Criminal - Amok

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

While investigating a murder, a Polish detective discovered an unusual clue – a novel that contained an odd number of similarities to the real-life crime. David Grann is the author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon, and his article about Krystian Bala is contained in his collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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heart-healthy fats, fiber-rich vegetables, or whole grains, Blue Apron will make it easy to get. When life gets busy, Blue Apron can help you get food on the table in 30 minutes or less. Order now at Blue Apron.com. Get 50% off your first two orders, plus free shipping with code Criminal 50. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blueapron.com slash terms for more information. This episode includes graphic descriptions of violence. Please use discretion. One day in southwest Poland, there were a couple fishermen, and one of them noticed something floating,

and then the other came over, and they realized it was a body. And there was a noose around the neck, and the hands had obviously been tied behind their back. There was no doubt that the figure had been murdered. This is author David Graham. The men who found the body called the police who came to remove it. It was decayed, and it was evidence once the pathologists looked at the person, that they also had lacked food in them.

So somebody had clearly deprived the person of nourishment, some indications that they had been beaten and tortured. And there was something very peculiar the way the news was. was around the neck and the hands were tied behind the back. At one point, the rope had been cut in the middle, but it was clear that the person had been held with the hands connected to the noose in the back, almost like a backward cradle,

so a very, very painful position so that if the figure had moved at all or struggled to move, they would have been choking themselves. It was clear that the body had been through a lot. It suggested almost an anger. It was almost, it did not seem like some detached murder. The man seemed to be in his 30s, was tall and had long dark hair and blue eyes. He matched the description of someone who'd been reported missing, a man named Darius Anashefsky.

Darius was from the city of Rotswav, 60 miles away, and had last been seen about four weeks earlier on November 13, 2000. He was a young businessman in his 30s. He worked in advertising. He was married. He was known as kind of happy, cheerful. He played guitar, got along with people, no history of violence, very personable. Darius's wife didn't want to see the body. So the police brought in his mother, and she confirmed it was him.

Where had he last been seen? He had last been seen leaving his... business. He had left in the afternoon around 4 p.m., if my memory is correct, and then was seen leaving the building. He didn't take his car, a Pugé, which was unusual for him, because he normally, when he was going to run an errand or do something, he always took his car. He did not take his car with him, and that was the last time he was seen. What did his family think? I mean, when they reported him missing, what did they think it happened? They really didn't know. His mother had worked at the business, and the only

clues was the mother had reported that somebody had called the office in kind of a demanding state asking to speak with Darius for business, and she had then given him her son's cell phone. And then later, when Darius came back into the office, the mother asked him, you know, did you speak with this client, this customer who called? And he said, yes, and I'm going to see him this afternoon. And that was really the only kind of clue that possibly he had gone to meet this person and then disappear. But nobody knew who that person was. There was no sense of motive.

The police were able to trace the phone call to a payphone, not far from Darius's office. But they were unable to find out who the caller was. You know, the authorities kind of considered all. almost the perfect crime because there were so few clues. And eventually, out of frustration and being stymied, the case was closed, and it gradually became the coldest of cold cases. About three years went by. The case was eventually passed along to a 38-year-old detective named Yossack Robleski.

He was a really interesting figure. He had had many professions. He had been a mechanic. He had been a municipal clerk. But then after the fall of communism, he joins the police department, and he kind of finally found his calling. He was a large man, but he was very unthreatening. And people said they trusted him because they didn't think there was anything to fear him.

And he was able to solve many cases. Interestingly enough, his first name, Yassik, translates to Jack, and his last name of Robleski. The first part is Sparrow. called him Jack Sparrow after the Hollywood movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. And he used to like to say, rather than being a sparrow, he says, I'm an eagle. Did he have any suspicions about the case? When he first began looking at the case, he had very little.

But he kept reviewing the file over and over. He put it away. He picked it back up. One thing that occurred to him, he had one suspicion, which was when he was looking at the way the body had been abused. the way this kind of cat's cradle, the way the body had been in position, made them think that there was some kind of personal animus that drove the perpetrator or perpetrators. He did notice one clue or was the absence of a clue, which was Yassik had a cell phone, but there was no report of a cell phone in the file. So he began to say, can we trace, can we figure out what had happened to that cell phone?

at that time in poll and telecommunications and that kind of technical investigation was still pretty primitive. But he was able to get a serial number of the cell phone from the widow and lo and behold, that cell phone turned out to have been sold on an internet auction just days after the murder.

