The Murder of Dariusz Janiszewski with Anson Maddocks

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning, Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now.

0:18 Speaker 2: True crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic. I'm Zevan Odelberg, host of kind of Murdery, a podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of murdery. That's right, folks, those are facts, just like it says in the intro. I am Zevin Odelberg, and this is kind of Murdery.

0:51 Speaker 2: Hey. I'm really excited today because my good friend at erstwhile co host Legendary Magic the Gathering artist Ansine Maatis is here once again to join us. And I am looking forward to hanging out with you, but I'm probably looking forward even a little more to hanging out with Anson if I'm honest. Hey, Hanson, how you do it?

1:07 Speaker 3: It's great to see you, hey, is Evan, Folks.

1:10 Speaker 2: I bring to you a Polish murder story and it is called Jack Sparrow and the Polish Intellectual The Bizarre Murder of Darius Janezuski. That's the name of the story. And I'll just give a tiny little overview here of what we're going to be talking about. This is a story of a man who saw himself as a sort of a brilliant intellectual, a modern Raskolnikoff, if you will, Raskolnikoff being the protagonist from Crime and Punishment, whose basic thesis that destroys his life is that the actions of a great man, by which he means someone like Napoleon or something not necessarily a good man, but a great man, transcends morality.

1:52 Speaker 3: Right.

1:52 Speaker 2: Are you familiar with Raskolnikov Anson.

1:56 Speaker 3: I have not read Crime Punishment, but I've heard arguments around this character, and I do. I'm glad that you know the distinction between a great man and a good man well.

2:07 Speaker 2: And indeed, with those definitions, the two are very often mutually exclusive. Yeah, our killer from today, like Raskolnikoff, posits that he can basically do what he wants, that he transcends human morality, and unlike Raskolnikoff. He may actually be a psychopath because he doesn't seem to nearly have the be moral and emotional hell to go through after he does awful things. But what makes him interesting is he commits a crime, and he, for all intentsive purposes, gets away with it for years until he decides to write a novel that has disturbing parallels in both the main character and the murder committed in the novel, namely that the main character resembles the author an awful lot, and the murder seems to resemble this previously unsolved perfect crime that he apparently got away with.

3:00 Speaker 2: And yeah, I mean spoiler alert, I guess, But it's really the details of this story that are interesting. I mean, you're gonna kind of see the outcome coming, so I don't think I'm spoiling the episode ahead of time. But sure enough, it's because he publishes a novel more or less about himself and his crime that the police catch wind that he might be their guy. And that's the story we're about to tell now. So if you're ready, please do join me and Anson as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may kind of murderies Jack Sparrow and the Polish intellectual The Bizarre Murder of Darius's Janetzuski starts.

3:39 Speaker 3: Now, cool man, let's get in there and do this.

3:52 Speaker 2: Let's hop in the hot tub time machine and I'm going to take you back now to a frigid winter in Poland. It's December two thousand. We're at a remote area of the Odor River where three fishermen discover a dead body, initially mistaken for a log. The corpse, with a noose around its neck and its hands bound, is identified as dare Use Janezuski, a thirty five year old businessman from Rocklaw, reported missing by his wife four weeks earlier. Janezuski's body shows signs of torture, starvation, and drowning.

4:23 Speaker 2: Despite an extensive police investigation featuring scuba divers and forensic specialists, no significant evidence is found. Janezuski's described as a gentleman and an amateur guitarist. He had a stable personal life, no known debts, enemies, or criminal record. He and his wife were planning to adopt a child, so he doesn't sound at all like the sort of person that would have had a murder headed his way, and indeed the case remained a perplexing mystery with no apparent motives or suspects.

4:52 Speaker 3: You got to wonder if this guy didn't like the fact that they couldn't figure out the murder and so he doesn't get to display his you know, his genius quote unquote.

5:04 Speaker 2: I think you're onto something absolutely this guy. Of course, we're about to introduce you to in in just a moment, so we'll put a pin in that, but we will get to him in a moment, this guy being the killer. I think you make a strong point answer, which is, as the old saying goes, pride goeth before the fall, and very often, and this is not just unique to killers, ego is what brings you down people. People want to be recognized, celebrated, and in pursuit of that, they'll very often act against their own best interests.

5:38 Speaker 2: So this is the definition of a cold case. And six months after Darius Janezuski's body's discovered, the investigation is suspended due to lack of leads, and then three years later, Detective Jasek Rabluski of the Roklaw Police Department revisits the Janezeuski case. He's determined to search for overlook clues. Rabluski is known for working late in his modest office, and he finds himself drawn to cold cases. He's a detail oriented man. He believes that it's just possible that somebody missed something that he won't.

6:11 Speaker 2: Jasic is a tall man with an unassuming appearance, and he's nicknamed Jack Sparrow by colleagues. It's a new nickname because the first and you probably guess this, but the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie starring Johnny Depp, came out in two thousand and three. So right now where we are in two thousand and three, Jason Rabluski has appeared and he's just picked up this name Jack Sparrow because when you translate Jasic to English you get Jack, and Rabluski means quite literally sparrow. So he was in Polish actually named Jack Sparrow.

6:46 Speaker 2: Okay, Rabluski considered himself to be more of an eagle, so he had a sense of self regard as well. The thing about Rablueski, he has an approachable demeanor. He's not an intimidating cop. In this often leads people to underestimate him, but he does relish the chase, and he felt like the Janezuski file offered him a new opportunity to delve into a complex and unsolved mystery, which is what we are going to do now. Rabluski felt that the brutality of the crime suggested a personal vendetta, and that Janezeuski's near naked body without signs of sexual abuse or robbery, indicated a motive that went beyond simple perversion or theft.

7:29 Speaker 2: Now, Janezuski, this is the dead man. His mother was a bookkeeper at an advertising firm, and she recalled a suspicious call on the day of his disappearance. A man called her firm and requested large signs, but he refused to discuss the details with her and asked instead for Janezuski's cell number. I guess Janezuski worked for the firm as well, and phone records later revealed that this call and a subsequent one to Janezeuski's cell phone came from a nearby phone booth, so the presumed killer wandered to a phone booth near Janezuski's place of business and attempted to call him, and when he didn't get him, he got his mother.

8:09 Speaker 2: He asked for the cell phone, was given it and called Janezuski. Let this be a lesson to everyone to probably not hand out other people's cell phones to mysterious callers in phone booths. Not that his mother could have missed that too. Just don't give other people's information away to strangers. It's a good, a good rule to live by. So the receptionist at Janezuski's office reported seeing him leave at four pm, followed by two men. This means that Rabluski, our police officer, considered the crime to be meticulously planned, with the perpetrator likely having studied Janezuski's routine to abduct him.

