists.
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Speaker 1: And here's a detail from his early life that feels
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incredibly significant to his eventual pathology. Touchlin suffered from severe
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bedwetting until he was eighteen years old.
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Speaker 2: Eighteen the clinical term for that is nuysis, and experiencing
3:53
it up until that age is staggering.
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Speaker 1: It's so far beyond normal childhood development stuff.
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Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, it goes way beyond a devel mental hurdle.
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The consequences for him were catastrophic on every front, socially
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and psychologically.
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Speaker 1: Did you have to think about the physical reality of it?
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Speaker 2: Right, when an adolescent is dealing with chronic inuresis in
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a harsh, impoverished environment, the physical reality, the constant smell,
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the dampness, the total inability to hide it. In a
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house of thirteen people, it becomes a totally defining characteristic
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of their existence.
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Speaker 1: And his father's reaction certainly wasn't to like get him
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medical help or psychological counseling.
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Speaker 2: No, definitely not. The father's reaction was just to beat
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him mercilessly for it.
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Speaker 1: And then at school the environment was just as hostile.
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I mean, you can imagine how cruel kids can be,
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especially in a small insular village.
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Speaker 2: Oh, they are ruthless exactly.
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Speaker 1: And because he smelled strongly of urine constantly, he was
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brutally ridiculed. They gave him these awful nicknames.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, the sources say they called him stinker, firefighter, pisser.
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Speaker 1: Just totally dehumanizing stuff. He was a complete outcast. He
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was literally physically repelling people.
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Speaker 2: And if we break down the psychological cocktail this specific
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type of childhood creates, Tushlin is internalizing two very distinct,
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very dangerous lessons simultaneously.
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Speaker 1: Okay, what's the first one.
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Speaker 2: First, he is learning that he is utterly marginalized. He
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has zero agency, no social standing, and he is entirely powerless.
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Speaker 1: Because he's rejected at home and at school.
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Speaker 2: Right, he's rejected by his family through physical violence, and
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he's rejected by his peers through disgust and mockery. So
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he is completely disconnected from any normal human warmth or acceptance.
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Speaker 1: Especially from girls his own age.
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Speaker 2: Right, exactly, girls naturally found him repulsive, which deeply affected him.
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Speaker 1: So what's the second lesson he's internalizing.
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Speaker 2: Well, the second lesson comes from observing his father. He
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is watching this alcoholic man beat him just to enforce obedience.
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Speaker 1: And they lived on a working farm, so he's seeing
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violence all the time.
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Speaker 2: Yes, he is watching his father's stun pigs before slaughtering them.
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So he internalizes this very dark truth about his environment.
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Violence is the primary, perhaps the only, effective tool for
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establishing authority and control over other living things. Oh yeah,
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in his mind, if you want to control something, you
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physically dominate it, you harm it, you render it unconscious.
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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this for a second, because I'm struggling
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with that.
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Speaker 2: A little bit.
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Speaker 1: Ohso, Well, millions of kids suffer horrible bullying and violent abuse,
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but they don't pick up a hammer and start hunting
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human beings. There has to be I don't know, a
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unique spark here, a missing ingredient.
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Speaker 2: That's a very fair point to me.
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Speaker 1: It feels like his childhood wasn't just a tough upbringing.
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It was a pressure cooker, but the release valve was
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completely welded shut.
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Speaker 2: Ooh.
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Speaker 1: I like that analogy, right, because most people have some
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way to vent the steam. A sympathetic teacher, a single
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good friend, a hobby, literally any escape, and Titchlin had
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none of that exactly. His complete inability to connect with
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his peers, combined with that inescapable physical stench of urine
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that literally forced pe away from him, created what I
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can only describe as a solitary confinement of the mind.
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Speaker 2: A solitary confinement of the mind. That is a really
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powerful way.
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Speaker 1: To look at it, because he was just entirely trapped
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inside his own humiliation with no way out. But how
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does that profound early life humiliation specifically warp someone's perception
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of women.
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Speaker 2: Well, because he cannot interact normally with the outside world,
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he is forced completely inward. And when a mind is
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simmering with that much humiliation and anger and it has
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no external grounding, the fantasies that develop are rarely healthy.
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Speaker 1: They become compensatory.
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Speaker 2: Right exactly because he was deeply intimidated by women from
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an early age, just terrified of them is the ultimate
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judges of his inadequacy. He retreated into deviant sexual fantasies
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to cope.
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Speaker 1: So in his head, he's the one in charge.
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Speaker 2: Right in his mind, in his day dreams, he isn't
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the smelly, pathetic outcast. He holds all the power. He
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strips away their agency so that they can't judge, they
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can't laugh at him, and they can't reject.
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Speaker 1: Him because the fantasy is literally the only place he
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feels safe and dominant.
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Speaker 2: That's exactly it.
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Speaker 1: But rural isolation eventually has to meet the real world.
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I mean, you can't stay in the farmhouse forever.
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Speaker 2: True.
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Speaker 1: When he turns eighteen, his bed wedding finally stops and
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he decides to make a move. He heads to the city,
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to the suburbs of a Dansk to get a fresh start,
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which is a huge transition, huge, and he gets a
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job in construction and for a brief moment it actually
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looks like he might pull off a normal life.
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Speaker 2: He even meets a woman.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, he meets a woman, they get married, they even
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have a baby. But you can't outrun your own mind.
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Speaker 2: No you can't. The geography changed, but the psychology didn't, and.
