Júlia Fazekas: "The
Angel Makers of Nagyrév"
Poisoner (arsenic) - Group of women who poisoned to death an
estimated 300 Men (husbands, fathers, brothers), between 1911 – 1929, in Nagyrév / Tiszakurt, Satolnok, Hungary,
Arrested November 17, 1929, and committed suicide by hanging herself on
November 23, 1929, she was directly responsible for the deaths of 45 + victims.
"The Angel Makers of Nagyrév" were a group of
women living in the village of Nagyrév, Hungary who between 1914 and 1929
poisoned to death an estimated 300 people (however, Béla Bodó puts the number
of victims at 45-50). They were supplied arsenic and encouraged to use it for
the purpose by a midwife or "wise woman" named Júlia Fazekas and her
accomplice Susi Oláh (Zsuzsanna Oláh). Their story is the subject of the
documentary film The Angelmakers and the movie Hukkle.
The Crimes:
Fazekas was a middle-aged midwife who arrived in Nagyrév in
1911, with her husband already missing without explanation. Between 1911 and
1921 she was imprisoned 10 times for performing illegal abortions, but was
consistently acquitted by judges supporting abortion. In Hungarian society at
that time, the future husband of a teenage bride was selected by her family and
she was forced to accept her parents' choice. Divorce was not allowed socially,
even if the husband was an alcoholic or abusive. During World War I, when
able-bodied men were sent to fight for Austria-Hungary, rural Nagyrév was an
ideal location for holding Allied prisoners of war. With the limited freedom of
POW's about the village, the women living there often had one or more foreign
lovers while their husbands were away. When the men returned, many of them
rejected their wives' affairs and wished to return to their previous way of
life, creating a volatile situation. At this time Fazekas began secretly
persuading women who wished to escape this situation to poison their husbands
using arsenic made by boiling flypaper and skimming off the lethal residue. After
the initial killing of their husbands, some of the women went on to poison
parents who had become a burden to them, or to get hold of their inheritance.
Others poisoned their lovers, some even their sons; as the midwife allegedly
told the poisoners, "Why put up with them?".
The first poisoning in Nagyrév took place in 1911; it was
not the work of Fazekas. The deaths of other husbands, children, and family
members soon followed. The poisoning became a fad, and by the mid 1920's,
Nagyrév earned the nickname "the murder district." There were an
estimated 45-50 murders over the 18 years that Fazekas lived in the district.
She was the closest thing to a doctor the village had and her cousin was the
clerk who filed all the death certificates, allowing the murders to go
undetected.
Her Capture:
Three conflicting accounts have been cited to explain how
the Angel Makers were eventually detected. In one, Mrs. Szabó, one of the Angel
Makers, was caught in the act by two visitors who survived her poisoning
attempts. She fingered a Mrs. Bukenoveski, who named Fazekas. In another
account, a medical student in a neighboring town found high arsenic levels in a
body that washed up on the riverbank, leading to an investigation. However,
according to Béla Bodó, a Hungarian-American historian and author of the first
scholarly book on the subject, the murders were finally made public in 1929
when an anonymous letter to the editor of a small local news-paper accused
women from the Tiszazug region of the country of poisoning family members. The
authorities exhumed dozens of corpses from the local cemetery. 34 women and one
man were indicted. Afterwards, 26 of the Angel Makers were tried, among them
Susi Oláh. Eight were sentenced to death but only two were executed. Another 12
received prison sentences.
***
Murder by Proxy:
Nagyrev is a farming village on the River Tisza in Hungary,
about 60 miles southeast of Budapest, near another town called Tiszakurt. For a
time, a community of killers flourished in these two places... thanks to the
midwives. Known as the "wise women", they inspired and assisted in
the murders of an estimated 300 people over a span of 15 years. It started
during World War I, and since there was no hospital in Nagyrev, the prominent
midwife, Julius Fazekas, took care of people's medical needs. She'd only been
in town for three years, but in that time had gained a reputation for helping
women get rid of unwanted babies. Her cohort in crime, reputed to be a witch,
was Susanna Olah, a.k.a., "Auntie Susi."
