Wściekły (1980)

In a park in Opole, a young woman is shot dead in broad daylight. Despite the crowd, no one sees the shooter or hears the shot. A few days later in Kraków, watchmaker Okrzesik is shot through a window in his own shop. The local thug Zenon Krawczyk takes advantage of the situation and steals watches from the workshop. Both shots were fired from the same small-caliber rifle. Beyond that, the police have no leads. Militiamen search for the stolen watches among fences and at street markets. At one market, they arrest Krawczyk, who had tried to sell the watches. The investigation is led by young Captain Bogdan Zawada of the Warsaw headquarters of the Citizens’ Militia; he is a psychology graduate, husband, and father. Then a psychopath kills the director of the Institute of Automation in Wrocław. Investigators find a shell casing and a Kraków tram ticket at the spot from which the shot was fired. The institute’s chief engineer turns out to be an old acquaintance of the captain. Zawada attends the institute director’s funeral. He suspects that another murder is only a matter of time. A faint lead emerges: while looking at a photograph from the girl’s funeral in Opole, he notices the indistinct figure of a man who also appeared at the director’s funeral in Wrocław. This man, unknown to the people attending either funeral, had been at both for reasons no one can explain. Captain Zawada tries to determine the psychological motive driving the murderer. He assumes that all the murders so far have been committed out of hatred for people who were happy. The shooter’s next victim is a dog, shot in the evening in a park while out walking with its owner. The killer then moves to Toruń, where at night he shoots through a window at a man lying in bed with his girlfriend, killing him. The militiamen block the railway stations and roads out of Toruń and begin searching the city’s hotels and all other places offering accommodation. Using a blurry photograph of the suspect from the funeral, they eventually track down a hotel receptionist who had directed him to Jadwiga Pyrnik’s unregistered private lodging. This lead proves correct. The murderer had indeed stayed there, but has already left in a hurry. He had given a doll made by the Kraków cooperative where he works to the granddaughter of the woman who owns the apartment. The killer is Bolesław Dragacz, a field inspector for the Kraków cooperative “Plastyka.” The militiamen surround his apartment and storm it through a hole made by blasting out the bricked-up doorway from the neighboring apartment. Dragacz escapes through a third-floor window, but falls onto the paved floor of the enclosed courtyard. He is taken to hospital in serious condition, where Zawada asks him, “Why did you shoot people?” but gets no answer.