On July 22, 1989, in the very center of Warsaw, in the Old Town, there was a murder that remains unsolved today. 82-year-old Aniel Piesiewicz, mother of well-known lawyer and screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, was found dead in her apartment on Długa Street. The body was bound by cables forming a noose around the neck, and there were torture tools next to it: the file and the pliers.

A political crime or something?

The date of the crime itself gives you the creeps. July 22 is the last festival of the Polish Republic, the Day of the Revival of Poland. Symbolic? It's hard to believe in a coincidence. The victim's son, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, was a lawyer defending the workers after the 1976 strikes and served as a reinforcement prosecutor in The trial of the assassins of Fr Jerzy Popieluszko in 1985. His activities brought on the wrath of the Security Service – threats, surveillance, provocations.

The method of murder resembles the 1984 murder of Popiełuszko. Violentness, planning, symbolism. "With every move, the victim tightened the loop," he reports. service Onet in the material about the "straightly Pieces". But there was one detail that didn't match a typical robbery crime: nothing was missing in the apartment.

An investigation that does not lead anywhere

The case has been investigated for years. The autopsy at the Department of Judicial Medicine confirmed the cause of death: suffocation (rapid asphyxiation). The investigation was dropped in June 1990 due to the non-detection of the perpetrators, after the complaint resumed in September 1990, but the case remains unsolved until today.

Main hypotheses by Virtual Poland and Interia portal:

Revenge SB – brutality, no robbery, date of the crime (July 22nd), activity of the son in the process of Popieluszko.
Gangster cases – Warsaw of the 1980s was full of crime associated with SB.
A series of mysterious murders – crime connected with other unsolved opposition cases in Warsaw in the 1980s, including the assassination of Małgorzata Targowska-Grabinska.

None of these theories have been confirmed. And the Piesiewicz family is still waiting for the truth.

Secrets of the end-of-PRL

The murder of Anna Piesiewicz is only one of many unsolved cases from the past years of the Polish People's Republic. Security services, gangsters, oppositionists – all this creates a dark picture of an era whose secrets have still not been revealed. The National Memorial Institute documents these matters in the book ‘City of Death. Questions about Political Murders in Warsaw 1956–1989′′.

Will we ever find out the truth? Time will tell.