Most of the men had gone to war in 1914, but soon there were
other men around — the Allied prisoners of war in camps outside town. They
apparently had limited freedoms, because a number of women got involved with
these men, and when spouses returned, the wives were unhappy. They'd gotten
used to their sexual freedom, it seems, and did not wish to have it curtailed.
Talk got back to the midwives about the general discontent. Apparently they saw
a way to capitalize. Fazekas and Olah began boiling arsenic off strips of
flypaper to sell to these women. They dispensed poison to whoever wanted it,
and there were plenty of takers. It's estimated that around 50 poisoners went
into action, calling themselves "The Angel Makers of Nagyrev," and
because of the high death rate, the area eventually became known as "The
Murder District." In fact, some women decided to be rid of more than just
an inconvenient spouse and began to poison other annoying relatives and even
their own children. Occasionally they poisoned one another. Marie Kardos
murdered her husband, her lover, and her 23-year-old son. Just before he died,
she got him to sing for her. Knowing he was poisoned, she listened to his sweet
voice. In the midst of his song, he clutched his stomach and was soon dead.
Giving testimony years later, she seemed to think this event rather delightful.
Maria Varga killed seven members of her family, considering the death of her
husband in particular a Christmas present to herself.
Because Fazekas' cousin filed the death certificates, when
officials poked their noses in to check on the sudden rise in the death rate,
she showed them that everything was in order. This one was a drowning (a
poisoned woman tossed in the river), and that one was an illness. There were no
doctors around to make examinations, so who was to say differently?
The first death was Peter Hegedus in 1914, and by some
accounts, the poisonings stopped in 1929 only after a medical student from
another town found high levels of arsenic in a body washed up on the
riverbanks. This event inspired officials to exhume two other bodies in the
Nagyrev cemetery, and finding poison, arrested suspects. By another account,
the killings stopped because one woman, Mrs. Szabo, who was acting as a nurse,
got caught poisoning a man's wine. Then another patient complained of the same
thing. Under questioning, Szabo implicated a friend, who admitted that she'd
poisoned her mother. She also told on the midwife, and Fazekas was brought in
for questioning. She denied it and said they could prove nothing. However, the
authorities set a trap. They let her go and she went about warning her
customers that their game was over. Her arsenic factory was closing down, and
no one had better tell. However, as she went from house to house, she all but
pointed out to the police who the poisoners were. That day, they made 38
arrests, with more to follow, and 26 women actually went to trial. Eight
received the death sentence, seven got life, and the others spent some time in
jail. Among those who died was "Auntie Susi," because it was she who had
gone about town distributing the poison to various customers. Her sister was
also sentenced to death. One account says that Fazekas was one of those hanged,
but another describes her suicide by poison in her own home, surrounded by pots
of boiled flypaper. At any rate, the woman who'd come in to offer her
"medical" services had inspired a shocking murder spree, and the
final tally will never be known.
Authorities considered that theses women had been gripped by
madness for 15 years, brought on by their promiscuity. They were at a loss to
otherwise explain it. Yet this isn't the only place where female caretakers
have teamed up to kill people.
***
Unearthing Hungary
husband murders:
Written By Jim Fish - BBC News,
March 29, 2004, (Used by permission, BBC News).
A two-hour drive south-east of Budapest, the village of
Nagyrev is like countless others dotted across the Danubian plain. Modest
single-story homes line its few muddy streets. But beneath its pastoral
exterior, Nagyrev nurses a dark secret. Nearly a century ago, with World War I
raging, the womenfolk here began to poison their husbands.
Now aged 83, Maria Gunya was a little girl when her father,
a local official, was asked by the police to help investigate a series of
unexplained deaths in the village. It turned out that the woman behind many of
the deaths was the village midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas. At that time, under the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no resident doctor or health service. The
midwife enjoyed a monopoly of basic medical training. "The women used to come to Mrs Fazekas
with their problems," Mrs Gunya recalls.
