Mateusz Kawecki, disappeared March 28, 2018. Body found September 12, 2018, Hutków, Poland

Revised September 2024

Mateusz Kawecki was a 30-year-old Polish man from a small village called Hutków in southeastern Poland. He’d been working as a construction worker in Hanover, Germany, for about five years and lived with his father, who also worked in Hanover.

On March 28, 2018, he headed to Poland to see his pregnant fiancée but never made it. Five months later, his decapitated remains were found in a barn near his family home, nowhere near his girlfriend’s residence. His car has never turned up. What happened to Mateusz? Was it a bizarre case of suicide or foul play?

The trip to Lipia Góra in Poland

Mateusz had a long-distance relationship with his Polish fiancée, who resided in a village called Lipia Góra in northwestern Poland. She was pregnant with his baby and close to giving birth, so Mateusz set out driving his 1998 BMW 525 at around 11.30 pm from Hanover to Lipia Góra on March 28, 2018, a journey of 402 miles (647 km ). He was due to arrive at around 8-9 a.m. the following morning, March 29. However, Mateusz never made it to Lipia Góra.

According to his father, he called Mateusz at around 10.30 am on March 29, and his son told him there were terrible traffic jams on the way to Poland. He was stuck in Szczecin, a town on the Polish-German border, on the way to Lipia Góra, and he had around 133 miles (214 km) to go from there to his destination. The German-Polish border wasn’t staffed, and there were no passport checks, although there were number plate recognition cameras. Around that time, he also texted his fiancée, saying that he would be with her in around 2 hours.

Mateusz fails to arrive in Lipia Góra

However, several hours later, there was no sign of Mateusz in Lipia Góra. Becoming increasingly worried after unanswered calls, the fiancée contacted Mateusz's sister, Katarzyna Piotrkowicz (who also lived in Hanover), at around 5 p.m., but she could not reach her. Later that evening, Mateusz's mother went to the police, but they discouraged her from filing a missing persons report as it was too early, and they believed Mateusz would likely turn up.

But by early April, the family finally reported Mateusz as missing in both Germany and Poland. The German police refused to investigate as they believed the Polish authorities were on the case. The family then asked the Polish police to locate Mateusz's cellphone, which was apparently on for a couple of days after his disappearance. However, the police could not do so because Mateusz used a German SIM card. German police can't locate his phone either, as Mateusz disappeared in Poland. The Polish police later claimed that Matuesz's phone never connected to a Polish network, and it is unclear where Mateusz received the call from his father.

Katarzyna Piotrkowicz said that investigators claimed that Mateusz never crossed the border as CCTV monitoring at the border crossing indicated he had not entered Poland. Frustrated with the efforts of the police investigation, Mateusz's family begin their search for clues on the disappearance and check the entire route, going into side streets, checking with gas station staff, asking for video surveillance, going around markets in towns near the border with Mateusz's picture and posting posters with his image. The family appears on TV in Poland and Germany several times and complains that the police are not doing enough and not taking the matter seriously.

The discovery of Mateusz’s remains in Hutków

On September 12, 2018, a neighbor came to Mateusz's mother’s house in Hutków to ask about their barn, as a terrible smell had been emanating from it since July, and they thought it was probably a dead animal.

He asks her if he can check the barn thoroughly. Half of it was walled off, creating a room with an attic/mezzanine level on top of that room. She agreed, so he climbed up and saw a pile of clothes. Upon closer inspection, though, he was shocked to see that it was human remains consisting of a severed head and a torso. The corpse was too decomposed to be identified.

Further examination of the area showed two rope nooses hanging from the roof and a backpack on the floor, which was later established as belonging to Mateusz.

Some of Mateusz's teeth were knocked out and stuck to his clothes with what seemed to be blood, and there were bloody patches on his clothes. Inside his backpack, there was a Polish water bottle with cigarette butts inside and an orange juice box. Mateusz's family claimed that he never drank orange juice.

A cell phone in the backpack showed one call to his uncle on March 30, 2018, but this seems like an accidental dial, as it only lasted for less than a second and never got through.

The investigation

DNA analysis was conducted, and it was confirmed that the remains were indeed Mateusz's. His personal belongings were analyzed, and no other DNA had been found on his items.

The Police and Public Prosecutor maintain that the death was a suicide and refuse to investigate further despite appeals and efforts by the family. They believed that Mateusz had planned his death and said there was no evidence of foul play. Unfortunately, the exact pieces of evidence which led prosecutors to this conclusion weren't released to the public.

Four days after the body was found, Mateusz's family discovered his shoe in the barn with his detached foot still inside it, which showed to the family that the police hadn’t even bothered to search the barn properly.

Prosecutors were able to gather a lot of evidence, including DNA, expert reports, and analysis of Mateusz's phone. German police also obtained security camera footage and searched Mateusz's apartment in Hanover. Experts in Warsaw then analyzed all of the evidence.

Based on all of the evidence, prosecutors were able to establish that Mateusz had lied to his family on the day of his disappearance. He was not in Szczecin when he'd called his family and wasn't driving at the time, and he was still in Germany, according to receipts found with his belongings.

He took a train to Frankfurt an der Oder, a German city on the Oder River at the Polish border. It’s known for its red-brick Gothic buildings like the Town Hall, which houses part of the Museum Junge Kunst and its collection of East German art. He most likely walked over a bridge to the Polish town of Slubice almost 24 hours after telling his family he was already in Poland. He then appeared to have checked into a hotel with another unknown person.

The next day, Mateusz took a train to Warsaw and then a bus to Zamość, the largest town close to his home village of Hutków, which was around 13 miles away. He arrived in Zamość around midnight, but it's still unknown when or how he got to Hutków, where his family lived.

What happened to Mateusz Kawecki?

Mateusz wasn't headed for his family's house in the Southeast of Poland. Instead, he intended to go to his fiancee's place in the Northwest - a 395-mile journey (635 km) between the two.

Mateusz's car has never turned up despite an extensive search, neither in Poland nor in Germany. They could not find the car or evidence of it being transferred to a new owner or de-registered. The keys to the BMW were also not located, despite his wallet being found in the backpack in the barn.

The attic in the barn was visible from the ground, and the family said that they used the barn throughout the summer of 2018, so it seemed very unlikely they wouldn't notice a hanging body, never mind the smell of the rotting corpse. Mateusz's cousin Edyta Dąbska said, “It is very strange because we have been to this barn many times during this time, the door was wide open and nobody noticed anything. The prosecutor claims that he was hanging there, but we do not think so because we did not see him there.”

Mateusz's sister accused the officers, who were involved initially, of negligence as they initially refused to search the barn thoroughly because "it would take too much time to sift through the hay, which lay on the ground where Mateusz's body was found. While the prosecutors found the officers' actions did not meet the standard for criminal negligence, an internal Police investigation did find wrongdoing, and two officers were reprimanded.

Key questions

• Who did Mateusz meet in Slubice?

• Why didn’t the family see or smell the body hanging in the barn?

• What happened to Mateus’s BMW?

• Despite a baby on the way, why did Mateusz commit suicide, and why does it near his parent’s home?

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Sources

https://blockowisko.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/ktokolwiek-widzial/

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/kf13vy/update_mateusz_kawecki_the_polish_man_who/

https://read.cash/@jibhadibi/mateusz-kawecki-strange-death-09a29af5

https://www.polsatnews.pl/wiadomosc/2018-11-25/szukali-go-pol-roku-cialo-znaleziono-tuz-obok-domu-panstwo-w-panstwie-o-sprawie-o-19-30/