And not only that, he was able to tell from the person who had sold this was somebody who had identified themselves as Chris B. Chris B turned out to be a man named Christian Bala. And Yassik is aware that it's a very tenuous lead. I mean, in the sense that he doesn't know how this Christian Bala obtained the phone. He may have found it on the street.

He may have bought it at a pawn shop, but it is the only lead he has. And he has to figure out who is this person. He realizes that Christian Bollah. Nbalah is out of the country. So he has to be a little bit careful about the way he investigates. He doesn't want to tip anyone off. And he begins to read about him and try to learn about him. One of the things he does is he learns that he was this kind of very young, bright philosopher student. And had been the equivalent of his valedictorian in high school, had gotten a scholarship to get a PhD in philosophy, which he eventually dropped out of in order to work. He had been married, although he was now divorced, he had a child,

and he had also written a novel called Amok. Yossack Robleski learned that Christian Bala had published Amok in 2003, several years after Darius had been murdered. And not long before Yossack began investigating the case, Yossick decided to get a copy. And he begins to read through the novel, at first almost kind of casually, almost out of curiosity is who is this person?

How can I learn about him? And the novel's a bit of a shock to him. I mean, Yossick is a very kind of straightforward person, you know, very Catholic, a very strong kind of view of good and evil. And the book is very blasphemous. It's very creepy. It's very sadistic.

It's pornographic. It's very, very postmodern. And this character who happens to be also identified as Chris, the same Chris, like the way the phone have been auctioned off. The narrator's name is Chris, who goes on this grisly kind of rampage in the novel, indulging in sex,

and eventually ends up murdering his girlfriend in the novel. And so as Yossick is reading the novel, he suddenly notices certain details that catch his attention. One of those details is that the victim of this murder, the girlfriend, had a noose around her neck. So he pauses on that. And then he finds one other detail that really strikes him.

And that is that the murderer, Chris, and the novel, had also not only put a noose around his girlfriend, it had also stabbed the girlfriend and then sold the knife used in the killing in the novel on an internet auction site. The fact that Darius' cell phone had been sold on an internet auction site had never been made public. Detective Viasik Robleski decided to make copies of Christian Ballas' novel

and hand them out to his detective squad. He assigned everyone chapters and asked them to look for more similarities between the plot and Darius Yanoshefsky's murder. I'm Phoebe Judge, this is criminal. David Grant says Christian Ballas' novel didn't get very much attention when it was first published,

And out of the people who did read it, some who knew Christian were surprised. Because Christian was very charming, very bright. And so, like, his philosophy teachers and philosophy friends were quite shocked by it. But it is important to understand that many people found Christian mesmerizing. I mean, there was something very alluring about him. He was brooding, smoking cigarettes. He kind of created this character. And so even in his own life, he would kind of tell these stories that you never were quite sure.

what was true or what was false. He would tell people he'd got on some adventure, or had some romance, or he was at a brothel where he had debased himself. And if people would repeat it several times, he would say, ah, it's become true. It was always in Christian, both in the novel, but also in his own life, this play between what is real and what is false, is what is true and what is a fiction.

And in the character in the novel, was that Christian, or was that just a character he created in a novel? David says once, after the book came out, an interviewer asked Christian, some authors write only to release their Mr. Hyde, the dark side of their psyche. Do you agree? Christian responded, I know what you were driving at, but I won't comment. It might turn out that Christian Bala is the creation of Chris, not the other way around. Christian had also posted excerpts of the book on his blog and would respond to reader comments under the name Chris. But David says Christian would dismiss suggestions that parts of the book had been drawn from his own life.

He said at one point, somebody asked him after the novel came out, you know, a friend, he said, you know, this novel makes you look really bad. And he said, well, it's, you know, it's fiction. And she said, yeah, but for you to have those thoughts, you know, you must have had those thoughts. And so, well, anybody who would think that is a fool. Still, as the detectives combed through the novel, they found more similarities. And they create almost like a checkboard. I mean, you know, where they're like, okay, this is true, this happened in Christian Bala's real life, this didn't happen, we could confirm this. I mean, there's a scene of a theft in the novel.