She said that when they complained about their drunken or
violent husbands, Mrs Fazekas told them: "If there's a problem with him, I
have a simple solution." That solution was arsenic, distilled by the midwife
by soaking flypaper in water. Over the years, with the village cemetery filling
up, police suspicions grew. They started to exhume bodies. Out of 50 bodies
examined, 46 contained arsenic. Fingers pointed towards the midwife.
The Trials:
Mrs Fazekas lived in a typical single-storey house in the
village, with a view from her covered porch down the full length of the street.
It was here that she developed her murderous skills into a cottage industry of
death. She saw the police coming.
Maria Gunya takes up the story: "When she saw the
gendarmes approaching, she realized that it was all over for her. By the time
they reached the house, she was already dead - she took some of her own
poison." Ultimately, the woman who had held the power of life and death
over the village could not bear to give it up to anyone. But the midwife was
far from the only culprit. At the nearby county seat of Szolnok, from 1929
on wards, 26 women stood trial. Eight received the death sentence, the rest went
to prison, seven of them for life. Few admitted guilt, and their motives were
never fully explained.
At the town archives, Doctor Geza Cseh has become used to
pulling out the dusty court records of the trial for visitors to pore over. "I'm
sure there are still secrets to be unearthed, here or elsewhere," he said.
There are hundreds of yellowing pages, all painstakingly transcribed by hand,
and some remarkable fading photos of the accused women, staring impassively at
the camera.
As for their motives, theories abound. Poverty, greed and
boredom are just a few. Some reports say that the women had taken lovers from
among the Russian prisoners of war drafted in to work the farms in the absence
of their menfolk at the front. When the husbands returned, the women resented
their sudden loss of freedom, and, one by one, decided to act. In the 1950s,
historian Ferenc Gyorgyev met an old villager while in prison under the
communists. The peasant claimed that the women of Nagyrev "had been
murdering their menfolk since time immemorial".
The Many Victims:
Perhaps they were not the only ones. In the nearby town of
Tiszakurt, other exhumed bodies were found to contain arsenic, but no-one was
convicted of their deaths. The total death toll in the area may, according to
some estimates, have been as high as 300. The years have erased most of the
painful memories from Nagyrev. Its name no longer strikes fear among the men of
the surrounding region. And Maria Gunya points out wryly that after the
poisonings the men's behavior to their wives "improved markedly".
***
Zsuzsi Fazekas,
Hungarian Serial Killer Leader of Serial Killers – 1929
100 Self-Made Widows in One Jail – Husband Poisoners.
Rumors of the Wholesale ‘Removal’ of Unwanted Husbands
Start the Authorities to Open Dozens of Graves in the Village Church Yard at
Nagyrev, Hungary, With Startling Results.
Budapest – Nearly a hundred women have been arrested, the
bodies of thirty murdered husbands have been exhumed and two suicides have
resulted so far from the exposure of Hungary’s “Widow-Making Syndicate.” To the
astonishment of the police and terror of married men, a successful, wholesale
murder plot has come to light, worthy of the dark ages. Since 1911 it has been
possible by paying a reasonable fee for any wife in the two small villages of
Nagyrev and Tiszakurt, on the banks of the Tiszaltiver, to have her husband
transferred to the cemetery, without any fuss or trouble or questions asked.
This remarkable murder service was strictly for married women only. No
unmarried woman could have a faithless lover punished by death and the “Widow
Makers” would not relieve a husband of an undesirable wife. Also if a woman was
happily married and therefore not a likely customer for the syndicate, she was
not taken into the husband-killing freemasonry and, like the spinster, was not
told about it.
The secret was kept and nobody knows how many husbands had
been put under the sod prematurely when, a few weeks ago, the wife of the
presenter of Nagyrev let it out in a burst of temper. It seems that the
presenter, though an important dignitary of the village, had several times in
succession come home somewhat under the influence of the native wines, much to
the annoyance of his wife. Seeing that her scoldings made no impression, the
lady, who is something of a prohibitionist, remarked that she had been married
to a drinker just about as long as she intended to be. The presenter took one
look at his better half, saw that she meant it, and suddenly became sober. That
was no divorce threat. The couple, like virtually everyone else in the
vicinity, belonged to a religion which does not permit divorce. Though the
“Widow Makers” had never talked before, there had been rumors and fantastic
gossip whispered among the men that somehow husbands were surprisingly obliging
about dying to suit certain wives’ convenience.