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Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy three that marriage completely collapses.
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Speaker 2: It does. The underlying issues, his inability to truly connect,
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his deeply rooted resentments, his utter lack of emotional regulation,
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They all inevitably surface.
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Speaker 1: So losing the marriage was kind of the trigger.
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Speaker 2: With the collapse of the marriage, the thin veneer of
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normal siege shatters. He loses the only structural anchor he
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had managed to build, and he begins to actively pursue
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those dark fantasies he developed in his youth.
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Speaker 1: So the internal pressure is finally breaching the.
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Speaker 2: Surface exactly, and the escalation starts with voyeurism. The psychological
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term for it is scoptophilia.
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Speaker 1: Which is basically deriving sexual pleasure and gratification from secretly
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watching women through their windows.
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Speaker 2: Yes, but notice the specific power dynamic at play in scoptophilia.
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He is watching them, but they cannot see him.
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Speaker 1: He's totally in control of the interaction exactly.
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Speaker 2: He is taking something from them, their privacy, their intimacy,
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completely without their consent, and they are powerless to stop
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it because they don't even know it's happening.
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Speaker 1: Which makes sense for his background.
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Speaker 2: For a man who has felt observed and mocked his
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entire life, being the unseen observer provides a profound, intoxicating
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sense of power that he desperately craves.
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Speaker 1: But watching isn't enough for long though.
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Speaker 2: No it rarely is in these cases.
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Speaker 1: He graduates to exhibition. He starts wearing a heavy coat,
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finding young women on the street and exposing himself, and
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this leads us to the catalyst, the turning point, right,
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the absolute breaking point where the voyeur becomes the scorpion.
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He's near the city's medical academy and he spots a
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female student.
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Speaker 2: And he unzips his jacket exposes himself, waiting for that
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reaction of shock or fear, which in his twisted mind
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equals power.
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Speaker 1: But she doesn't scream, she doesn't run away in terror.
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She just looks at him and says, hey, dude, you
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have nothing to show, and she starts.
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Speaker 2: Laughing, which is incredible. But if we place that moment
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in the context of his entire life, that laughter is
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a catastrophic psychological event for.
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Speaker 1: Him, because it's his worst fear realized exactly.
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Speaker 2: He has been his entire childhood, being the town joke,
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the stinker. He transitions to exhibitionism to finally be the
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one causing fear to dictate the emotional reality of the encounter.
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Speaker 1: And instead he's plunged right back into the ultimate humiliation.
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Speaker 2: The documentary material highlights this as the pivotal psychological shift.
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His internal reaction he literally thought, bloody women, I will
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show you signals a complete transformation in his desires.
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Speaker 1: It's no longer enough to merely be seen or to
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shock them.
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Speaker 2: No, to guarantee he will never be rejected or laughed
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at again, He requires their total physical subjugation.
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Speaker 1: He needs to guarantee they cannot laugh, which brings us
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to the terrifying pragmatism of his weapon, rah Hammer. Right
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when he decides to escalate to physical violence, he doesn't
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use a knife for a gun. He uses a heavy hammer.
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It goes right back to the farming gora, right back
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to watching his father stunning the.
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Speaker 2: Pigs, the muscle memory of control exactly.
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Speaker 1: But here is the detail that just chilled me to
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the bone. He would wrap a cloth around the heavy
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metal head of the hammer. Now you listening, your first
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thought is probably, Oh, he's trying to muffle the sound
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of the strike, or maybe soften the blow to not
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be lethal.
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Speaker 2: That would be the logical assumption.
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Speaker 1: But no, he wrapped it in cloth so that when
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he tucked the hammer down the front of his trousers
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to hide it while walking the streets, the cold metal
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wouldn't make his stomach cold.
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Speaker 2: That detail speaks volumes about his pathology.
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Speaker 1: I mean, how do you even comprehend that.
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Speaker 2: It is supreme narcissism. He is preparing to go out
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and shatter a human being skull to inflict unimaginable life
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ending agony, and his primary logistical concern is his own
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mild physical discomfort during the commute.
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Speaker 1: It's so sickening.
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Speaker 2: It demonstrates a complete clinical detachment from the humanity of
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his victims. To him, they are people with lives and families.
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They are merely objects to be subdued, stepping stones for
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his own gratification.
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Speaker 1: Speaking of how he viewed them, there's another critical detail
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from the sources regarding his modus operandi, his mo He
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would often completely obliterate the faces of his victims with
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the hammer.
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Speaker 2: Yes, the facial trauma was extreme.
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Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? If his primary goal
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is to take away their power to laugh at him,
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how does that manifest physically when he attacks why the
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face specifically?
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Speaker 2: In behavioral analysis, overkill directed specifically at a victim's face
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is almost always interpreted as a deeply personal act of
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identity erasure. Identity erasure, right, the face is where humanity resides,
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you know. It's how we recognize someone, how they express emotion,
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how they communicate, and, crucially for Tiplin, how they express mockery.
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Speaker 1: So by targeting it.
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Speaker 2: By systematically destroying the face, he is annihilating the person's identity.
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He's transforming them from a complex human being with the
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capacity to judge him into exactly what the clinical reports describe,
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a passive, motionless.
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Speaker 1: Female, which was his ultimate goal.
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Speaker 2: Yes, is the ultimate manifestation of his immense, lifelong resentment.
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He is violently silencing the laughter forever.