8:45 Speaker 2: The lack of detailed descriptions of potential suspects and the organized nature of the crime led Rabluski to ponder the possibility of there being multiple assailants, that this was a conspiracy of kidnapping, torture, and murder. And as Detective Rabluski is obsessively reviewing this file, he lights on something that could be significant. He notices that while the police had most of Janetzuski's seemingly relevant possessions, or at least had been made aware of them. Janezuski's cell phone was never recovered, so the detective initiates a search for the phone, leveraging new tracking methods, and here's our first big clue.

9:26 Speaker 2: Astonishingly, the phone serial number matched one sold on a legro, which is an internet auction site like eBay, just days after Janezeuski's disappearance. The seller, identified as Chris B seven, turned out to be Christian Bala, a thirty year old Polish intellectual. Dun, dun, dun. What do you think of that? Anthematics?

9:50 Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm still listening. Unfortunately, I'm thinking about similar stories. And oh, you know when you read a name and you don't know how to pronounce the name. Oh, I know that you recognize, you recognize the visual structure of the name, you know the letter, how the letters you know go together, But you don't have any idea. You just didn't even in your head. You didn't make a point of making sure that you could pronounce it.

10:19 Speaker 2: Sure, you just muddle through and your imagine it. Yeah, I do that all the time. I do that on this show. Usually I apologized for butchering a name. Most likely other times I actually look up how to pronounce it, depends how diligent I'm feeling. The first inkling that Detective Rabluski has that he may have found a legitimate suspect is this sale of Janetzeuskie's cell phone within days of Janetzeuski's death by a seller identified as Chris b seven. And that seller turns out to be, as I mentioned, self styled Polish intellectual Christian Bala, thirty years old.

10:55 Speaker 2: But of course, because he's a logical reasonable man to active, Rabluski finds it unlikely that Bala, if he was actually involved in the crime, would sell the victim's cell phone online. That just seems a little bit too stupid, right, Like, no way, the guy that actually killed him is going to go attach a bunch of self identifying metadata to a cell phone and then hawk it on eBay or the equivalent of eBay for a couple extra bucks. No way, says the cop. Well so none. Nevertheless, he's a thorough man, and so he looks more into Bala and discovers that Bala at this point two thousand and three, again, we're about three years after the death of Janezuski has moved abroad and is not easily accessible.

11:41 Speaker 2: He also discovers that Bala had recently published a novel entitled A Muck featuring sadistic and philosophical themes. Now, Rabliski is more accustomed to history books, and he's taken aback by the decadent and anti church themes in Christian Bala's novel A Muck. He also notes parallels between the novel's murder method and Janezeuski's case. Intriguingly, the killer in the book was named Chris, echoing Bala's username on the auction site where Janezeuski's phone was sold. Really now, I said, if this.

12:15 Speaker 3: Guy, I'm sorry, I'm just gonna say, if this it sounds like he's just kind of very basic for a genius, right well, And I'm even imagining in that theme that he might be thinking that Christian Bale is going to play him in a movie.

12:33 Speaker 2: Right, Oh yeah, perhaps you.

12:36 Speaker 3: Know, because his name is just so close right and.

12:39 Speaker 2: Right, it makes I would observe that people that consider themselves to be geniuses, like explicitly or are willing to tell other people such very often, aren't I think they end up in the in the Dunning Krueger realm of you know, just bright enough to fake it, but not bright enough to realize just how uninformed and dumb they might be. So the cop notices parallels between the novel's murder method and the Janezuski case. He notices that the killer is named Chris, and he notices that Chris was the name of the user who sold Janezuski's phone.

13:14 Speaker 2: So he thinks to himself, you know, this is the first real purchase, real clues I've gotten, the first time I've been able to sink my teeth into this case a bit. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to delve deeper into this book, and I'm going to be a literary detective, if you will. So this is where he becomes convinced that Bala is his killer, because the coincidence is required for an innocent man to sell a murdered man's cell phone online and then write a novel about a murder that mirrors the murder committed when Janezuski was killed with the same username as the one used to sell Janezuski's phone.

13:47 Speaker 2: Well, that's just that's too many coincidence, is it. It falls into what I call the tortured logic test, which is essentially this, if you have to do too many unlikely mental backflips to make something be true or not true, then you're probably headed in the wrong direction. Are you familiar with Okham's razor anson the concept of Akham's razor.

14:10 Speaker 3: The most likely choice is probably the.

14:14 Speaker 2: Yeah, you got the one that's right. The simplest solution is usually the correct one. Yes. That means that, in the absence of any other clues or suspects, and with a significant amount of circumstantial evidence piled up against Christian Bala, Detective Jack Sparrow believes that Bala has to be his killer. But you can't prosecute someone on just a novel, a fictional novel, and a sold cell phone, at least not yet. So let's take a moment to talk about our suspected murderer, Christian Bala. His academic pursuits and philosophical inclinations were evident in his vast collection of books, which really ran the gamut from Marxist ideology, which is prevalent, of course, in a lot of Polish philosophy departments, given how long they under communist domination.

15:02 Speaker 2: And he's also interested in Nietzsche's views on truth as an illusion and Wittgenstein's perspective on language as a social activity. And all of this hints at a complex and rebellious mind. Perhaps Bala himself would tell you, a brilliant mind. I'm not just bringing this up for local color, but rather because Rabluski found Bala's obsession with these various philosophers increasingly relevant as he dealt into the novels seeking connections to the real life murder in particular post communism. Bala found relevance in these theories because he saw parallels in the manipulation of language and facts under the Soviet regime.

15:39 Speaker 2: He was also drawn to French postmodernists like Derrida and Michelle Fucot, exploring ideas about the instability of language and identity, and he went on to develop a unique interpretation of these philosophical ideas, which led him to experiment with and I like this term. I have to say mytho creativity.

16:00 Speaker 3: Have you ever seen a like a Polish theater poster.

16:05 Speaker 2: I'm not sure that I have tell me about them.

16:09 Speaker 3: I would say a lot of them are really brilliant. They're they're just really effective. Really, I mean, you would hang them on your wall, I think. And it's just making me think of like maybe culturally like propaganda. It sounds like you might have been sort of fascinated with propaganda.

16:29 Speaker 2: You're telling me that them damn comedies were pretty good at visual propaganda. That's That's what I'm hearing you say.

16:37 Speaker 3: It is a thing. You know, if your side is being tried for war crimes, you know, the propagandists can be put to death. You know, it's that it's that serious of a powerful tool.

16:48 Speaker 2: All right, Blame the propaganda machine. That's who really killed Janazuski.

16:54 Speaker 3: I don't know. I just think it's interesting that you can you can see a lot of good art in these these posters that I'm then thinking of.

17:05 Speaker 2: On this topic of mytho creativity. You know, Anson, you of course, are a legendary artist, greatly associated with the fantastic game that I play and love, Magic the Gathering. You have drawn many iconic mythological creatures in your day. In fact, I don't know if you can see on the zoom. But I am wearing my official ansinmatics Lana war Elf, the bone headed or skull headed punk rock elf that you know probably was the card that caused me to first fall in love with your art. But could you expound upon the idea, this idea of mytho creativity in art sort of creating a new identity and in your case, perhaps a visual identity that belongs to you and sort of building your your own truth that could maybe be truer than true.

