Stanislaw Gonerka (7 June 1927 – 20 February 1987) was a Polish man convicted of three murders in Sweden. He was known in the media as Slaktaren ("The Butcher"). Born in Poland in 1927, he had a difficult childhood, including forced labor during Nazi occupation. He trained as a butcher and worked as a police officer. In 1958, he moved to Sweden, where he was convicted of crimes like theft and drunk driving, leading to his deportation in 1962. He returned in 1972 and later brutally murdered Wanda Radosz in 1974, dismembering her body. Gonerka was arrested after police discovered body parts in a container and he confessed, although he initially claimed the death was an accident. In 1975, he was sentenced to psychiatric care for aggravated assault and causing of death by negligence. Gonerka was involved in another double murder in 1977, killing Rut Norinder and Artur Andersson in Ystad. He was remanded to psychiatric care after being arrested, but a few years later, in 1983, he was released. In 1984, the dismembered body of Catrine da Costa was found, and Gonerka became a suspect, though he denied involvement. Despite suspicions, his DNA was never obtained or analyzed in connection with the case. Over the years, his name resurfaced in investigations but he was never fully pursued. Gonerka died in 1987, and later investigations linked him to the da Costa case, but no conclusive forensic evidence was ever gathered. The case remained open, but no concrete conclusions were reached before the statute of limitations expired in 2009.
Early life Stanislaw Gonerka was born on 7 June 1927, in Poland. He had a very difficult childhood and, as a teenager, was forced to work for a German farmer under the conditions of forced labor in Nazi-occupied Poland. From 1944 to 1945, Gonerka was held in the Leslau labor camp in Poland. In his twenties, he trained as a master butcher. Before that, he worked as a police officer and claimed to have witnessed the torture of detainees. Whether he personally took part in the torture is not clear from the police interrogations conducted with him in the 1970s.
Move to Sweden In 1958, Gonerka moved to Sweden. While working as a butcher, he was convicted of several crimes, including aggravated theft and drunk driving. He was deported to Poland in 1962. In 1972, he returned to Sweden and became a Swedish citizen. That same year, Gonerka robbed and brutally assaulted an elderly man in Helsingborg. He used a rubber baton as a weapon, striking the man multiple times on the head. Gonerka was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for the robbery and associated check fraud offenses. A 1973 psychological evaluation noted that he "surely has the ability to deceive" and described him as "generally unreliable." In the autumn of 1974, Gonerka was released from prison. During his incarceration, he had met a woman through a personal ad.
1974 Malmö murder
Events On 22 August 1974, 38-year-old Wanda Radosz (born 14 February 1936, in Poland) was murdered at Hyacintgatan 4 in the Holma residential area of the Hyllie district in Malmö. After visiting a dance restaurant, the 47-year-old Stanislaw Gonerka killed Radosz and subsequently dismembered her body. On the afternoon of 24 August, some children playing near a garbage container at Sorgenfrivägen 47 in Östra Sorgenfri, Malmö, discovered two human thighs wrapped in plastic. The day before, several children had claimed to have found body parts in the container, but their parents dismissed their accounts. Eventually, some parents became suspicious and contacted the police at around 3:30 PM. The package containing the body parts was bloody, but the rest of the container was clean. According to the forensic examiner, the dismemberment had been performed "skillfully." The limbs had been severed from the body at the kneecap up to the femoral neck.
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