Jealous ex-lover given life sentence for Karolina Chwiluk murder in Limehouse
Grzegorz Kosiec has been jailed for life. Picture: MET POLICE - Credit: Archant
A jealous ex-boyfriend has been jailed for life today for killing his first love in a frenzied knife attack after she moved on with a mutual friend’s family in Limehouse.
Polish labourer Grzegorz Kosiec, 23, had struggled to come to terms with the split before he stabbed student Karolina Chwiluk.
He picked up a kitchen knife and repeatedly stabbed the 20-year-old in the first-floor flat in Dora Street on May 4 year.
Two of her flatmates were wounded as they desperately tried to stop him.
“This was a frenzied and violent attack,” prosecutor Tom Kark had told the Old Bailey. “Karolina Chwiluk had no chance to defend herself.”
The Westminster University architecture undergraduate, who worked as a part-time waitress at the Polish embassy, had 26 wounds, including gashes to her face and neck.
Kosiec claimed when arrested that he didn’t hurt anyone else on purpose when they were trying to pull him off.
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The couple split up three weeks before the murder when she began seeing a mutual friend a week before her killing.
The break-up was over Kosiec’s aggressive behaviour when he drank, his lawyer said.
Kosiec pleaded guilty to murder and also wounding Dawid Czerwiwski, 24, and Monika Fijak, 42, in what his QC claimed was a spontaneous yet “vicious and sustained attack” on the woman he loved.
Peter Doyle, QC, said: “Losing Karolina to a mutual friend plainly played in his mind.
“He tried to rationalise what happened and at no stage sought to malign Karolina.
“It was his first experience of the love of a woman and he never understood what he had done to lose her and what he could do to win her back.”
Karolina had worked hard to get into university and had enormous potential, her stepmother Anna Machala said in a victim impact statement.
She said: “Karolina would have changed the world for the better. Her senseless death changed our lives.”
The killing was motivated by jealousy, with Karolina having made clear the relationship was over, Judge Mark Lucraft remarked when handing down the sentence. Kosiec was jailed for at least 20 years.