17:56 Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm babbling here, but have any thoughts on mythological creation as it relates to your own work.

18:04 Speaker 3: Do you mean using it as an inspiration or trying to create something that is a new stepping out of mythos?

18:14 Speaker 2: I think as it relates to our killer or possible killer Christian Bala, I think what I'm saying is the idea of being inspired by existing mythology, using that inspiration to create your own mythology that perhaps then could even or does even replace the real truth or the realness of a thing in your own mind or others, becomes sort of more human than human, or more monster than monster, if you will. I think that's what I'm talking about.

18:45 Speaker 3: That's interesting, Okay. I had to do a minotaur for Magic. I did not know that there would be other depictions of minotaurs in the game. At the time I was doing the game, I thought this game was I mean, I knew that there might be so expansions later, but I was thinking of it more. If you think of like face cards in irregular deck of cards, they're very straightforward representations of the thing that they're supposed to represent, and I thought that I was going to be doing something more like that.

19:20 Speaker 3: So the minotaur has a labyrinth built into his decor, his tribalistic scarification on his body, indeed, and I thought that that might be a good way of depicting what the minotaur is about. In the depiction of the minotaur itself.

19:38 Speaker 2: That's mytho creation right there. Yes, okay, that's the Herluin Minotaur. Yeah. Man, you did a fantastic job on that card. And I'm not the only one who thought so. In fact, the Herluin Minotaur was as close as there could be in the early days of Magic to being the mascot for the game. Today, people may have heard about the Black Lotus as being a very famous card, or there are other cards that maybe today are more famous in pop culture awareness. But at the time and the time being the release of limited edition Alpha and Beta, the Herluin Minotaur really was like the mascot of the game.

20:17 Speaker 2: And I say that because the art was featured on the outside of the boxes. They made essentially letterman jackets that said Magic the Gathering with the Heurlu Minotaur on it. So, whatever your process was there, the thing that you created resonated not just with the fan base but with the company. It was the first thing that they put all over their consumer merchandise.

20:40 Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, the game was so popular so fast that anything associated with it had the stretch marks on the growth of that game. Are they go? You get drawn into it as one of the artists working on it, It's like you can see one of your pieces get taken and just like they're trying to go, what can we do with this? And it goes everywhere and you kind of just have to sit back and hope that it does well.

21:10 Speaker 2: And I mean, you're absolutely right about how marvelously quickly the popularity of the game exploded. I mean even today and we're thirty years later. Eventually, Wizards of the Coast that makes Magic was sold to Hasbro, and Hasbro is a massive toy company. Of course, they are now the parent company for Wizards and for Magic, and even today, you know, with physical toys and games being less popular than they once were because of all the digital and video diversions that we have to pick from, Magic remains one of the only profitable or most profitable sectors of Hasbro's overall business, which is why they're printing sets about every other week now and just trying to squeeze every last nickel out of us poor enthusiasts.

21:55 Speaker 2: But you know, the people listening to this show are true crime and murder enthusiasts, and some of them are probably about ready to stick a fork in their eyeball and really want me to get back to the to the story at hand. But please, folks, don't blame Anson. I'm the one that led him down this particular primrose path because I'm such a fanboy. So let's get back to our murder story. But thank you Anson for sharing your thoughts. They were captivating to me and I you.

22:22 Speaker 3: Know, let's save these listeners and see what you can do to salvageis.

22:28 Speaker 2: But let's let us get back to the back to the story. So this idea of mytho creativity, we talked about how Anson has used it to great impression effect and beautiful artistic success. Let's talk about how our erstwhile probably the killer at least for now because they don't have any other suspects, Christian Bala and how he used mytho creativity and essentially what he would do is he would rowactively started to try to create a mythos around himself, weaving tales about himself that we're not necessarily true, but were perhaps a derivative of the truth or an augmentation, a steroidal version of the truth, and he wanted to see if they would be accepted as truth by others.

23:11 Speaker 2: As he blurred the lines between the real person, the real character, and the persona he crafted, he was led to remark that an autobiography of his would be filled with myths. When I read this thing about my autobiography would be filled with myths, I thought of the weird al biopick starring Daniel Ratcliffe, which is presented like any other Hollywood movie about a famous person biopic that you might see but the entire movie is very intentionally completely false. Nothing that happens in that movie actually happened to weird Al Yankovic, and weird Al was very involved in creating the movie, so functionally weird Al chose for his biopick to make, and this is fitting a parody of his own life.

23:58 Speaker 2: He invented his story as something that was plausible and would seem to the viewer, at least in parts, to be what really happened, but none of it did. So it seems that Christian Bala was going for a similar thing here, not to conflate weird Al with a heinous murderer. By the way, love weird Al, not a killer.

24:16 Speaker 3: I'm sure he would love to be conflated with that.

24:20 Speaker 2: All right. So Christian Bala was embraced a rebellious lifestyle, boasting about brothel visits and rejecting conventions. Bala claimed he would live furiously, though not for long, very consciously projecting the image of a libertine. Some people saw Bala's behavior as juvenile, while others were captivated. Libertines are often captivating. Despite his wild tales, though despite the mythos he was creating around himself, Those close to him described him as kind and principled, So maybe he was just kind of a nerd who wanted everybody to believe he was one of the cool kids.

24:57 Speaker 2: Well that remains to be seen. In nineteen ninety, contrary to his libertine image, Bala married his high school's sweetheart, Stagia Stanislava. His mother disapproved, feeling Stagia was unsuitable, but they married and the couple had a son named Casper in nineteen ninety seven, the same year that Bala graduated with top marks and started a PhD in philosophy. However, financial pressures led him to start a cleaning business, but he was a philosopher, not a businessman, and his business and then his marriage faltered.

25:28 Speaker 2: He filed for bankruptcy in two thousand, the year Janezuski was killed, and his marriage ended primarily due to his infidelity, so he got back to his libertine ways anyway. Post separation, he traveled to the United States in Asia, teaching English and scuba diving, a stark contrast to his earlier academic and philosophical pursuits, and then while abroad, he focused on writing this novel, the novel that piqued the interest of Detective Jack Sparrow amuck. In a Muck, the protagonist, Chris embodies postmodern nihilism, rejecting notions of truth and God.

26:04 Speaker 2: The narrative parallels crime and punishment, with Chris, like Raskolnikov, questioning moral truths, but unlike Raskolnikov, Chris does not seek redemption. His actions in a Muck are extreme and unrestrained by morality. He engages in satomasochistic relationships, commits blasphemy, and even murders his girlfriend in a brutal scene. In a Muck, Christian Bala extensively manipulates language to underscore its ambiguity. There's a chapter entitled Screwdriver, which is a play on words symbolizing a tool, the cocktail orange juice and vodka, and the protagonist's sexual conduct.

