Krystian Bala

Krystian Bala (born 1973) is a Polish writer, photographer, and a convicted murderer.

In 2007, Bala was sentenced to jail for 25 years for planning and committing the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski, a Polish small business owner, in Wrocław in 2000. For a number of years the Wrocław police had failed to solve the murder, until a detective found some physical clues linking the murder to Bala. More sensationally, clues to the killing were found in Bala's first novel Amok (2003), published 3 years after Janiszewski's death. It was as if Bala had written a "fictional" version of the real-life killing into his novel, using information only the murderer could have known. The case drew widespread media coverage in Poland and resulted in increased sales of the novel as readers looked for clues in the novel to the real-life events of Janiszewski's death. In 2007, while Bala stayed in prison, an appeals court ordered a retrial of the case. In December 2008, Bala had a new trial and was again found guilty and continued to serve a 25-year sentence. Bala is working on a second novel tentatively titled De Liryk. Police report evidence found on his computer of plans for killing a new victim to tie in with his second novel.

The case was the subject of a 2008 investigative article by David Grann in The New Yorker, called "True Crime", later published in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010). In 2010, Grann's article was optioned to be made into a movie by Focus Films. The completed film, True Crimes, was shown at the Warsaw Film Festival in October, 2016, and the Berlin International Film Festival the following February before being picked up for US distribution in April 2017. The crime was also the subject of a dramatization in one segment of True Nightmares, Season 1, Ep.6, "No Way to Die", first aired November 18, 2015.

Bala's case has similarities to that of Dutch writer Richard Klinkhamer.