‘Skin Hunters’ Title Is Somehow Its Least Disturbing Element

I finally got the chance to watch Woman of the Hour the other day, which is haunted by the dual horror of senseless and relentless violence against women and the indifference of law enforcement. But of the true crime I’ve subjected myself to this week, that isn’t the one that’s going to be living rent-free in my head, Skin Hunters, a Polish docuseries on Max, is haunted by a different breed of evil: a gig economy of murder committed by health care workers-a story that cannot and will never resolve in anything as simple as a single leering predator.

Łódź, Poland in the 1990s was a city battered by economic hardship and desperation: ambulance workers — many of them wildly unqualified to be responding to medical emergencies of any kind — develop a horrific sideline to make some extra cash. Funeral parlors were engaged in violent, mafia-esque competition for business, and the funeral business is big money. To get an edge, the ambulance workers begin setting and accepting bribes from funeral parlors for bringing in “skins”—human corpses.

A Łódź ambulance worker or a dispatcher would call in a medical emergency to the funeral parlor for a payday, then deliver the body. Frequently a hearse would arrive ahead of the ambulance itself, awaiting the profit from an impending death. Or, an ambulance would be held until death was inevitable. Or, the ambulance would load up their patient and go park someplace and wait for the victim to pass. Or, they would administer massive amounts of the muscle relaxant drug Pavulon to kill their victim.

Over the course of a decade, the system developed into a full-blown system of murder and payoffs. And these payoffs were not much — dispatchers and ambulance workers were not getting rich off this scheme, to all appearances. An ambulance team would split the “proceeds”—and perhaps walk away with between fifty to one hundred bucks per killing.

The story unfolds over four relatively short episodes, told with precise, even testimony by a cast of law enforcement, investigative journalists, and victims’ families. Some commentators’ faces are hidden, a keen moment-by-moment reminder of the scale and immediacy of these crimes. Throughout, the talking heads, for the most part, maintain a level of composure and directness, delivering this story with a kind of cold shock that the horrors of what they are saying are true or could be true.

It isn’t far-removed, and there isn’t an easy villain. Trial footage shows a judge whose disgust and disbelief is not, I think, wholly performative, while most of the culprits slip through the legal system. Łódź residents look into the camera and wonder, did my relative die at the hands of one of the medics to whom we entrusted them? Answers remain buried and impossible to retrieve; the scale of the killings is too huge and the culprits too numerous for a clear ending to ever take shape.

This is the kind of difficult true crime that gazes past the logic of a narrative and simply holds up to the light the facts of this long nightmare. It’s a difficult and incomplete accounting, and it’s done with grace, composure, and sensitivity in the face of unthinkable, casual evil.

All four episodes are now streaming on Max and Apple TV.