26:40 Speaker 2: He himself is a screwdriver. Even the murder of the girlfriend Mary by Chris is framed as a linguistic play, further blurring the line between reality and fiction. Bala completed A Muck in two thousand and two, embedding elements of his life into Chris's character and thus intertwining his identity with his fictional character. He even engaged with readers as Chris Online. He even sold janet Zouski's cell phone as Chris Online, further merging author and character. An interviewer's question later about releasing one's darker psyche, a question to Bala, was met with a response that playfully suggested that Chris might be the real identity, not Bala.

27:25 Speaker 2: So it sounds like he's gone somewhat full Batman two face here, and perhaps even himself doesn't know which one is the real one. Who's driving the who's driving the ship? I don't know who is driving.

27:41 Speaker 3: I'm a little disturbed that this is very similar to this idea that I try to I tell people things like, well, you know, you can use a screwdriver to build something or to kill somebody.

27:55 Speaker 2: So, despite its controversial content, or perhaps because of it, a Monk received mixed reviews. Some praised its realism and called it a masterpiece of illusion which sounds like a poster for a David Copperfield show in Vegas, while others, including a Polish newspaper and Bala's own acquaintances, criticized it for lacking any literary merit and just basically being a safari of disgusting human behavior. Bala's former philosophy professor and an ex girlfriend were shocked by the crude language, so it was like an M and M album in the late nineties.

28:31 Speaker 2: This crude language contrasted sharply with his earlier academic work. Now Bala's friends believed the novel was his way of breaking societal taboos through fiction. In an interview, Bala emphasized his disregard for convention, so he went out of his way to tell the interviewer just how punk Rocky was. He said he was aiming to awaken readers to the world's flaws through the novel's graphic scenes. He didn't say this, but basically what I hear him saying is like, none of this is gret are disgusting in and of itself.

29:01 Speaker 2: I'm not endorsing any of this behavior. I'm making you aware of the ugly flaws in the world by telling you about it. I gotta be honest with you. I'm really starting to hate this fucking guy just for his like self satisfied intellectual hypsterrism. It's like, fuck off, dude, that's just my gut react.

29:22 Speaker 3: You know, if he had any balls at all, he would have told people that it was true, and please go ahead and critique my work now, yeah, and see where it gets at.

29:33 Speaker 2: Well, just the whole thing's at least so far is it's feeling so sophomoric that sort of just like I said, self satisfied anyway, you get my point. I just kind of want to kick him right in the kneecaps and nee him in the.

29:47 Speaker 3: Nuts, because he's a stooge.

29:51 Speaker 2: In all seriousness. Whenever I'm watching or reading, and any artistic creation, whether it's a movie, a book, a play, a piece of art, probably my least favorite quality that anything can have, and hopefully I'm not guilty of it in this podcast, I could be. But when you feel like you can hear the creator in the background of whatever you're consuming saying, oh man, I'm such a genius. This part's so great, this thing about this is so great. God, I am going to blow these fuckers away with my genius, that's the worst quality that any artistic creation can have.

30:30 Speaker 2: In my opinion. I've been told by people who are more well read and familiar with it than I am that there's only one author who is overtly that way. And still managed to be a worthwhile genius. And that would be James Joyce famously who wrote The Dubliners, but most famously Ulysses, who said, at the time, I am going to pack this book Ulysses full of so many literary illusions and references and devices, et cetera, that college professors and PhD students will be unpacking it for centuries. And the only reason he gets a pass is because that is exactly what happened.

31:11 Speaker 2: So I guess even if he's a pompus hipster asshole, he pompus hipster asshole Babe Ruth style and called his shot and actually pulled it off, you have to kind of respect that it's true. Back to the story at hand. So a muck.

31:28 Speaker 3: On me for eating during this recording.

31:31 Speaker 2: Hey, I'm just happy you showed up, brother. I actually, you know what, I've come to a point where I feel like that sort of human realism, if you will, is probably entertaining as opposed to a problem like how often do you get to hear anthematics talking with his mouth full?

31:50 Speaker 3: Anyway, there's all that should be left after you eat a pair? Oh yeah, just the central process hero?

31:56 Speaker 2: What all right? So?

31:59 Speaker 3: The only pair that really really tastes great.

32:03 Speaker 2: I'm going to leave that one there. So achieved disturbing realism, with its protagonist Chris becoming so convincingly sinister. The book's grotesque and psychopathic tone led some to view Bala himself in a similar light. During an online conversation, a friend express concern that the novel reflected poorly on him, suggesting that Chris's thoughts might be Bala's own. However, Bala dismissed this idea, stating that only a fool would believe that fiction is real. So if only a fool would believe that fiction is real, and the foolish police used this foolish belief to catch you, what does that make you?

32:44 Speaker 2: Fools used a foolish belief to bring your ass down, So what's a notch below a fool?

32:49 Speaker 3: A good writer would go with it. It would be like, yeah, thanks, Yeah, I appreciate the compliment. It sounds like he was trying to be a chicken shit they saying, only well believe this is.

33:02 Speaker 2: Real, even though his entire intellectual pursuit was to blur the lines between reality and fiction and see how successfully he could get other people to believe that the myth was real. He's now like talking shit about his own audience.

33:19 Speaker 3: M that's ridiculous.

33:21 Speaker 2: So Captain Jack Sparrow Detective Rabluski he scrutinized a mock underlining passages and noting discrepancies and similarities with the Janezeuski case. While the murder in the novel involved a female victim and differed in method, a chilling parallel emerged. Chris mentions selling a Japanese knife used in the murder online, mirroring the sale of Janezeuski's phone on the auction site, a detail which was not publicly disclosed. Additionally, Chris hints at having killed a man in the past, further arousing Rabluski's suspicions.

33:55 Speaker 2: Now somebody might say, hey, is that really a parallel? I mean, a cell phone is not a knife. However, if you'll recall, how did the murderer lure Janazuski to his kidnapping and eventual death by calling his cell phone? So I don't think it's too much of a college essay literary leap to make a fairly compelling argument that the cell phone itself was the first murder weapon, or at least the chain of events that led to the murder, was the first tool. The first weapon used by the killer was the cell phone.

34:32 Speaker 2: So I would argue that there is more of a parallel between the cell phone and the knife than there may appear to be on the surface. What do you think of that? Do you buy that? Or does that sound like horseshit to you?

34:43 Speaker 3: Hanson literary Shenanigans. I don't know.

34:47 Speaker 2: Rabluski Now, now that he's really convinced that Bala has really just written this hot mess of a novel about himself and the murder he committed, Rabluski takes the unconventional step of distributing copies of a Muck to his t and instructing them to analyze and interpret it for any clues or parallels to reality. Now, he cautions his squad to act discreetly, because, for one thing, Bala's living abroad, making direct police intervention challenging, and Rabluski's very aware that apprehending Bala, should they feel like they've proven that he's the killer, will be very difficult unless Bala voluntarily returns to Poland.