All this hashed into the precentor’s mind as he noticed that
the wife of his bosom bit her lip, as she often did when she realized she had
said too much. Not for nothing had it been said that the doctor must have
vaccinated the precentor’s wife with a phonograph needle. Before morning he
managed to wring from his garrulous wife a confession. Their neighbor, the
Widow Szabo, had offered to sell her poison enough to kill him and show how to
administer it—all for 120 penges (about $20) down, 120 penges more after the
funeral and a final installment of the same amount when the estate had been
settled up. Frau Szabo said she could guarantee the poison would work without
making the doctor suspicious because the had tried it successfully on her own
husband and brother. The precentor knew that his old friend Herr Szabo had
gotten to be an invalid and nuisance to his wife before his last and brief
illness, but he was nuzzled as to why she had murdered her brother. It was
later discovered that the brother carried life insurance in his sister’s name
and she needed the money.
Next morning without waiting for breakfast, the presenter
called upon the officer in command of the village s soldier-police force. That
night, after all the village was asleep, the police quietly took the widow
Szabo to the neighboring large town of Szolnok, where the police judge soon
drew the facts from her. She had, indeed, poisoned her husband and brother, and
gotten the stuff from another widow, Frau Zsuzsi Fazekas, the village midwife,
who was equally efficient at bringing people into the world or pushing them out
of it. Frau Fazekas was also arrested and brought to Szolnok for questioning.
But, after two days, when the judge had gotten no admissions from the
iron-willed woman, she was allowed to go home under the impression that she had
bluffed the authorities. Meanwhile, they had searched her house and found
evidence of a murder business, suggestive of Rome under the Borgias. In the
attic of the house belonging to this woman, who was not a licensed midwife
though the best general nurse in either village, they found hidden away a large
supply of arsenic flypaper. Between the floor-boards of the attic and the
ceiling of the room below were a dozen pint bottles carefully corked and filled
with water, in which this same flypaper was soaking. The other bottles contained
the arsenic-saturated solution from which the papers had been removed.
Taking samples from the bottles and replacing the liquid
they had removed with, an equal amount of water, they left things so the woman
would not suspect that her poison hoard had been found. For two days after her
return the poison merchant stayed in her home as if nothing had happened, and
then, as the authorities hoped, curiosity began to burn her up. She just had to
find out if someone had talked and to caution all the other members how to act.
The second evening after her return she set out on a round of calls. Every few
minutes her shawled head turned around that her sharp old eyes might assure her
that nobody was following. Nevertheless, she was shadowed most expertly and
every house she visited was noted. Also it was noted that in every case she
conversed with a woman who had been at least once a widow. On the next evening
her ringing of widows’ doorbells began and ended with that of Frau Szabo, the
precentor’s neighbor. This husband and brother killer had been returned to her
own abode on the understanding that if she would co-operate with the
authorities, she would get off easy. A detective was hidden within earshot when
the nurse called, but apparently some warning, perhaps involuntary, passed from
the widow Szabo to the widow Fazekas, for after a few perfunctory remarks about
the weather, the caller went straight home.
Realizing that their bird was warned, the police made their
next move. The following morning the regular grave digger at the cemetery
between the two villages was astonished to find that the police had provided
him with a squad of assistants and orders to open 11 [illegible digit: 11?]
graves. No explanation was given, but the proceeding caused a sensation and
brought to the scene nearly the entire population of the communities. Among
them were the widow Fazekas and the eleven ladies she had called upon. The
eleven saw with dismay that the diggers were attacking the graves of their late
lamented husbands. The twelve ladies and another, a widow, making thirteen,
went into a huddle and after much whispering, dispersed. The thirteenth, who
proved to be the widow [of] Balint Czordas, then put on her best clothes and
went to the Hungarian capital, followed by police agents. At Budapest she
entered a chemist’s shop and a few moments later was seen to emerge with a
white and agitated face, for which one of the agents soon learned the reason.