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Speaker 1: So he has the motive, he has the deep seated rage,
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and he has his practical, cloth wrapped weapon. We shift
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from the theoretical to the horrifying reality. On Halloween night,
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October thirty first, nineteen seventy five.
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Speaker 2: Tuchulin is twenty nine years old.
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Speaker 1: At this point, right, he spots a twenty one year
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old waitress named Danusia walking home alone. He ambushes her,
14:03
smashes her with the hammer, and drags her into the bushes.
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Speaker 2: But then something unexpected happens.
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Speaker 1: A couple walking by here's whimpering in the dark. And
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what Chuklin does next is a display of terrifying, cold
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blooded composure.
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Speaker 2: It really is.
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Speaker 1: He steps out of the bushes, looks directly at the
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witnesses and says, I think someone's groaning over there. Something
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bad must have happened. You stay here and I'll go
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call the ambulance. And he just calmly turns and walks
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away into the night.
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Speaker 2: It is a remarkable display of psychopathic control. I mean,
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most first time attackers, when interrupted, experience a massive adrenaline spike.
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Speaker 1: Right, They panic, or run wildly, or attack the witness.
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Speaker 2: Exactly touchlnn uses manipulation and a facade of civic concern
14:47
to simply stroll away from the scene of a brutal,
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bloody crime. Fortunately, because he was interrupted, Danusia survived, though
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she was critically injured, and he.
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Speaker 1: Doesn't retreat for long. He attacks again just two months later,
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in January nineteen seventy six, snowy freezing conditions, he hits
15:04
another woman with the hammer, but again he is interrupted
15:07
by passers by and she survives. And then again Yeah,
15:09
four weeks later, February nineteen seventy six, a third attack,
15:13
same exact result. She manages to survive because the attack
15:17
is cut short.
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Speaker 2: From a criminological standpoint, the nature of these early attacks
15:21
is fascinating. It operates on the principle of coitus interruptus,
15:26
but applied to violent escalation. Okay, tell me more about that. Well.
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In all three instances, the violent sequence was initiated but
15:32
not brought to its intended conclusion. He didn't get to
15:35
fully enact the sexual assault and domination portion of his
15:37
fantasy because external factors forced him to flee.
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Speaker 1: So he's not deterred by getting caught.
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Speaker 2: Psychologically, this doesn't deter him at all. It actually creates
15:46
an unbearable itch. The violent neural pathways have been activated
15:50
but left unfulfilled, demanding completion.
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Speaker 1: The pressure inside that welded shut boiler is rising again exactly,
15:58
and he actually started to create the process itself. It
16:01
wasn't just about ambushing them instantly and getting it over with.
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He wanted the thrill of the chase.
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Speaker 2: The chase prolongs the victim's distress. It maximizes his feeling
16:12
of power before he finally turns them into that passive object.
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Speaker 1: Right, he's feeding on it.
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Speaker 2: The fear he sees in them during the pursuit is
16:18
intoxicating to a man who's felt powerless and invisible his
16:22
entire life. He is savoring the dominance.
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Speaker 1: So right as this pattern is accelerating, right as this
16:27
itch is demanding to be scratched, the attacks suddenly stop.
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In late nineteen seventy six, For three whole years, there
16:35
isn't a single hammer attack in.
16:36
Speaker 2: Gadans, which is highly unusual.
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Speaker 1: Very did he suddenly find his conscience? Did the urges
16:42
go away? No? He goes to prison. But here is
16:45
the dark irony of the justice system. He doesn't go
16:49
to prison for the brutal hammer attacks. He goes to
16:51
prison for three years for stealing tools from his workplace.
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Speaker 2: The bureaucratic irony is profound. The criminal justice system success
17:00
fully removed a highly dangerous, escalating sexual predator from the streets,
17:05
but they did it completely by accident.
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Speaker 1: They caught him for petty theft.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, totally unaware that they were actually pausing a serial
17:12
killer's evolution.
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Speaker 1: It's just wild to think about. He's sitting in a
17:15
cell and the authorities think we got the guy who
17:17
stole the wrenches, while he's sitting there with the blood
17:20
of three women on his hands, just waiting it.
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Speaker 2: Out, waiting and fantasizing.
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Speaker 1: Prison didn't rehabilitate him at all, It just delayed his urges.
17:27
Let's fast forward to the summer of nineteen seventy nine.
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He is released from prison. He gets a laboring job
17:34
at a railway rolling stock factory known as z NTK, and.
17:37
Speaker 2: You have to look at his specific role there.
17:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is the guy in charge of distributing the
17:42
heavy tools to the workers.
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Speaker 2: You truly couldn't write a more volatile scenario.
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Speaker 1: I know.
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Speaker 2: You take a man whose weapon of choice is a
17:50
heavy metal hammer, whose violent fantasies have been marinating and
17:54
concentrating in a prison cell for three years, and you
17:57
put him in a room full of heavy metal tools
17:59
with minimal supervision.
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Speaker 1: It's a recipe for disaster.
18:03
Speaker 2: It was the catalyst that moved him from severe assault
18:05
to outright murder. The environment provided the exact means for
18:10
his pathology to fully express itself.
18:12
Speaker 1: So November ninth, nineteen seventy nine, he takes a bus
18:15
out to a village about ten miles from Gadansk. He
18:18
is actively hunting, now, traveling to find victims.
18:21
Speaker 2: He's changed his pattern right.
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Speaker 1: He spots a twenty year old nurse walking home alone.