35:24 Speaker 2: I mean, a guy sold a cell phone online a cell phone which he could have gotten at say, a pawn shop. After the killer pond it as just a possibility, and then a guy writes a bizarre stream of consciousness postmodern rip on crime and punishment. That's not the kind of evidence that you can initiate like an interpall action with You don't want to go to the United States government and be like, hey, so let's spend millions of dollars extraditing this guy because we have this far from incontrovertible evidence perhaps perhaps perhaps he killed someone.

36:04 Speaker 2: And yet, I mean, I was pretty much sold, to be honest with you, that Bala was guilty as soon as he sold the guy's cell phone online and then wrote a novel about a murder with lots of parallels committed by a murderer with the same user name as the guy who sold the dead guy's cell phone. Because that, like I said, doesn't pass the torturous logic test for me, for that not for him to be the killer, especially in absence of any other suspects. So I'm right there with Captain Jack Sparrow. And yet probably a good thing that the legal system requires more than a certain gut.

36:38 Speaker 3: Okay, I mean, well, think about artists that you know, create depictions of really horrific things. You know, they would be bad if they write on trial for everything they painted.

36:50 Speaker 2: It certainly would, wouldn't it. Anson Mattox, master of horror in art?

36:56 Speaker 3: Eh?

36:56 Speaker 2: You know? And to this point right now, and this is not the first time this has happened. It's scary for the hip hop community. A quite successful and famous rapper named Young Thug is currently on trial for essentially racketeering charges, essentially like organized crime charges, and they do have a lot of from what I understand, they have a lot of real hard evidence against him. But there's also been quite the outcry because the judge ruled the prosecution could use Young Thug's rap lyrics as evidence against him in the trial, meaning as a means to paint his character as the type of man who would commit these crimes.

37:39 Speaker 2: And on the other hand, as it relates to this particular story that we're telling, you want to catch an awful killer, and if they write a book about their murder and that helps you catch them, I'm not going to say, well, don't catch them. You shouldn't be suspicious at all because it's just a book. Let's try to catch the killer that committed this awful crime. So the next thing they did, as law enforced and often does, is they focus on quietly building a profile of Bala and comparing it with Chris in the novel.

38:06 Speaker 2: And we haven't even talked about all the parallels yet. And Captain Jack Sparrow notes several both Chris and his main character were deeply interested in philosophy. They'd faced marital and business failures, they traveled extensively, They'd had issues with alcohol. I mean that applies to a lot of people, I'm sure. But a significant breakthrough came when Rabluski found a police report about Bala being detained for an incident involving a church statue that was remarkably similar to an episode in a Muck in Court because spoiler it again, Bala will go to court for the murder of Janezuski.

38:41 Speaker 2: His friend Powell recounts the incident. He and Bala had been drinking all night and running out of alcohol, they went to buy more. On their way back, they impulsively stole a statue of Saint Anthony from the church, intending to use it as a drinking companion. This real life event closely mirrored a scene in a Muck where the protagonist and his friend are caught by the police where they stolen statue in the novel. Chris, the killer and protagonist in the novel, reflects on the absurdity of facing prison for a minor offense while having committed far worse deeds without consequence.

39:17 Speaker 3: This part of it is actually interesting, the fact that he wouldn't be as worried about writing about something that was a minor offense, but if that ends up being a hook into leading the investigators to his worst crimes. Absolutely, and that he's in the book he's talking about the character being outraged at.

39:40 Speaker 2: Just right reading between the lines, he's going, I'm going to go to jail for jack and a statue when I fucking murdered someone.

39:46 Speaker 3: Yeah.

39:47 Speaker 2: Well, And that's the thing, right, is that this is less about whether a novel should be admissible as evidence in a crime, and it's more about all the ways in which it reads as sort of a winking confession. I think one thing that would be criminals, or if not, would be criminals people who sort of think that they might be able to get away with something or might be smart enough to get away with something. I think one of the giant logical fallacies that they may fall into that I think Bala falls into here is one may become aware of like what is and isn't admissible in court, or what can and cannot be used as evidence in court, and you think that you're safe, like say you are going to text somebody about doing something illegal, and you use some euphemism for the illegal thing, and you're thinking to yourself, Haha, they can't possibly prove that when I said pizza, I meant batsalts, so I'm good.

40:52 Speaker 2: But really, law enforcement is dedicated. The machine is inexorable and very often all the time. And that's what happens in this story is for the suspicion to be turned on you because you may be correct that this particular thing that caused the suspicion to be turned on you is not something that in and of itself is going to bring you down. But once you've drawn the eye, they will find something else that does bring you down. That's why it seems it seems so preposterously dumb to sell the cell phone with a username that turns out to be the name of the killer later, because sure, can they prove you killed someone with a username in court?

41:36 Speaker 2: No, but they can start looking into you, and that's what happens, all right. Yeah, So essentially the police decide they're going to use a muck as a roadmap to the Janezuski murder. And the more they look into it, the more parallels they find. And they still they're a little light on stuff to take to court, but they are increasingly convinced that Bala is their man. Further investigation reveals that Bala, under his Chris b Online alias, had browsed a police manual titled Accidental Suicidal or Criminal Hanging on an auction site.

42:14 Speaker 2: Once they're looking at you, then it's like, oh, and this was just one month before Janezuski's abduction that he was looking into this manual, which details the difficulties and techniques of hanging a human. But there's no proof that Bala actually purchased the book, and Rabluski realized that he needed to build a strong case against Bala, and he would need more than circumstantial evidence. Now that Janetzeuski murder was then a featured story on the Polish forty eight hours esque news magazine nine to nine seven, but despite widespread viewership, it failed to turn up any leads where all the way in two thousand and five, now Bala is still abroad, sustaining himself through travel articles, English teaching and scuba diving.

42:55 Speaker 2: Then he emails a friend from Micronesia says his paradise, and then later that year Rabluski Jack Sparrow learns that Bala is in fact going to return to Poland. So on September fifth, two thousand and five, shortly after his return, Bala claims he was violently abducted in Choge Now by three men who handcuffed and blindfolded him, believing he was wealthy and targeting him for ransom. He describes the experience as harrowing of he was beaten, he was threatened, and he was fearing for his life, but eventually he realizes he wasn't kidnapped.

43:26 Speaker 2: He was in police custody, having been apprehended by Rabluski and his team. But Rabluski says, no, no, no, I we use standard legal procedures. There was none of this torture and beatings, etc. Bala was brought to Rabluski's office in Roklaw, and Rabluski was mindful of the character Chris and a muck who coldly rationalized brutal actions, and the potential for complexity and duplicity in Bala's character. In his interrogation, Detective Rabluski cautiously approached the subject of Janezeuski's murder, initially focusing on all his business and relationships.

