The "Skin Hunters" ("Łowcy skór" in Polish) is the media nickname for four hospital casualty workers from the Polish city of Łódź, who were convicted of murdering at least five elderly patients and selling information regarding their deaths to competing funeral homes who would then charge the clients for those extra expenses. The perpetrators were apprehended in 2002. Their descriptive designation was coined by a newspaper article which first brought the story to the public's attention.
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Case
On January 20, 2007 four employees from a hospital casualty department in Łódź were sentenced. The perpetrators were shown to have killed mostly elderly patients using the muscle relaxant pancuronium (brand name Pavulon). The four workers then sold information about the deceased patients to funeral homes, so they could contact the relatives before other funeral homes could. They exacted bribes ranging from 12,000 to over 70,000 zloty.
The killers are:
Their sentences were upheld by the Łódź Appeal Court in June 2008. Further appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court of Poland on October 27, 2009.
The investigation into the scandal is still ongoing and a total of forty other members of the casualty department are under investigation, as are the owners of a local funeral home for receiving information regarding the deaths of patients. The funeral home added the cost of the bribes it paid to the killers to the bills that the families of the deceased paid for their funerals.
Discovery
The scandal was first brought to public attention on January 23, 2002 in an article in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza by Tomasz Patora, Marcin Stelmasiak and Przemysław Witkowski. They described how the hospital workers or paramedics would call funeral homes regarding patient deaths in order to receive a bribe, and sometimes even killed patients. The dead patients were called "skins" and so the article was called "Skin Hunters" (Łowcy skór).
In popular culture
In 2003, a film Skin Hunters (Łowcy skór) was made of the case starring Piotr Adamczyk. In 2008, a documentary of the events, Necrobusiness, was made by a Swedish company.