18:26
He exposes himself. She turns in shock, and he strikes
18:29
her with the hammer. But this time it's not a
18:31
single stunning blow to incapacitate. He struck her fifteen times
18:35
in the head. Fifteen times.
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Speaker 2: We really have to pause and recognize the sheer, exhausting
18:40
physical brutality of fifteen full force hammer blows.
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Speaker 1: It's hard to even picture.
18:45
Speaker 2: It requires a sustained, frenzied rage, that level of overkill,
18:50
that an immense amount of kinetic energy directed at a
18:53
human skull ensures massive irreversible trauma. It is an exertion
18:58
of total annihilation.
19:00
Speaker 1: He drags her into the bushes, and while he is
19:02
sexually assaulting her, her hands and legs are moving not
19:05
because she is fighting back, but because of unconditioned reflexes
19:08
due to the catastrophic brain damage you just inflicted.
19:11
Speaker 2: Horrific.
19:11
Speaker 1: She is actively dying, her brain is misfiring, and he
19:14
is entirely unfazed by it. He finishes, wipes the blood
19:18
off the hammer, and leaves.
19:19
Speaker 2: This moment demonstrates the complete crystallization of his psychopathy. How
19:23
the fact that he can engage in sexual gratification while
19:26
the victim is actively displaying the neurological spasms of death
19:29
shows that he views her solely as a mechanism for
19:32
his own pleasure, just an object right, her humanity, her suffering,
19:36
her impending death. None of it registers in his consciousness,
19:40
is anything other than background noise to his own satisfaction.
19:43
He has achieved his ultimate fantasy, absolute control over a
19:46
completely passive entity.
19:48
Speaker 1: But as he is fleeing this horrific scene, he makes
19:52
a massive mistake. He tries to jump over a stream
19:55
in the dark, and the hammer drops out of his
19:57
hand and into the shallow water.
20:00
Speaker 2: Huge piece of evidence.
20:01
Speaker 1: The police find it the very next day, and right
20:03
there on the handle it is stamped with four letters
20:06
z NTK the exact factory where he works.
20:10
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable.
20:11
Speaker 1: Wait, I have to push back on this. They found
20:13
the exact murder weapon stamped with his workplace, and he
20:17
was literally the guy in charge of checking out the tools.
20:20
How did he not get caught right then and there.
20:23
It defies all logic.
20:24
Speaker 2: It does seem impossible. But this is where we see
20:26
the perverse luk of the criminal intersecting with bureaucratic blind spots.
20:31
Speaker 1: Okay, explain this to me.
20:33
Speaker 2: The police absolutely follow that lead. They went directly to
20:36
the ZNTK factory. They interviewed the foreman. They looked at
20:39
the tool logs. But Tichlan hadn't checked that hammer out
20:43
through the official system. Of course, not because he was
20:46
a thief by nature. He had simply stolen the hammer
20:49
off the books. When the police looked at the official
20:51
list of who had checked out hammers that week, Paul
20:54
Tichlan's name wasn't on it.
20:56
Speaker 1: So his petty criminality, his habit of just stealing whatever
20:59
he wanted, actually acted as a shield that masked his
21:03
ultimate evil. Exactly if he had been a good employee
21:06
and followed the rules to sign it out, he would
21:08
have been caught after murder number one.
21:10
Speaker 2: It is a terrifying reality of investigative work. The system
21:13
was designed to track honest workers, not thieves, and because
21:17
he slips through that net, he feels emboldened.
21:20
Speaker 1: He feels untouchable, which leads to his next phase. In
21:23
nineteen eighty, he moves back to his rural hometown of Gura.
21:27
He remarries, he has another child, and he lives this bizarre,
21:31
compartmentalized dual life.
21:33
Speaker 2: Very typical of organized serial killers.
21:35
Speaker 1: To his new wife and his neighbors, he's just a
21:37
farmer who does odd jobs at night to make extra money.
21:40
But those odd jobs are actually hunting trips across the region.
21:43
Speaker 2: And the attacks become consistently lethal.
21:45
Speaker 1: Now February nineteen eighty, he attacks a thirty year old
21:48
woman named Anastasia. She rejects his advances on a path,
21:52
he strikes her down, and this brings us to what
21:54
might be the single most disturbing detail of his behavior
21:57
from the source material, the Celebratal Yes.
22:02
Speaker 2: After attacking Anastasia, after rummaging through her belongings and taking
22:06
whatever trivial items he wanted, Tutelin would find any foods
22:09
she had with her lunch, her groceries, and he would
22:12
sit down and eat it. I just I can't you
22:15
literally sit there eating her food while watching her bleed
22:18
to death in absolute agony.
22:20
Speaker 1: I literally cannot wrap my head around that. Sitting down
22:22
for a snack while someone is dying at your feet.
22:25
What does that level of callousness even reveal about a
22:28
human brain?
22:30
Speaker 2: It reveals in narcissism so profound that it borders on
22:33
the incomprehensible for a normal person. Empathy requires the neurological
22:38
capacity to project yourself into the experience of another person,
22:42
to feel a fraction of.
22:43
Speaker 1: Their pain, and he just doesn't have that.
22:45
Speaker 2: Tushlin lacks that mechanism entirely. For him, the universe consists
22:48
of one entity, Paul Tucklan. The victim's agony is less
22:51
important to him than a momentary pang of hunger.
22:54
Speaker 1: It's chilling.