44:01 Speaker 2: When he confronted Baala about the crime, Bala denied knowing Janazouski or having any involvement in the murder. He then questions him about similarities and parallels between his own life and that of and what happens in the novel, and Bala of course admits to incorporating aspects of his life into the books, which, if not at all criminal. Most artists incorporate aspects of their lives into their work, especially if they're any good at what they do. I mean, one of the first things you learn is write what you know?

44:29 Speaker 2: What do you think about that? As a great artist yourself? And so do you incorporate aspects of yourself and your own life into your work knowingly or otherwise?

44:37 Speaker 3: You know, if I can culp it, I think it just happens intentionally.

44:42 Speaker 4: Maybe maybe you all have an idea that the concept itself of the idea is kind of fascinating, and you want to like explore it and look at it from different angles and stuff and see if it really is that interesting. Yeah, anytime I'm trying to figure something out, you know, get a the visual representation of it, I have to think about it from as many different perspectives as I can.

45:04 Speaker 2: Which is of course going to be informed by who you are and the experiences that you've had. I mean it inevitably informed. I mean, when you create art, whether it's a novel, a piece of graphic art or a painting or whatever kind of art it is, you have created something, you have given birth, it's of course who you are is going to be somehow embedded in that. So I guess that's sort of the argument for the police reading too much into the book, but maybe they didn't. When Captain Jack Sparrow asks Bala about selling the cell phone, he says, I can't recall how I acquired it.

45:40 Speaker 2: I might have bought it at a pawnshop. He then agrees to take a polygraph test, answering no to key questions about his involvement in the murder and his acquaintance with Janezuski. The examiner notes potential attempts by Bala to manipulate the test, and the results are ultimately inconclusive, so he does kind of fail a polygraph right after that. Again, Rabluski really feels like he's got his man, but he also knows that it's a pretty weak case, so he continues to look into Bala for more concrete evidence and a definitive motive.

46:13 Speaker 2: His examination of Bala's passport reveals travel stamps from Japan, South Korea, and the United States, aligning with page views from those countries on the nine to nine to seven shows website about Janetzouski's murder. So Bala says, I know nothing about Janezeuski. I know nothing about the murder. But he's shown to have specifically browsed and read about this murder from multiple different countries while he was living abroad. So again, whether that's really evidence, who knows, But there's a little bit of like, what are the odds that this murder you have nothing to do with, this man you know nothing about, but you're so you're so damned compelled by it that while you were in the United States, Japan, in South Korea, you were online reading everything you could possibly consume about the Polish TV show about the murder and about the murder.

47:08 Speaker 2: HM. That seems pretty suspicious as well, especially when you're traveling right right right.

47:13 Speaker 3: You know, there's so much other, so many other things to keep your attention.

47:17 Speaker 2: What are the odds that you even know that Polish forty eight hours did a show about this particular murder when you're busy scuba diving in Japan. If you're an innocent person who had nothing to do with it.

47:30 Speaker 3: All those things lined up make you know some more compelling reasons to go after I mean, there must have been a ton of evidence.

47:39 Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk about some more of the evidence. So now we're going to talk about that time, the time in two thousand, just before the murder of Janatzouski, and what was going on with Bala at that time. Interrogations of friends and acquaintances revealed mixed perceptions. Some viewed him as bright and interesting, but a deeper investigation into Balla's life during nineteen ninety nine and two thousand, the period of his business and marital collapse, which also coincided with Janezuski's murder, painted a darker image.

48:07 Speaker 2: Bala's behavior during this troubled time was erratic. Friends in a babysitter described him as increasingly vulgar, intoxicated, and aggressive, particularly towards his wife, Staga, accusing her of infidelity. Post separation, Bala remained possessive, monitoring Staja's phone calls and displaying controlling behavior. A significant incident occurred at a New Year's Eve party in two thousand, where Bala reacted violently, believing a bartender was flirting with Stagia. His drunken threats and mention of having quote dealt with such a guy unquote was alarming, requiring several people to restrain him from what witnesses described as going quote a muckquote.

48:50 Speaker 2: In parallel, the investigation team made a breakthrough regarding the suspicious phone calls made to Janezuski on the day of his appearance. Tracing the unique number of the calling card use at the public phone booth, they connected calls made with the same card to Bala's family, girlfriend, friends, and associates. This discovery significantly, as you might imagine, strengthened the case against Bala. Now he is directly connected to the phone call made to Janetzuski that led to Janezuski's kidnapping and presumably, though you're not allowed to presume his murder, another critical connection between Janetzuski and Bala emerged through Malgorzata Drozol.

49:29 Speaker 2: Malgarzada was a friend of Stagia. She recalled seeing Staja in a Roklaw nightclub called Crazy Horse talking to a man with long hair and bright blue eyes in the summer of two thousand. She then identified the man as Darius Janezuski, our murder victim. This revelation linked Bala directly to Janezuski, suggesting a personal connection and providing a potential motive propelling our investigation forward. Staja, Bala's ex wife, initially refused to cooperate with the investigation, possibly due to fear of Bala, belief in his claims of persecution, or concern about betraying the father of her child, all legitimate.

50:08 Speaker 2: However, upon being shown sections of a Muck, she recognized unsettling similarities between herself and the character Sonya, and agreed to speak Stasia confirmed meeting Janezeuski at Crazy Horse and going on a date with him, which ended abruptly when she learned he was married. Weeks later, Bala confronted her in a drunken state, accusing her of having an affair with John Azuski. Bala, claiming knowledge of their interactions and the motel they visited, became violent. After Janezuski's disappearance, Stasia questioned Bala, but he denied involvement.

50:40 Speaker 2: Despite his volatle behavior, she couldn't believe he was capable of murder, but her revelations helped Rubluski interpret the cryptic last line of a Muck as referencing a murder driven by blind jealousy. Bala's trial, so they did finally feel like they had enough to bring him to trial. Bala's trial in Roclaw on February twenty second, two thousand and seven attracted a diverse audience, including philosophers, lawyers, and journalists. The case, involving a murder potentially foretold in a novel, garnered significant media attention.

51:14 Speaker 2: Judge Lydiahjenka presided over the trial with a jury comprising another judge and three citizens Janazeuski's family was present, while a visibly anxious Teresa Bala, Christian's mother, sat in the back. The trial encapsulated not just a criminal case, but a debate on postmodernism's implications and the intersection of fiction and reality. Bala's father, too distraught by his son being on trial, did not attend. In the courtroom, Christian Bala stood in a cage, which I guess is how they do it in Poland.

51:45 Speaker 2: It's wild.

51:45 Speaker 3: It's like the shields in a bank that protected the tellers. Yeah, I think I saw a picture of it.

51:52 Speaker 2: Huh. Interesting. Wild. So in the courtroom he stood in a cage, facing a potential twenty five year prison sentence. The prosecution to picked it a Bala, akin to as a Muck protagonist Kit Chris, a morally unshackled hedonist driven by jealousy to murder. Evidence included files from Bala's computer detailing his sexual exploits and emails mirroring the language used by Chris and a Muck. A psychologist testified about the sadistic parallels between Bala and his fictional character. Bala meanwhile, engaged directly with witnesses, often questioning the stability and interpretation of their testimonies.

