The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [57]
“I HAVE INFECTED YOU,” Chris warns the reader at the beginning of “Amok.” “You will not be able to get free of me.” Wroblewski remained haunted by one riddle in the novel, which, he believed, was crucial to solving the case. A character asks Chris, “Who was the one-eyed man among the blind?” The phrase derives from Erasmus (1469–1536), the Dutch theologian and classical scholar, who said, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Who in “Amok,” Wroblewski wondered, was the one-eyed man? And who were the blind men? In the novel’s last line, Chris suddenly claims that he has solved the riddle, explaining, “This was the one killed by blind jealousy.” But the sentence, with its strange lack of context, made little sense.
One hypothesis based on “Amok” was that Bala had murdered Janiszewski after beginning a homosexual affair with him. In the novel, after Chris’s closest friend confesses that he is gay, Chris says that part of him wanted to “strangle him with a rope” and “chop a hole in a frozen river and dump him there.” Still, the theory seemed dubious. Wroblewski had thoroughly investigated Janiszewski’s background and there was no indication that he was gay.
Another theory was that the murder was the culmination of Bala’s twisted philosophy—that he was a postmodern version of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two brilliant Chicago students who, in the nineteen-twenties, were so entranced by Nietzsche’s ideas that they killed a fourteen-year-old boy to see if they could execute the perfect murder and become supermen. At their trial, in which they received life sentences, Clarence Darrow, the legendary defense attorney who represented them, said of Leopold, “Here is a boy at sixteen or seventeen becoming obsessed with these doctrines. It was not a casual bit of philosophy with him; it was his life.” Darrow, trying to save the boys from the death penalty, concluded, “Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?…It is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.”
In “Amok,” Chris clearly aspires to be a postmodern Übermensch, speaking of his “will to power” and insisting that anyone who is “unable to kill should not stay alive.” Yet these sentiments did not fully explain the murder of the unknown man in the novel, who, Chris says, had “behaved inappropriately” toward him. Chris, alluding to what happened between them, says teasingly, “Maybe he didn’t do anything significant, but the most vicious Devil is in the details.” If Bala’s philosophy had justified, in his mind, a break from moral constraints, including the prohibition on murder, these passages suggested that there was still another motive, a deep personal connection to the victim—something that the brutality of the crime also indicated. With Bala unable to leave Poland, Wroblewski and his team began to question the suspect’s closest friends and family.
Many of those interrogated saw Bala positively—“a bright, interesting man,” one of his former girlfriends said of him. Bala had recently received a reference from a past employer at an English-instruction school in Poland, which described him as “intelligent,” “inquisitive,” and “easy to get along with,” and praised his “keen sense of humor.” The reference concluded, “With no reservation, I highly recommend Krystian Bala for any teaching position with children.”
Yet, as Wroblewski and his men deepened their search for the “Devil in the details,” a darker picture of Bala’s life began to emerge. The years 1999 and 2000, during which time his business and his marriage collapsed—and Janiszewski was murdered—had been especially troubled. A friend recalled that Bala once “started to behave vulgarly and wanted to take his clothes off and show his manliness.” The family babysitter described him as increasingly drunk and out of control. She said he constantly