22:55
Speaker 2: Eating a meal while watching someone die isn't just apathy.
22:58
It's an assertion of ultimate dominance. It says your life
23:02
is ending, your suffering is absolute, and I am so
23:04
completely unaffected by it that I'm going to casually enjoy
23:07
a sandwich. It is the apex of predatory dehumanization, and
23:12
he keeps doing it.
23:13
Speaker 1: By the end of nineteen eighty he has killed six women.
23:16
You have to ask yourself, how how could a man
23:19
commit these brutal, noisy hammer attacks across the countryside, on buses,
23:24
on trains for years without sparking a massive nationwide manhunt.
23:29
Speaker 2: It's a great question.
23:30
Speaker 1: If this happened today, it would be wall to wall
23:33
news coverage. But to understand why they weren't catching him,
23:35
we have to pull back and look at the geopolitical
23:38
shield that protected him.
23:39
Speaker 2: Because context is everything here. We are talking about Poland
23:42
in the early nineteen eighties, right, This is a country
23:45
in the grip of massive political and social.
23:47
Speaker 1: Upheaval, and when you read the internal memos from the
23:51
regime at the time, it's fascinating to see how their
23:53
ideological priorities completely blinded them to a local crisis.
23:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, the early eighties in Poland saw the rise of
24:01
the Solidarity or solid Arnosk Labor Union uprising. This was
24:05
a massive anti communist social movement that threatened the very
24:08
foundation of the state, so they were distracted. Consequently, the
24:12
Communist government and their militia police force were entirely preoccupied
24:17
with maintaining their grip on power, their resources, their manpower,
24:21
and their attention were intensely focused on tracking down political dissidents,
24:25
monitoring protests and crushing the opposition.
24:28
Speaker 1: Catching a violent criminal in the suburbs was just a
24:30
super low priority compared to regime survival exactly. And I
24:34
want to pause here for a mandatory impartiality note for
24:37
you listening. We are neutrally reporting the historical context provided
24:41
by the sources here. We are not taking a political
24:44
stance left or right, but we are merely explaining how
24:46
the regime's ideological pride and focus on political survival resulted
24:50
in a low priority for murder investigations.
24:52
Speaker 2: Yes, it's about the historical facts of the era, right.
24:55
Speaker 1: So there was also a deep ideological blindfold they were wearing.
25:00
The official party line of the time, dictated from the
25:02
top down, basically said that serial killers could exist in
25:06
the USA, in the UK, or in the rotten West,
25:10
but not in a beautiful communist country like Poland.
25:13
Speaker 2: It was a point of pride.
25:15
Speaker 1: So how did this ideology actually function on the ground
25:18
to stop an investigation?
25:19
Speaker 2: It functioned through institutional denial and strict censorship. The state
25:24
narrative insisted that violent crime, especially aberrant serial violence, was
25:29
a symptom of capitalist decay.
25:31
Speaker 1: So it couldn't happen there.
25:32
Speaker 2: Right, It was a disease born of greed and social inequality.
25:36
To admit that a serial killer was operating in Gadansk
25:39
would be to admit that the communist utopia was fundamentally flawed. Wow.
25:43
So local police who might have noticed the pattern were
25:45
actively discouraged from reporting it up the chain. The state
25:48
controlled media was strictly forbidden from publishing warnings or connecting
25:51
the murders.
25:52
Speaker 1: The authorities basically chose institutional denial over public safety.
25:55
Speaker 2: They did they didn't connect the docks, they didn't warn
25:58
the public, and they deliberately start any potential investigation of resources.
26:02
Speaker 1: And the result of that denial on the ground was
26:04
a terrifying psychosis of fear. As one local journalist put
26:08
it in the sources. Because the government wasn't officially acknowledging
26:11
a serial killer, rumors just exploded through whisper networks.
26:15
Speaker 2: People talk, Yeah.
26:17
Speaker 1: Women in Gadansk and the surrounding areas were absolutely terrified.
26:21
Men were having to act as escorts walking women home
26:24
from factories and shops every single evening. The citizens knew
26:28
something was horribly wrong, even if the newspapers refused to
26:31
print a word of it.
26:32
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, Tushlin is using this chaos to his advantage. He
26:36
is highly mobile. He isn't just walking around his neighborhood.
26:39
He is using the region's public transit system, buses, trains,
26:43
and even stolen cars to travel along specific.
26:46
Speaker 1: Routes, striking and then vanishing.
26:48
Speaker 2: Yes, vanishing back into the rural anonymity of his farm.
26:52
The political turmoil provided a thick smoke.
26:54
Speaker 1: Screen, a smoke screen that lasted until he made a
26:57
geographical error so massive that the government could no longer
27:00
look away, Which brings us right back to the beginning
27:03
of this deep dive. December eighth, nineteen eighty two. Scars Zooey.
27:07
Speaker 2: The fog, the fog.
27:09
Speaker 1: The temperature is zero degrees. The fog is so thick
27:12
it's like a physical wall. Touch Lynn spots a twenty
27:15
six year old factory worker named Bojana. He attacks her,
27:18
hits her with the hammer, knocks her out, and drags
27:21
her into the bushes to continue his assault.
27:23
Speaker 2: It's so tragic.
27:24
Speaker 1: Residents in the nearby apartments actually hear her crying out.
27:27
They hear saying mom, mommy, but because of the fog,
27:30
they can't see anything. Bojina actually woke up twice during
27:34
the attack, begging for help, and he just hit her
27:37
again to silence her.
