In a serial murder spree obviously inspired in part by London's notorious and uncaught Jack The Ripper, Lucian Staniak stalked the streets of Warsaw, Poland, and surrounding areas from 1964 until his arrest in 1967. His killings were ghoulish acts of mutilation that were puntcuated by frequent letters of responsibility to police and the media. The red ink and distictive scrawling text in these letters earned Staniak the nickname "Red Spider".

Staniak preferred young women and girls as prey, often disembowling his victims and in one case mutilating a girl's genitals by ramming a spike inside of her, leaving it in place for the unlucky soul who stumbled upon the body to find. The authorities finally caught a break in the case when they discovered that two of the victims, both sisters murdered in sperate attacks, belonged to an art club in Warsaw. It wasn't long after that Staniak became the prime suspect when detectives viewed his paintings, which were reportedly mostly grotesque depictions of murdered women painted in blood red.

Arrested on his way home from one last slaying at a nearby rail station, Staniak was easily coerced into confessing to twenty homocides, claiming absurdly that they had begun when he felt compelled to murder a woman who resembled the driver of a car that killed his parents and sister in a hit-and-run accident. Regardless of motive, Staniak was tried and convicted of six deaths but avoided his death sentence when he was ordered to be committed to an asylum for life.