52:26 Speaker 2: As the trial progressed, however, Bala's defense shifted towards empirical arguments. He emphasized the lack of direct evidence linking him to Janezeuski's kidnapping, murder, or disposal of the body. He insisted on his innocence, stating that he never met Janezeuski and that there were no witnesses to prove otherwise. He argued that his personal life incidents were being manipulated into a fictional narrative driven by the prosecution, aligning with his defense attorney's view that the case was more of a novel plot than reality.

52:54 Speaker 3: So they're accusing each other of the same thing, basically.

53:00 Speaker 2: Well, the plot of my novel is does not mirror the murder, but the plot of my trial mirrors a novel. I'm yeah, I'm not sure that's the line of reasoning I would want to go down. So like, my novel doesn't mirror real life at all, but this part of real life that's going against me is totally mirror as a novel. Uh yeah, I wouldn't. So there, I don't think that's the if. Then you want to push forward with you.

53:27 Speaker 3: Want to push people away from that whole.

53:29 Speaker 2: Yeah prospect, Yeah, novel equals real life is what you're trying to argue against. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Christian. So, the case was finally handed to a jury and Bala, in a statement expressed his belief in an acquittal. In the courtroom, as the verdict was read, Bala maintained a composed posture until the decisive word guilty was announced. So he was guilty, and he went to prison, and he went to a prison in Roulaw known for overcrowding, poor conditions in violence.

54:00 Speaker 2: So there's a great writer for The New Yorker named David Grahan who wrote an article about this case, and his work was an important piece of my research putting the story together. He wrote an article called a Postmodern Murder Mystery back in two thousand and eight about this case. He would go on to interview Christian Bala while Bala was in prison and in the prison visiting room, and he said that Bala resembled an American student, contrasting sharply with his current circumstances, and Bala would describe his situation as a Kafka sparse, speaking in fluent but heavily accented English.

54:31 Speaker 2: He was clearly physically and emotionally infected by his incarceration, and he vehemently maintained his innocence, attributing his conviction to the controversial nature of his novel A Muck and stating that his situation was akin to Solomon Rushdie's being persecuted for provocative literary work. That is not at all fair to Solomon Rushti. No, it seems pretty frick and clear that Christian Bala actually killed this guy. Salomon Rushti just wrote a provocative novel. Ball is like, I'm just like Solomon Rushdie.

55:04 Speaker 2: I wrote a provocative novel. You're like yes, And I wrote a provocative movel Yes, and you killed someone. You are not just like Solomon Rushti. Okay, but that's what he asserts, and he insisted that the novel was intended to offend and provoke, separating his personal beliefs from those of his narrator Chris. Again, he's conveniently leaving out that the novel is what kipped the police off to him. The novel is not the key piece of evidence. It was the bread crumbs. It was Yeah, it was the breadcrumbs that led to him.

55:39 Speaker 2: It was not the key piece of evidence that led to his conviction. That would be selling the cell phone call, the last known calls to Janezeuski coming from his calling cards, the fact that his wife went on a date with Janezeuski, the fact that he personally threatened Janezuski, et cetera. Et cetera said that he had already taken care of someone else who tried to date his wife, Like, there's plenty of actual evidence that has nothing to do with the novel. He's blaming the bread crumbs. But anyhow, I don't mean to rant and rave here.

56:09 Speaker 3: You're right, it's focusing on it too much.

56:14 Speaker 2: He's probably write well, you'd think, but wait for it. When David Grant brings up the actual evidence against him, such as the cell phone and the calling card, Bala suggests a conspiracy to frame him, and mentions that he filed an appeal. Now, like other real or imagined sociopaths, again, we have fallen into the realm of extreme ego and self regard. He's a philosophy student with a failed cleaning business who was abroad supporting himself teaching English and scuba diving. There's nothing wrong with any of that, But please explain to me how, Christian Bala, are you so important that anyone private citizen, police officer, or whomever would be undertaking a conspiracy which involves multiple anyones to frame you for the murder.

57:04 Speaker 2: It's not like you have a billion dollars or some property or some prestigious government position or something that anybody would want to take or destroy. But there's a conspiracy to get you. They're all out to get me, sure they are. He does file an appeal, highlighting inconsistencies in the trial, including differing medical opinions on Janezuski's cause of death, a judge's uncertainty about whether he acted alone or with an accomplice. But he's even more forthcoming when talking about his book A Muck And While in prison, Bala's obsession with A Muck had intensified.

57:37 Speaker 2: He carried an annotated copy full of diagrams and literary influences. Here he thinks he's the next James Joyce, revealing his deep engagement of the book. Even behind bars, he would read passages alowed to fellow inmates. Now the unresolved question of why someone would commit a murder and then detail it in a novel. It's like he's actually going to be helped out a little bit by the fact that what he did was so unbelievably stupid. People still can't believe he would have actually done this, and so to some people, he seems more innocent because of that.

58:09 Speaker 2: They're like, well, he can't possibly have killed someone and then wrote a novel confessing his crimes. I mean, who does that? Who sells the murdered man's cell phone within a couple days of killing him under the username for his future confession novel That there's no way he's that dumb. He must be innocent. I mean, there's an irony there. He behaved like such a jackass that maybe he didn't do it.

58:32 Speaker 3: That'd be nice to get away with something like that. If that was enough to get somebody.

58:36 Speaker 2: Off of the start acting really really dumb. Yeah, yeah, As we had mentioned, Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky explores the notion that criminals air due to lapse in judgment and crucial moments. However, much was written years after the murder, suggesting a different motive than just errors and crucial moments. If indeed Balla was guilty, some thought that maybe he sought to confess yes, subconsciously or otherwise, or just to gain notoriety. One thing's for sure. Because of the trial, A Muck gained popularity, and as of two thousand and eight when it was set for a new edition with details and the trial.

59:13 Speaker 2: But let's get down to the part of this conversation that interested Bala himself the most, because I think this is telling about who he is and by extension, what he did. He was more fascinated with creating the perfect story than with creating the perfect crime, and he discussed his sequel to A Muck, which he named de Lyric, a play on lyrics and delirium. He lamented the loss of his manuscript for de Lyric, as his computer containing the draft was seized by the police. And this is important conspiracy seized by police by the police as they were arresting him for murder.

59:49 Speaker 2: But this little detail is important. The police, when they seized his computer, found evidence that Bala was gathering information about Stasio's new boyfriend, potentially indicating that he was planning another crime, just like he was planning another book. Oh shit, And now we're getting into the realm of sort of Hollywood or really just serial killers. But you can imagine if this was all a season of Dexter, and if he had not been caught because of a muck, would he be the killer that goes and kills someone and then writes a book about it.