27:38
Speaker 2: It is a horrific scene, and it highlights how physical
27:40
geography in extreme weather aided him. The blinding fog acted
27:44
as a physical accomplice, isolating Bojana for the people who
27:47
could hear her but couldn't locate her to intervene.
27:50
Speaker 1: But it wasn't the physical geography that got him caught.
27:52
Speaker 2: No, it was the political geography of this specific murder
27:56
that finally forced the state's hand because.
27:58
Speaker 1: He left her to die right next to the local
28:01
Communist party headquarters exactly.
28:03
Speaker 2: The regime could afford to ignore bodies found in rural
28:06
fields or distant suburbs, But when a young woman is
28:09
brutally murdered practically on the doorstep of the ruling party's
28:12
local seat of power, the optics are impossible to ignore.
28:16
Speaker 1: It shatters the narrative.
28:18
Speaker 2: It completely shatters the narrative of safety and order that
28:21
the party relied upon. The mass murders can no longer
28:24
be swept under the rug. The illusion of the safe
28:26
communist utopia was broken, and they were forced.
28:29
Speaker 1: To act, and act they did the very next month,
28:32
January nineteen eighty three, a massive special police unit is formed,
28:36
a task force specifically dedicated to finding this man. Finally,
28:40
it's led by commanders like Stanislov Shechiak and Andrezi Gavrich,
28:44
and this task force officially names him the Scorpion. The
28:48
media's censorship is finally lifted and coverage explodes. They give
28:51
him this incredibly evocative nickname. The sudden over the head
28:55
striking motion of the hammer perfectly matched the sting of
28:58
a scorpion.
28:58
Speaker 2: It is an apt, albeit rim moniker that captures the sudden,
29:02
lethal nature of his attacks.
29:04
Speaker 1: Now here's where it gets really interesting. Think about it
29:07
from touchln's perspective. Here's a guy who spent his entire
29:11
life being called stinker and pisserait.
29:14
Speaker 2: A total outcast.
29:15
Speaker 1: It was a marginalized nobody, mocked by everyone, smelling of urine,
29:20
living in rural poverty, and suddenly he's on the front
29:24
page of the newspapers. He's the Scorpion. He has an
29:27
entire specialized government task force hunting him. He has become
29:32
a dark celebrity that had to have fed his massive ego.
29:36
Speaker 2: Right, Oh, absolutely yeah. For a malignant narcissist who felt
29:39
invisible and powerless, his whole life. This is the ultimate validation.
29:43
He is finally important.
29:44
Speaker 1: He's the main character.
29:45
Speaker 2: He is generating widespread fear, which is his primary currency.
29:49
Being named and hunted by the state wouldn't have terrified him,
29:52
would have made him feel invincible. He likely viewed himself
29:54
as a master criminal, outsmarting the entire system, just reveling
29:58
in the panic he.
29:59
Speaker 1: Was causing, invincible until he trips over a piglet.
30:02
Speaker 2: The mundane details of life always intervene in these cases.
30:05
Speaker 1: This transition is just wild to me. The task course
30:08
has the will, they have the resources, but they need
30:10
a solid lead. And ironically, it's not one of his
30:13
brutal murders that trips him up. It's his old, unbreakable
30:16
habit of petty theft.
30:17
Speaker 2: Yep, he couldn't help himself.
30:19
Speaker 1: We are in February nineteen eighty three. Tushlin steals a van.
30:23
He's driving around near a small town and he spots
30:25
a farm with some piglets in a sty. So what
30:28
does this terrifying serial killer do? He pulls over loads
30:32
a bunch of piglets into the stolen van and drives
30:35
them home to his farm. He literally tells his wife
30:37
he got them as payment for a job.
30:39
Speaker 2: It highlights the chaotic, opportunistic nature of his criminality. He
30:44
is governed entirely by impulse. He sees a woman, he
30:47
wants to assault her. He sees a van, he wants
30:49
to steal it. He ses pigs, he takes them.
30:51
Speaker 1: There's no master plan, there's.
30:53
Speaker 2: No grand discipline master plan. There's only immediate gratification of
30:57
whatever urge strikes him in the moment.
31:00
Speaker 1: So the very next day, March first, he is out
31:01
driving that same stolen van. He spots a twenty five
31:05
year old accountant named Vaslava walking to work. And here's
31:09
where he crucially alters his momo a very bad idea.
31:12
Instead of just ambushing her in the bushes, he pulls
31:15
the van over, sharply, hits her, and throws her unconscious
31:19
body into the back of the van, intending to drive
31:21
to the secluded woods, But the van gets stuck in
31:25
the thick spring mud.
31:27
Speaker 2: A critical failure of his altered plant. Because the vehicle
31:30
is immobilized, he is forced to conduct the assault right there. Hastily.
31:34
He attacks her, leaves her for dead in the field,
31:37
and is forced to abandon the stolen van in the
31:39
mud and flee on foot.
31:40
Speaker 1: But Vaslava is incredibly tough and she is really lucky.
31:43
She survives the hammer attack, and because he altered hism
31:47
and tried to abduct her, in the daylight, she gets
31:49
a good look at him. She gives the police a
31:51
solid description, which is huge. And when the police arrive
31:54
at the abandoned van, this is where the analog detective
31:57
work just shines. They look in the back of the van.
32:00
Speaker 2: What do they find?
