Michael Onufrejczyk
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Michail/Michael Onufrejczyk (1895 - 1966) was a Polish warrant officer and farmer living in the United Kingdom. In 1954 he was found guilty of the murder of his missing partner Stanislaw Sykut and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. The case was cited as a precedent in the UK for murder cases in which the victim's body was never found.
Biography edit
Onufrejczyk was a warrant officer in the Polish Army. Highly decorated for bravery during both World Wars, he enlisted in the Polish Resettlement Corps after the second world war and was resettled in Wales, using a loan from the Polish Army Fund to buy the dilapidated Cefn Hendre Farm in Cwmdu, Llandeilo.
In April 1953 Onufrejczyk took on a partner, fellow Polish veteran Stanislaw Sykut, to help him run the farm and to obtain £600 capital that Sykut brought with him. The notoriously bad-tempered Onufrejczyk soon began bullying Sykut, who reported him to the police after being beaten up by him. The same day as the complaint was made, Sykut contacted a local solicitor and began legal action to dissolve the partnership and force Onufrejczyk to sell Cefn Hendre Farm. However, before the action could be completed Sykut disappeared on 14 December 1953, with Onufrejczyk claiming he had gone to London for two weeks. After two weeks, Sykut had not returned and had made no withdrawals from his bank account. He was reported missing, and a police investigation was opened.
Onufrejczyk soon came under suspicion due to Sykut's upcoming legal action and his claim that Sykut had gone to London. He did not help his case by changing his story about Sykut's whereabouts multiple times, at one point even claiming Sykut was abducted by the Polish secret police. He further incriminated himself when he was caught trying to forge Sykut's signature on documents awarding himself sole possession of the farm, at which point he was arrested. Experts from the Monmouthshire Forensic Laboratory searched the farmhouse and uncovered thousands of bloodstains on the walls and ceiling of the kitchen and in the corridor leading from the kitchen to the farmhouse. It was theorized that Onufrejczyk had dismembered Sykut in the kitchen before feeding his remains to pigs on the farm.
Onufrejczyk was charged with murder in August 1954. The trial was a landmark case because Sykut's body had not been found; while there had been some previous cases in which a person had been convicted of murder without a body, this was the first in which there was no admission that the victim was dead and no eyewitnesses to the murder. At his 12-day trial, Onufrejczyk claimed that the bloodstains came from rabbits he had skinned, but forensic testing had established that most of them were human blood. Onufrejczyk was found guilty on 14 September and sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment and he was released in 1965, dying in a car accident the following year.