20 Years For Burying Huddersfield Woman Alive

A Huddersfield man's been given 20 years in prison for trying to murder his girlfriend.

26-year-old Marcin Kasprzak, attacked Michelina Lewandowska with a Taser, bound and gagged her and buried her under soil, leaves and an 88lb tree branch in woodland near their home in Huddersfield.

27-year-old Miss Lewandowska, escaped from the box after around an hour by using her engagement ring to cut herself free.

Kasprzak, of Penistone Road, was found guilty at Leeds Crown Court of attempted murder.

His friend 18-year-old Patryk Borys, of Rashcliffe Hill Road, Huddersfield, who helped in the kidnap, was cleared of attempted murder.

Both men admitted kidnap at a previous hearing. Kasprzak also admitted possessing a prohibited weapon.

On Friday the Recorder of Leeds, Judge Peter Collier QC, said this was a “planned attempt to kill”.

He said: “It was your intention that she should not be found and it was your intention that she would die there.

“The death you intended would have been long and slow. It is mind-numbingly awful to imagine the sort of death you intended her to die.”

Judge Collier continued: “I must have regard to the uniquely chilling nature of this case. As I have already observed, being  buried alive must be one of the most dreadful ways to die that anyone can imagine.''

Borys was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in a young offenders institute for his part in the kidnap.

The judge told the court how Kasprzak used a Taser to stun Miss Lewandowska before he and Borys bound her feet "securely and effectively" with tape and gagged her. The pair kept her tied up in the house for around six hours before they put her into the cardboard box, taped it up and drove to a "deserted wooded area" where Kasprzak buried her.

The victim has described how she still has nightmares. In a statement after the trial, she said: "During my time inside my shallow grave where I was buried alive I feared that my life was at an end and I was going to die.

"I still have nightmares that Marcin will come back to find me and kill me. My only hope is that he can accept that what he did to me was very wrong. I really hope that no one will ever experience what I went through on that day in May, at the hands of a man whom I loved and trusted."