32:01
Speaker 1: Pig feces from the piglets he stole the day before.
32:04
The police immediately conclude this guy isn't a city dweller.
32:06
He's coming from a rural farm.
32:08
Speaker 2: That deduction narrows the geographic profile significantly, But the master
32:12
stroke was a cultural realization based on the era.
32:15
Speaker 1: Right, Commander Schiach realizes that the killer drove a van.
32:19
In nineteen eighties Poland, having a driver's license was still
32:22
a massive rarity. It wasn't like today where everyone has
32:25
a license. Vehicles were scarce and the bureaucracy to get
32:28
licensed was intense.
32:30
Speaker 2: A driver's license in that specific time and place was
32:33
a very narrow filter. So Commander Chiack does something incredibly tedious,
32:38
but brilliant. We have to understand how difficult this was.
32:41
There are no digitized databases.
32:43
Speaker 1: No computers to just search none.
32:46
Speaker 2: Chiac manually requests the bureaucratic paper records of every single
32:49
person who holds a driver's license in the rural areas
32:52
where the attacks were concentrated. He then filters that physical
32:55
stack of papers by age, looking for men between twenty
32:58
five and forty based on Va Slava's description.
33:01
Speaker 1: Let's unpack this detective work because I'm just marveling at it.
33:03
This isn't modern CSI. They didn't have cell phone tower pings,
33:06
they didn't have DNA databases, they didn't have CCTV cameras.
33:09
They had pigpoop and filing cabinets.
33:11
Speaker 2: It's remarkable.
33:12
Speaker 1: It's like they were trying to find a needle in
33:14
a haystack, and instead of just sifting through the hay forever,
33:17
they realized the needle they were looking for had a
33:20
very specific magnetic property, the driver's license.
33:23
Speaker 2: That's a great way to describe it.
33:25
Speaker 1: They used that specific filter to pull his file right
33:28
out of a mountain of irrelevant paperwork.
33:31
Speaker 2: The driver's license was the magnetic force. Once Schiac had
33:35
that narrowed list of licensed men of the right age
33:38
in the right area. He manually cross referenced it with
33:42
the physical records of known criminals, and there on the
33:46
list is Paul Tuckler.
33:48
Speaker 1: And what is his known criminal record?
33:50
Speaker 2: Theft, specifically stealing tools. The pieces are aligning.
33:54
Speaker 1: Rapidly, so Chiac requests Tuxlan's mugshot. Over the years, the
33:59
police had managed to get at eight separate photofit sketches
34:02
from the women who had survived his attacks. Shiac takes
34:05
touch on smugshot and places it next to those eight sketches.
34:08
Speaker 2: The eureka moment, Shack said, it gave him shivers. It
34:11
was a perfect match. Ye. It was as if the
34:13
mugshot was a compilation of all those fragmented memories from
34:17
the survivors. They had his face, they had his name,
34:20
and from the license records, they had his exact address
34:23
in Gura. The hunt was effectively over.
34:26
Speaker 1: But before they can mobilize and get out to the farm,
34:28
he strikes one last time. May sixth, nineteen eighty three.
34:33
He attacks a nineteen year old seamstress named Yolanta. She
34:37
rejects him. He hits her with the hammer, assaults her
34:40
and she dies.
34:40
Speaker 2: It's devastating.
34:41
Speaker 1: She is his ninth murder victim. It's absolutely heartbreaking that
34:45
she lost her life right as the police were finalizing
34:47
his identity. Three weeks later, they finally move in to
34:51
arrest him, and.
34:52
Speaker 2: The pretext for the arrest is almost comical. Considering the
34:54
gravity of his crimes.
34:56
Speaker 1: It is absurd. The elite Scorpion Task Force rolls up
34:59
to his farm, but they don't kick down the door
35:01
shouting about serial murder. They arrest him because his neighbor called.
35:04
Speaker 2: The cops over a pig cooker.
35:06
Speaker 1: Yes, Tutelin had stolen a massive pig cooker from the
35:09
farm next door.
35:10
Speaker 2: It just goes back to his feeling of invincibility. He
35:13
thought he was untouchable. He has just murdered his ninth victim.
35:17
He's the most wanted man in the country, and he
35:19
decides to casually steal a large piece of farm equipment
35:23
from his immediate neighbor.
35:24
Speaker 1: He had completely lost any sense of risk assessment.
35:27
Speaker 2: The police used the pick cooker as a quiet pretext
35:30
to get handcuffs on him without sparking a violent confrontation.
35:33
Speaker 1: So they bring him in four officers in the car
35:35
and they all just know looking at him, this is
35:37
the guy. They get him into the interrogation room with
35:40
Detective Govrish. It takes four and a half hours. At first,
35:44
he plays dumb, says he doesn't.
35:45
Speaker 2: Remember anything, standard denial, but.
35:47
Speaker 1: They start presenting the specific dates, the specific locations. Meanwhile,
35:52
another team is searching his farm and hidden in a
35:56
cupboard in his electrical workshop, they find a blood stained
35:59
hammer and his shoes.
36:01
Speaker 2: The physical evidence is undeniable. The game is up. Tuchlin,
36:04
recognizing this, begins to confess. But what is truly deserving
36:08
is his demeanor. After the confession, specifically, during the crime
36:12
scene re enactments.