It turned out that theft had really happened in real life. In the novel, the narrator Chris gets drunk one night with a friend, and they decide to steal a figurine of St. Anthony from a church. Yossack Robleski discovered that Christian Bala had once been caught by the police doing the exact same thing. The friend he'd been with had told a judge they stole the statue because, quote, we wanted a third person to drink with. And there were other things. Christian had been left by his wife, so had the narrator Chris. Both men loved philosophy, both drank a lot, and both owned businesses that had gone bankrupt.

One thing that is also present that is of suspicion, at least to Yassik, was that Chris, the narrator, not only confesses to murdering his girlfriend in the novel, the narrator in this novel gets away with it. There's no repercussions, no stain from the murder, no penance, no punishment, no redemption, just free. But he hints in several places that there was another murder of a man who had done, done something to him. He never speaks about what it is, but it's kind of moved throughout. Chris alludes

to the other murder in a conversation with a girlfriend. After she questions the truth of his stories, he asked her if she didn't believe that he, quote, killed a man who behaved inappropriately toward me 10 years ago. He adds, quote,

everyone considers it a fable. Maybe it's better that way. Sometimes I don't believe it myself. So was there an actual other murder of a man that is being hinted at in the novel? And could that have been Darius? We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for Criminal comes from Mint Mobile.

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Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. To try to better understand, Christian Bala, the police reached out to a criminal psychologist. She examined the character of Chris in the novel and wrote that the character showed features of psychopathic behavior. Quote, he is testing the limits to see if he can actually carry out his sadistic fantasies. She agreed that there were similarities between Chris and Christian, but that, quote, basing an analysis of the author on his fictional character

would be a gross violation. Even Yasek would acknowledge that the case was extraordinarily thin. I mean, all they had at that point, well, they had the cell phone. They knew that Christian Bala had somehow obtained Darius's cell phone within a few days and sold it on an Internet site. And that's kind of, you know, all they have at that point. So they have a very thin case. And on top of that, you know, even people around the department are looking at Yassik. I think you've lost your mind.

Like you're looking at a novel as a roadmap for a crime. So Yasik knows he needs more evidence, but he's also a bit hamstrung because at that point, Christian Bala is out of the country and with extradition treaties, he couldn't just call him back to question him. Yassik also didn't want word of the investigation to reach Christian. Then he might never come home.

And so he couldn't interview his closest family members or his ex-wife. So he's somewhat limited learning about him through these different sources. He still has no sense of a motive for the crime. Yossack decided to look through the profile for Chris B on the Internet auction site that Christian had used to sell Darius' cell phone.

And they realized that very shortly, like a week before, 10 days before, Darius was murdered, that Crispi, Christian Bala, have been looking for a police manual on criminal hangings. And now, again, it's suggestive, but once again, they're also stymie because there's no evidence that the book itself

was actually purchased. They don't know if that book was ever found. But at least in Yossack's mind, again, it's suggestive to him. Why is Crispy looking at a police manual, Detecta Manual about criminal hangings 10 days before a noose is found around Darius' neck. And then they learned that Christian is going to return to Poland, that he's coming back to visit. And so they decide they're going to bring him in for questioning.

Christian Bala returned to Poland about two years after Yossik had begun investigating the case. While he was out of the country, he'd been traveling, writing for magazines, and teaching English and scuba lessons. Officers arrested Christian on September 5, 2005, as he was coming out of a drugstore in a town near Rotswav. Christian leader wrote an account of what he says happened. He said that three men attacked him, forced him into the back of a car, and put a black plastic bag over his head.

He wrote that the men beat him. and then called someone on the phone. He said he overheard one of the men say, He's still alive, and what about the money? Will we get it today? He said that the men drove for a while and then stopped, and one of them said, We can dig a hole here and bury him.

Christian wrote, I thought that this was going to be the last moment of my life. But then he said the men started driving again and took him to a building where he was stripped and beaten some more. When they started to interrogate him, he realized he was in police custody. Yossack said that none of this happened. He said they did arrest Christian outside of a drugstore, but without violence. Quote, we use standard procedures and followed the letter of the law.

What do you think about that, you know, do you have any suspicion that Christian was, in some ways threatened, tortured by Yossack and his detectives? Or do you think that that was another one of Christian's tales? When you read the tale, I'll just say this, it strains credulity. I wasn't there. I wasn't a witness. I do know, and then that it was investigated for a long period of time by authorities, and they found no evidence of it. And there's no evidence ever in Yassik's career of doing it.

anything like this. But it is the one time where suddenly you have Jasek saying this story, this story, this thing that Christian Bala is saying this time is definitely a fiction. He is making this story up.