She had asked if when a person dies of an arsenic solution, traces of the chemical
remain in the body. The chemist assured her that the poison can he detected by
a very simple test. She then wanted to know if any of it could still be found
when the body had been so long buried that the flesh had all disappeared. The
lady had seemed surprised to learn that it could still be found in the hair and
finger nails. Balint [Chordas’s widow] returned to town, informed the nurse of
the bad news and was arrested on her way out. With the eleven widows whose
husbands were being exhumed and the presenter’s neighbor, she was taken to the
jail at Szolnok, where the ghastly story of the “Widow Makers” rapidly began to
come out. As the officers began to arrest her she drank a glass of lye, for
eating grease out of pipes, and died after prolonged and terrible agony. She
gave herself a more agonizing death than any of her victims. The widows tried
changing the headstones in the cemetery by night, but a police guard stopped
that.
The receiving vault of the cemetery was turned into a morgue
where the presence of arsenic in the bodies of the eleven was speedily found.
After these had been returned to the earth it was also found in the remains of
the husband and brother of the presenter's widow-neighbor. After these came
more with the same result, thirty poisoned husbands in all, as the confessions
at Szolnok brought more and more crimes to light. And more and more widows were
arrested until nearly 100 of them are now in the Szolnok jail, accused of
belonging to the syndicate. Men, women and children peered in the windows of
the little morgue at the forms of men who had died during the last eighteen
years and whose widows have confessed that they put them away with a little of
the nurse’s “medicine.” Soon the confessions implicated almost every widow in
either of the two villages whose husband had breathed his last in bed during
the last decade and a half. So the authorities have just ordered that every
married man who died since 1911 shall be exhumed and examined. At the present
time the cemetery looks like one of the battlefields of the late war and every
widow will soon have the opportunity of looking again upon the features of her
late lamented. Thus far only the bodies of two women and half a dozen children
have been ordered disturbed.
At present there are nearly 100 widows in prison waiting
trial, and it has been predicted that before the last test has been made there
will be as many more prisoners. A few widows, far from protesting at this
wholesale digging up, have insisted on it. They maintain that their present
husbands will run away and that they will never be able to pet others unless
this chance, is offered to prove that they were not in the “Widow Making
Syndicate.” Incidentally, all marrying and giving in marriage seems to have
stopped in the vicinity. The institution of matrimony is not expected to
flourish again until the trials are over. An unexpected feature of the
exhumation was the finding in some of the coffins of bottles containing dried
out sediment of what was evidently the arsenic solution with which the crime
had been committed. In some also were remains of bread and cakes saturated with
the poison. This happened only when the nurse herself had been in charge of the
case. She took this queer method of getting the evidence out of the house. The
confessions showed that the widow [of] Balint Czordas [Christine] was the
second in command, a sort of vice-president of the murder syndicate. She
confessed to having helped poison twenty husbands and, also, during the hungry
years, just after the war, a few children who were hard to feed. The morning
after her confession the authorities wished to ask one or two more questions,
but she had committed suicide during the night. Three other widows, sharing her
cell, had watched Balint make a rope from bedding and hang herself, without
interfering.
The nurse started things in 1911 by showing the wife of
Lewis Takacs how to murder her husband. Seeing Lewis slip into his grave
without making any fuss, she went into the business of exterminating
unnecessary husbands. As midwife she had occasion to talk intimately with
wives, and if they were tired of their partners showed them the way out. Like
the surgeons, she charged according to how much her customer could pay. It is
said that she did the Takacs murder for “charity.” But she never revealed that
her “murder medicine” was just flypaper soaked in water. She had the delusion
that arsenic, in solution, could not he traced in a cadaver. One of her
customers poisoned two husbands and had bought the bottle for the third when
the police intervened. The widow Palinka only murdered one husband but it
worked so nicely that she could not resist getting more of the stuff and in two
years slipped six more members of her family, her parents, two brothers,
sister-in-law and aunt, into the graveyard. By so doing she inherited a nice
house and two and a half acres. This, however, was contrary to the rules of the
syndicate which was supposed to be entirely a man-killing enterprise, with an
occasional child thrown in, but never a woman. The Palinka widow did her work
with an ostentatious flourish. She would first administer a small dose, just
enough to give the victim a touch of cramps. Then, to cure this, she would rush
to the city and return with a bottle of expensive stomach medicine, from which,
in the sight of everyone, she would give the sick person generous doses till he
died, of course, she had poured out the original contents and refilled the
bottle with the flypaper water, obtained from the nurse.
