Dennis George Muldowney was tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty of murdering Krystyna Skarbek, and sentenced to death.
On 24 June 1952, just over a week after the murder of Krystyna Skarbek, her killer Dennis George Muldowney stood trial at the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court. He was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to death by hanging.
The trial drew public attention to the extraordinary wartime record of the victim, as details of Skarbek's heroic service as a British secret agent during the Second World War became more widely known through press coverage of the case. Muldowney reportedly showed little remorse, and testimony revealed the extent of his obsessive fixation on Skarbek, whom he had stalked and repeatedly harassed after she rejected his romantic advances.
The swift judicial process, typical for capital murder cases in Britain at the time, resulted in a death sentence within days of the crime. The case remains a poignant coda to the story of a woman who survived Gestapo interrogation and years of front-line espionage, only to fall victim to a stalker's violence in peacetime London. The trial's outcome brought a measure of formal justice, though it could not undo the loss of one of the war's most remarkable agents.