According to Yossack, he questioned Christian in his office, starting with simple questions about his work and relationships. When Yossik brought up Darius Yanoshefsky's murder, Christian said he didn't know him. Ayasik doesn't yet reveal the one kind of trump card he has, which isn't that much, but he knows about the phone, that Christian Bala had somehow sold the murder victim's phone on this internet auction site.

And so he starts to ask him some questions, and Christian about a muck, about his life, and Christian just kind of denies him. And then he asked him about the phone. And that's the one time where Christian was a bit evasive. He said, I don't remember where I got that phone. Now it was a while back, as many years before. And he said, well, then later he said, well, maybe I got it at a pawn shop. And so by the end, there really isn't any evidence to hold him or to continue to hold him under Polish law. He does agree to submit to a polygraph test.

The polygrapher thought that at certain points during the polygraph that a Christian who was a scuba diver might have been using certain breathing exercises, It's hard to say. I mean, these polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and the results were inconclusive in any case. And in the end, the case seems to be unraveling, and Christian is let go. The police were able to charge Christian with selling stolen property, the cell phone.

He had to hand over his passport and stay in the country. And he begins to tell people that he is being investigated and persecuted because of a novel he wrote. and it creates a sensation. I mean, the human rights organizations start writing letters to the Polish ministry of justice, deluging them with letters, saying, how can you be doing this?

You're violating his rights. One of Christians' girlfriends organized a committee to bring attention to his case. In an online post, she wrote, during his brutal interrogation, they referenced his book numerous times, citing it as proof of his guilt. And let's, you know, I think anyone hearing that someone's being investigated for a novel they wrote, we say this is outrageous.

And Yossick always says, I need corroborating evidence. The novel is a roadmap to a crime. It is giving us some clues and insights. He knows it is not evidence. He cannot present the novel as a piece of evidence in court. He's trying to use the novel, though, to try to kind of crack the case. So Yassik then begins to now. Two things happen that are very important evidentiary-wise.

One of the things they try to do is they keep trying to figure out from the payphone. In those Polish pay phones at the time, you would kind of insert this card, and that would allow you to make the calls. And with that card, you could then insert it into other pay phones and use it again. They're able to finally crack that and figure out what the card was that was being used. And when they figure out and crack this card that was being used, they realized the same caller had placed a lot of other calls. Who were those calls to?

There were two Christian Bala's family members and friends and colleagues, everybody in Christian Bala circle. So that was the first really strong piece of evidence, not suggestive, that Christian Bala was the one from the payphone who had placed the call to the advertising firm that lured Darius out. The next question, though, was, what is the connection? The detective started to question Christian's family and friends. David says many people had nice things to say about Christian. A past employer from a teaching job called him easy to get along with and said, with no reservation, I highly recommend Christian Bala for any teaching position with children.

But a babysitter who worked for him and his then wife said he drank a lot. and he often gave his wife a hard time and accused her of sleeping around. Christian and his wife separated in 2000. One person reported that at one point he had been in a bar and he had seen his ex-wife flirting with a bartender. This was just a few weeks after Darius was killed and he was screaming drunkenly that nobody can talk to my wife that way. Witnesses said Christian,

shouted, quote, I've already taken out a guy like you with a rope. Five people held Christian back from attacking the man. Then, the detective spoke to a friend of Christian's ex-wife. Who says that one time at a bar, she had seen Christian Bala's ex-wife talking to somebody. And it was none other than Darius Yanejewski. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Bombus. This new here is the perfect time to upgrade your sock drawer with Bombus.

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Yassik Robleski had been trying to get Christian Bala's ex-wife to agree to an interview. So she had been very resistant to be interviewed for a long time. And I don't know the reason why, you know, perhaps it was, I mean, I only know what Yassik, you know, wondered, you know, could it be because she was afraid of Christian, was a lot of Christian, was because she thought he was innocent, was it because they had a child together, and she didn't want to incriminate him, but eventually Yasiko was to speak with her. And she had never read the novel Amok, but then he shows her portions of the novel and these very, very sadistic descriptions of a woman in the novel who very much mirrors her,

the ex-wife, and at that point she's willing to talk. And she says for the first time that she had met, Darius Yanicheski in a bar. This was in the summer of 2000, the same year she and Christian separated. They had later gone on a date, and they had gone to a motel. She says they didn't have sex because she learned that he had been married, but they were together, and they had gone on this date. He had left.

