Life Means Life. Nick Appleyard
He also had a habit of staring at pretty girls in a trance-like way that scared his mother.
By the age of 13 he was drinking heavily. He rarely attended school and when he did so, he was troublesome, often groping and trying to kiss his fellow pupils, regardless of their gender. After one particularly violent assault outside class, the police were called and he was packed away to a facility for delinquent juveniles where his aggressive sexual urges were allowed to fester.
Three years later he tried to rape his 16-year-old neighbour and was jailed for three years. He was released in the summer of 1976, but the following year he was jailed for two years for the attempted rape and murder of another young woman as she walked home. However, he was back on the streets of Warsaw in April 1978 whereupon he immediately set about sexually assaulting women and girls. In the remaining months of 1978 alone, he carried out 15 rapes. Often his method was to hide in quiet lanes where he would ambush women and children as they walked home, choking them with rope or threatening them with knives. At other times, disguised in a wig, he would stop his car, wind down the window and call his victims over. As they leant in to hear what he was saying, he quickly wound up the window, trapping them by the neck. Then he would jump out of the car and haul them into woods, often subduing them by hitting them over the head with a spade.
In 1980 he was nicknamed ‘The Beast’ by Polish newspapers and was jailed for 15 years. He had served 11 years when he was freed as part of an amnesty to prisoners after the collapse of communism. But after a few years of stability, during which he had a daughter, his attacks resumed.
In 1995 Kunowski preyed on a 10-year-old as she returned home alone from school in Warsaw. He said he was a friend of her father’s and asked if he could wait in the house until her parents returned from work. Once through the door he pounced on the girl, repeatedly raping her while throttling her with a telephone cord.
He was charged with that rape and with the rape of another schoolgirl but, instead of keeping him behind bars as he awaited trial, the judge made the inexplicable decision to grant him bail to have a hip operation. As police built up a strong case linking him to other rapes in the city, he escaped. It is believed he simply got out of his hospital bed and walked away.
Kunowski sold his house in Mlava, bought a fake Portuguese passport and made his way to Acton, West London, pretending to be a tourist. Using skills he acquired in prison in Poland, he got a job working as a tailor at a dry-cleaning company and soon blended in among millions of anonymous faces.
When the Polish authorities realised that he had fled the country, they issued an international warrant through Interpol. His fingerprints and photograph were available via Interpol’s crime database to its 125 members, the UK included, but he was not fingerprinted when he arrived in the UK so he had a clean slate to find new victims in a new country.
The day after murdering Katerina Konev, Kunowski took a job at a strawberry farm in Ledbury, west of London. Unable to control his genetic propensity to steal, he was sacked for thieving from the office. He was held for the crime and handed over to Immigration. Officials discovered he was an illegal ‘over-stayer’ and he spent two months in a detention camp in Oxfordshire. While there, he applied for citizenship on the grounds of economic hardship in his homeland and, as his application was being considered, he was once again allowed to walk free. His petition was denied in the autumn of 1997 but by then he was back in London, untraceable as neither his fingerprints nor DNA were taken after his arrest.
Astonishingly, even though he was a hunted killer and illegal immigrant, he was given a life-saving NHS heart bypass in 2001 at a hospital around the corner from where he killed Katerina. That year he stopped a woman in West London and told her: ‘I know where you live. I murdered a young girl in Iffley Road, four years ago.’ In July 2002 he was arrested again for trying to claim benefits using a forged Portuguese passport in the name of Jose Marco Da Dias, but once again the immigration authorities failed to establish his true identity. While under investigation, he disappeared again. A few days later, he was arrested for the rape of the Korean student at his bedsit.
The Home Office said: ‘It’s a matter of great concern that a criminal with such a serious history managed to get into this country and that his background was not uncovered when he came to our attention. Our system has been completely over-hauled since then. All asylum-seekers are now electronically fingerprinted. The details are fed into an index which alerts us to crime.’
Katerina’s father, Trajce, believes his daughter opened the door to Kunowski that day because she thought it was ‘Daddy’ coming home and she couldn’t wait to tell him that she was top of her English class. ‘We found about how well she’d done afterwards – she never got to tell us herself,’ he said.
After the verdict, Katerina’s mother said: ‘I find it impossible to understand how he was allowed into the UK to commit this crime. I am aware that he had serious criminal convictions and impending prosecutions in Poland. Something must be done to ensure such a thing does not happen again. I do not feel that justice has been done.’
Detective Chief Inspector David Little, the senior detective investigating Katerina’s murder, was asked if Kunowski was likely to have committed offences during the time when his whereabouts was unknown. He said: ‘When he wasn’t incarcerated he was committing offences. I would suggest he is probably the most dangerous sex offender I have ever come across. Certainly, he is the most prolific.’ DCI Little admitted that the 1997 murder investigation had been exceptionally thorough and had thrown up everything the police needed to secure a conviction but, because he was an illegal immigrant, Kunowski had been forensically invisible. He said: ‘If the person doesn’t exist, you can’t bring him to justice.’
Polish lawyer Waldemar Smarzewski prosecuted the 1979 trial, following which Kunowski was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Mr Smarzewski, who is now Warsaw’s Chief Prosecutor, said: ‘When he appeared in court there were about 70 charges, made up of rapes, attempted rapes, lechery with children, endangering a child’s life and attempted murder. I wanted to get him 25 years, but there was no evidence for the attempted murder.
‘This was a very important and dangerous case because of the number of victims and what he did to them. I wanted to put him away for longer because he was very dangerous. I was sure that if he left prison he would go back to rape and maybe even kill.’ Of Kunowski’s crimes in Britain, Smarzewski said: ‘This is no surprise to me. I knew he would strike again. I think he should remain behind bars for the rest of his life. I am sorry this psychopath ever came to Britain.’
Meanwhile, Kunowski is impressed with life at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Wakefield Prison. In letters, he tells his mother that the food is ‘good, with lots of vegetables’ and he is happy to admit that for him, incarceration on UK soil is better than liberty in Poland.
‘The cold-blooded murder of an eight-week-old baby, an 18 month-old toddler, not to mention the murders of their mother, father and grandmother, provide a chilling insight into the utterly perverted standards by which you have lived your lives.’
Trial judge Sir Stephen Mitchell
Names: Kenneth Regan and William Horncy
Crime: Mass murder
Date of Conviction: 1 July 2005
Ages at Conviction: 56 and 53 respectively
For at least a decade, Kenneth Regan, nicknamed ‘Captain Cash’, was a very successful gangster who smuggled drugs, laundered money and sold fake passports on a huge scale. In 1996 business was so good that he had a submarine custom-built so that he could smuggle 15 tonnes of cannabis, worth £40 million, into the UK, but he had to abandon his plans at the last minute. He then muscled in on London insurance firm Serez International, using it as a front to launder upwards of £10 million of drugs money between 1996 and 1998. Working with