1:00:26 Speaker 2: And that's what his books are, that's his brand.

1:00:29 Speaker 3: But of course that writer looks for inspiration.

1:00:33 Speaker 2: Yeah, through heinous violence. If this were a Hollywood script, I think anyone would extremely question the believability of. Honestly, how many books can you write about murders you actually committed before you get caught? And indeed, Christian Bala didn't make it past one, but he was planning two. Now. Of course, can't prove that he was actually planning to kill another person just because he was writing another book, or that the book was linked to a few, but it sure seems that way that the book with the sequel and the new manuscript also contained evidence researching his wife's new boyfriend, given that he killed the last guy he perceived to be her new boyfriend.

1:01:13 Speaker 2: Bala expressed his determination to complete the lyric following the appellate court's decision. Remember, he had filed for an appeal. Now, the appeals court, to the surprise of many wait for it, overturned the initial guilty verdict. Although the judges recognized a strong connection between Bala and the murder, they pointed out inconsistencies in the evidence, such as differing medical testimonies that necessitated a retrial. It's okay, everybody, don't get your pitchforks out yet. I guess the Polish legal system moves quite a bit quicker than the American legal system because that trial happened rapidly.

1:01:50 Speaker 2: Christian Bala went to retrial for the murder of Janazouski in December of two thousand and eight. He was again found guilty and continues to serve a twenty five year sentence. There you have it, he was convicted twice.

1:02:04 Speaker 3: Well, and where is he imprisoned?

1:02:07 Speaker 2: A prison in Roclaw, Poland?

1:02:09 Speaker 3: Who commit crimes?

1:02:10 Speaker 2: And if you do, don't write a novel about it. Also remember that he was into this idea of mytho creativity and saying that if he wrote an autobiography, it would all be made up, etc. Before he was arrested, he made a point of floating the idea himself that Chris, the protagonist from A Muck was more Hymn than he was. In other words, maybe I'm really Chris, not Christian. By the way, Chris and Christian, this seems like a really obvious connection, But in my research notes, Chris is spelled hrs and Christian is spelled more like a Polish spelling.

1:02:48 Speaker 2: I guess, I mean, maybe that would be in Cyrillic, but Christian, as in Christian Bala is spelled krystia n. So maybe I'm a jackass. But having consumed all this information visually, and I kind of just now connected Chris American spelling to Christian with a krys, or even the fact that Bala is a B, so he's he's Chris B. Chris B ed, Chris B. I feel like I should have figured that out before we even started recording. But I mean, come on, not to put too fine a point on it, Christian Bala, Chris B Chris B.

1:03:27 Speaker 3: Like he's just really really egotistical and he just didn't want to stray too far from himself.

1:03:33 Speaker 2: He couldn't. There's no better name in the entire universe than Christian Bala. And I'd hate to denigrate my my appellation. Man, It's really something.

1:03:44 Speaker 3: There's another thing though, It's like if he's just made up a new name for a character, that'd be fun, right, But it's almost like he was trying to make sure that he didn't slip when he was being the character. He didn't slip and accidentally, you know, say his name instead the characters, right.

1:04:02 Speaker 2: Just the fact that he himself was like, I don't know, maybe Chris is me, maybe Chris is more me than I am. That was his whole deal. And then when he goes to jail, he's like, how could you possibly think that Chris is me? It's like because you did? Yeah, No, I mean he's trying not to slip, or it's that false confidence of like, well, I'm smart and I know the law. So they can't possibly convict me for writing a novel with a character that has my initials. Who could commit a murder? No, again, they can't, but they can.

1:04:35 Speaker 3: Find you think you want to read that book or not read.

1:04:38 Speaker 2: Not read that book? I mean I think if it makes somebody want to read the book, that's fine for me. First of all, I don't know if in Poland they have the same laws as in America, where you're explicitly not allowed to profit directly from a horrific crime. Right, I'm not sure about that. Somebody looked that up for me. Ay, I don't really want to read the book because I don't want to support this gross person. But the posting kind of murdery is kind of enough darkness in my life for me. I have a very vivid imagination and don't need to go into the particular hellscape of this guy's mind.

1:05:16 Speaker 2: And also just the fact that he's so self satisfied makes me Regardless of what his book was about, it could be about gardening tools, and I don't want to read it. I'm not interested in reading anything by anybody who's like patting themselves on the back for being a genius the whole time. No thank you. In my experience, most decent people are affected, and may perhaps not crippled, but deeply affected by a significant amount of self doubt. And when somebody doesn't seem to have any that's what they call a red flag.

1:05:49 Speaker 2: As far as I'm concerned, you.

1:05:51 Speaker 3: Think it would make them ripe for the darwin Wards.

1:05:54 Speaker 2: Indeed, well, I mean, granted he's still alive. But if he had been given the death penalty and executed, I'd say this guy could get nominated for a Darwin Award. It kills, somebody writes novel about it, busted, because he wrote novel about it executed, that's a legitimate Darwin Award. Granted, Darwin Awards are usually more focused on physical stupidity, but I'd go for the nomination. Do you have a favorite Darwin Award story? Hanson?

1:06:23 Speaker 3: Oh, geez, I don't know. They all sound so outrageous that they're all just kind of fun, you know, because you don't know the people that it happened to, and he just it's sort of like a joke, you know.

1:06:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, I know there was.

1:06:36 Speaker 3: One about somebody some guys are at a concert or something, and I can't remember all the details of it, but they're trying to get over a fence to get into the concert and something about their car going over the edge of a cliff and do you.

1:06:49 Speaker 2: Know that I don't know that one. The one that sticks in my mind though, is also a car and a cliff story. It was like a giant cliff over a river and somebody noticed some kind of just like like melted metal slag stuck to the side of the cliff. And basically what they were able to reconstruct was that somebody had taken like a full on jet engine, like a like a jet engine for like essentially a fighter jet, like a really powerful jet engine. Yeah, and strapped it to their car, like a white chevelle or something, and fired that sucker up and essentially, you know, and this doesn't seem that surprising in hindsight, but got totally airborne, just like jets do, and hit the side of the cliff so damn hard that they just exploded and all that was left was like steel slag glued to the side of the cliff.

1:07:43 Speaker 2: That's the one that I've remembered ever since I was.

1:07:45 Speaker 3: A kid of survival research laboratories, you know, the he makes wonder if maybe it was an experiment and maybe nobody actually died in it. Who the hell would put themselves in something.

1:07:55 Speaker 2: Like somebody kind of like our killer from today's story, who seems to be psychotically convinced that nothing could possibly go wrong. All right, Well, I appreciate you being here so much, my friend. It's been an absolute blast recording this episode with you. For Ansinmatox. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this has been kind of murdery.

1:08:18 Speaker 4: Oh no.

1:08:19 Speaker 1: If you like the show, please subscribe, review and tell your friends. You can find us on social media at kinda Murdery or email at kindamurdery at gmail dot com