They never went on a date again, and that was it. But that Christian had showed up not long after, at her apartment or at her home, broke down the door, hit her, screaming, says, I know you had an affair, I know who would, I know the hotel, I know the room. Christian's ex-wife said he also mentioned that he had visited Darius's office and described it to me. After this, Yossack decided he had enough evidence

to charge Christian Bala with murder. And so Christian Bala is indicted. It creates a sensation. He continues to claim that he has been persecuted for a novel he wrote, that he compares himself to Samaan Rushdie, that he is being crucified for his literature. It was reported that at one point before the trial, Christian confessed to prosecutors that he had killed Darius.

But he immediately retracted the confession and had a, quote, fainting spell. The trial began on February 22, 2007, On the first day, the courtroom was packed. One Polish newspaper wrote, Killing doesn't make much of an impression in the 21st century, but allegedly killing and then writing about it in a novel is front-page news. What did the prosecution argue that it was kind of cut in a cut-and-dry case?

Yeah, I mean, they presented it as, you know, if you take away the novel, and you, you know, this was a man allegedly. who out of a fit of rage, kidnapped or abducted somebody who had gone on a date with his ex-wife and then murdered him in this very barbaric way. Christian was found guilty of planning and directing the murder. There wasn't enough evidence to prove that he'd committed the murder himself. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He later appealed.

He did get a new trial, but he was. found guilty in a second trial as well, and he's still in jail to this day. In 2007, David Graham traveled to Poland to meet Christian. At a really tough prison, kind of post-communist prison, there had been a riot there. It was, you know, very harsh conditions. And I remember going into the visitor's room. I was surprised I was able to get in and able to see him. And as I walked in, you know, it was just very, very.

dismal place, and I see someone kind of standing in the visitor's room wearing a sweatshirt that said, I think it's a University of Wisconsin on it, and a dark ear, and the here was kind of standing up as if the person had kind of been rubbing their hand through it. Very handsome, but they look like a grad student, and I realized I was looking at Christian Bala. David remembers Christian shook his hand, and as they walked to a table to sit down, Christian said, this whole thing is farce, like something out of Kafka. While they were talking, Christian would occasionally point to David's notebook and say things like, put this down, or this is important.

When we spoke about the novel, he was very excited when we talked about different theories and truth. When I asked him about some of the very specific evidence about the cell phone, where that, you know, how did he get hold of that and some of the other, like, why on the public telephone did it look like he had made the call to the cell phone? the advertising firm. And on those points, he was a bit evasive and kind of conspiratorial. And I didn't feel like I ever got clear answers. But he maintained his instance. And he kept saying, I'm the author.

I'm the author. I know what I meant. I know what I meant. David says at one point during their conversation, Christian accidentally said me instead of him when talking about the narrator, Chris. Do you think that there is a... any part of him that wrote the book because he wanted someone to figure out the puzzle? Well, one of the questions that always kind of haunted this case was, you know, and for me,

as someone who spent, you know, many months researching it was, you know, why did you write, why did you write the novel? And, you know, had the novel not been written, I don't think Yassik ever would have had his suspicions raise to the extent that he did. And it did give him to some extent a roadmap. You know, the character in the novel is somebody who is dealing with guilt and a guilty conscious.

I mean, that is kind of one of the themes of the novel. So was the author dealing with a guilty conscience? Was this his confession? After Christian was arrested, his book started selling out in bookstores all over Poland. He thought, and he still thinks, at least when I met him,

you know, that his novel, while it was obscured at the time, would one day be recognized for the masterpiece it was. And then, I'll never forget this. At one point he said to me, he said, I'm working on a second book. And he said, but the investigators had confiscated it. And so he hadn't been able to finish it yet. And then one point he leaned towards me as if to make sure that the guards could inherit him.

And he said, it's going to be even more shocking. David Grant is the author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon. And his article about Christian Bala is contained in his collection, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, and Megan Canane. Our engineer is Veronica Simonetti.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at This Is Criminal.com. and you can sign up for our newsletter at this iscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads and Mystery, without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other criminal listeners.

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