36:13
Speaker 1: The police take him back to the woods, to the bushes,
36:16
to the exact spots where he destroyed these women's lives,
36:19
to have him physically walk through what he did. And
36:22
he isn't solemn. He isn't crying or asking him for forgiveness.
36:25
He is excited.
36:26
Speaker 2: He treats these solemn legal procedures as an opportunity to brag.
36:31
He views the detectives and the legal apprentices as his audience.
36:35
He is showing off what he used as his grand conquests.
36:38
Speaker 1: He actually asks the police if they can get some
36:41
of the younger girls, referring to the legal apprentices who
36:44
are present to take notes, to come over and help
36:46
him physically demonstrate the attacks, because it would turn him
36:49
on to show it better.
36:50
Speaker 2: It completely shatters any illusion that a confession equals remorse.
36:55
He isn't confessing to unburden his soul. He is confessing
36:58
to relive the power trick. It's just he wants to
37:00
stand in the spot where he played god and force
37:03
the authorities to listen to how smart and powerful he was.
37:06
It is the final grotesque performance of a man who
37:09
views other humans merely as props in his own dark theater.
37:13
Speaker 1: The case goes to trial in May nineteen eighty five,
37:16
and after being so eager to brag during the reenactments,
37:19
he pulls a massive stunt in court. He suddenly pleads
37:22
not guilty.
37:23
Speaker 2: Of course he does.
37:24
Speaker 1: He stands up and claims the whole thing is conspiracy.
37:27
He says the militia forced him to confess by promising
37:29
they would just put him in a psychiatric word for
37:31
three years and then let him go.
37:33
Speaker 2: It is a classic manipulation tactic, a desperate attempt to
37:36
regain control of a narrative that is slipping away from him.
37:40
But given the overwhelming physical evidence, the survivor testimonies, and
37:43
the extreme detail of his own prior confessions, the jury
37:47
easily sees through it.
37:49
Speaker 1: In August nineteen eighty five, Paul Tushlin is found guilty
37:53
of nine murders and eleven attempted murders. He is sentenced
37:56
to death nearly twelve years after he first struck Danusia
37:59
on how only night. On May twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven.
38:02
He is executed by hanging.
38:04
Speaker 2: And even at the very end, he doesn't go quietly.
38:07
Speaker 1: No, he fought his guards furiously on the way to
38:09
the gallows.
38:10
Speaker 2: Which is incredibly common with individuals of this psychological profile
38:15
when all their manipulation fails, when the reality of their
38:18
own death is imminent and inescapable, they resort to the
38:21
only tool they ever really trusted, physical violence.
38:24
Speaker 1: It's his baseline.
38:25
Speaker 2: Fighting the guards isn't about escaping. It's a last desperate
38:29
attempt to dictate the terms of his environment, to have
38:32
a final vestige of power before the end.
38:35
Speaker 1: It brings us right back to that chilling final exchange
38:38
with the prosecutor. The prosecutor asks what would you do
38:41
if released? And Chechlin looks at them and says, well,
38:44
I'd probably go for another hunt. Absolute unrepentant evil.
38:48
Speaker 2: It is the stark reality that some individuals simply cannot
38:51
be rehabilitated. They're hardwiring, formed by trauma and solidified by
38:55
years of unchecked violent action is permanent.
38:58
Speaker 1: When we synthesize this entire journey, Tucklan's story is a
39:02
terrifying intersection of multiple failures. It's a story of severe,
39:05
untreated childhood trauma and toxic isolation forging a predator and.
39:09
Speaker 2: The system that failed to see it.
39:11
Speaker 1: It's also the story of a political system that was
39:14
so distracted by its own ideology and survival that it
39:18
failed to protect its most vulnerable citizens. It shows how
39:22
the grand sweep of history revolutions communist regimes can obscure
39:26
the darkest, most intimate crimes. Very true, and it shows
39:30
how incredibly small, seemingly unrelated details like deciding to steal
39:35
a hammer off the books, or the tragic comic choice
39:38
to steal piglets and leave feces in a van, can
39:40
ultimately change the course of an investigation and stop a monster.
39:43
Speaker 2: It leaves us with something critical to consider, though, especially
39:46
when we look at how the world has evolved since
39:48
nineteen eighty three. What's that well, we spend a lot
39:51
of time discussing how Tusslin relied on the physical isolation
39:54
of rural Poland, the localized nature of analog police records,
39:57
and the lack of communication across jurisdic to remain an
40:00
anonymous shadow. The fog of Scarzoui was a physical manifestation
40:05
of the informational fog he hid within.
40:08
Speaker 1: Right and today that feels impossible. We live in a
40:11
hyper connected digital world. Our physical movements are tracked endlessly
40:15
by our phones, our purchases, and cameras everywhere. It feels
40:19
like a serial killer couldn't possibly operate like that today.
40:22
Speaker 2: But does modern technology actually make us safer from predators
40:25
hiding in plain sight? Or does the sheer overwhelming, unfathomable
40:30
volume of digital data we produce every single second create
40:34
a brand new type of thick fog. Oh wow? Are
40:37
we so blinded by the static of a billion data
40:40
points that we're actually creating new, vast digital spaces for
40:44
modern monsters to hide within, completely unseen until it's too late.
40:48
Speaker 1: That is a thought that is going to stick with
40:49
me for a long time. The fog didn't disappear. It
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is digitized. Thank you so much for joining us on
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this deep dive today. Keep asking questions, keep looking beneath
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the surface, and always be aware of the fog around you.
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We'll see you next time.