Behindtheheadlines MURDER AND
THE BUTCHER OF CWMDU – LLANDEILO, CARMARTHENSHIRE, 1953 Michael Onufrejczyk was a highly decorated warrant officer in the Polish Army.
He was wounded twice in the First World War, earned nine medals for gallantry in the Second World War, and when the fighting ended, he realised a lifelong dream of becoming a farmer.
Enlisting in the Polish Resettlement Corps in South Wales, he bought Cefn Hendre Farm in 1949, having raised a loan from Polish Army funds.
He largely kept himself to himself and did little to integrate with the local community.
In April 1953 he took on a business partner in fellow Polish war veteran Stanislaw Sykut to help him run the dilapidated farm.
More importantly, he needed the capital of some £600 Sykut brought with him.
But the fiery-tempered Onufrejczyk was soon bullying Sykut, who complained to police that he’d beaten him up.
The same day he went to a local solicitor to arrange ending their partnership – either Onufrejczyk could buy him out or they’d have to sell up and split the proceeds.
By the end of the year Sykut had vanished, his disappearance explained away by Onufrejczyk as a result of taking a twoweek trip to London.
Knowing his tendency for violence police kept a watch on Onufrejczyk, but despite making intensive searches of the farm, no body was found.
Conflicting reports of the missing man abounded around Llandeilo: he’d gone to London, returned to Poland, Onufrejczyk even spreading word that he’d been kidnapped at gunpoint by Polish secret police.
Later, discoveries that he’d attempted to forge transfer of the deeds to the farm solely to his name led police to make more searches, this time with a team from the Monmouthshire Forensic Laboratory.
Experts uncovered more than 2,000 dark stains on the walls, ceiling and passage leading from the kitchen to the farmyard, most of which were human blood. One thing, however, was still missing – Sykut himself.
Onufrejczyk, who failed to convince anyone by explaining the stains as being from rabbits he’d skinned, was eventually charged with murder in August 1954.
The jury at the 12-day trial in Swansea returned a guilty verdict and he was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment – a case often quoted as a precedent whenever a “missing body” murder comes to trial.
Upon his release in 1965, Onufrejczyk returned to Cwmdu, asking anyone if they’d seen his old friend Sykut.
But police always suspected he’d met his end in the kitchen of the farmhouse he’d shared with the former war hero, who they thought had chopped him up and fed his remains to their pigs.
Onufrejczyk was killed in a road accident the following year, so we will never know. DEATH IN THE VALLEYS – WATTSTOWN, RHONDDA, 1947 The brutal murder of 76-year-old Rachel Allen shocked the small Rhondda mining village of Wattstown.
Known as the Cat Woman, she was a widow who eked out a pension by taking in washing, not to mention any or all stray cats that might wander to her door.
On the evening of October 12, 1947, she left her favourite local, the Butcher’s Arms, stopping off to buy a tin of snuff on the way home. It was the last time anyone saw her alive.
She was discovered near her house later the same night, front-door key clutched in her hand, punched and kicked to death and lying in a pool of her own blood.
And although disbelieving that anyone local could have committed such a vicious