Like many other part of Hungary since the war, this area has
been poverty-stricken and has practiced .he strictest economy in both
government and private circles. Government penuriousness has prevented proper
medical supervision of death certificates, which, with the hasty calls of the
overworked and underpaid doctors, made the murder syndicate’s work possible. Note:
This article gives Fazekas’ first name as Zsuzsi, while other sources give
Susanna or Suzanne
***
How Wives Gained
Power By Mass-Murder of Husbands
- In Hungary circa. 1929
Ghastly Widow-Making Syndicate Dealt on the Installment Plan
and Cost More Than 100 Lives Before Its Grisly Career Was Ended by Dramatic
Arrests in a Cemetery. Susi Olah was
stewing fly-paper for her husband’s dinner. Certainly it was an unusual dish –
but then Susi’s purpose was unusual. Not wifely love, but deep and bitter hate
urged the young girl to her task. A pretty creature of 18, she had been forced
to marry an old and disagreeable man. So now she was preparing her husband’s
dinner – not to feed him, but to kill him. And so, many long years ago, was
sown, the seed of one – of the most ghastly poison-massacres in history. A
slaughter of over 100 men, women and children – which is now recalled to mind
by the recent death in a Hungarian prison of one of the women involved in the
horrible mass murders in the villages of Nagyrev and Tiszakurt.
For Susi Olah succeeded in poisoning her old husband with
arsenic, soaked out of fly-paper. Not for a moment had this sinister girl
doubted she would succeed. Had she not, a few days before, tried out this
hell’s-brew on a pig? And had not the pig died? Assuredly. And in just the same
way would her husband die. He did. And Susi Olah, who had committed the
“perfect crime,” had a technique with which she was to help many other women
make widows of themselves. She was to live to dominate two villages as a feared
autocrat. And she was to die in a manner poetically just. One day in October,
1929, the police chief at Szolnok, Hungary, received an anonymous letter. It
told of a mysterious death, which was striking men down in the villages of
Szolnok and Tiszakurt.
The chief called on two detectives, Bartok and Frieska.
“This is probably written by a practical joker,” he said,
“but you’d better check on it.”
In Nagyrev, the two detectives went first to the village
inn. There were four men at the inn, and Bartok and Frieska bought them wine,
then discreetly questioned them.
Stark fear showed in the villagers’ eyes. They looked at
each other. Only one of them spoke.
“See the padre,” he mumbled. “He’ll tell you.”
The local clergyman was as frightened as everyone else
seemed to be. He ushered the officers into his study, pulled down the blinds
and then said: “Gentlemen, you have come
none too soon. Here we live in the constant shadow of death. For no apparent
reason, healthy and robust men suddenly sicken and die. This spring when Frau
Szabo’s old father died it was rumored that she and Susi Olah had poisoned him.
I called on Frau Szabo and questioned her. Of course she denied the rumor but
before I left she gave me a cup of tea. Within an hour I was violently ill. A
medical friend who was staying with me believed she had poisoned me.”
The two detectives looked at each other. Was the padre
crazy?
“You see, gentlemen,” he went on to explain, “in these
villages we nave neither doctor nor policeman. All death certificates are
signed by our coroner, who happens to be Susi Olah’s son-in-law.”
“Susi Olah,” mused Bartok. “That’s the woman named in the
letter to our chief.”
“You’ll find her a formidable opponent, gentlemen. And if
she discovers the rea for your visit you will be dead men. The superstitious
peasants are terrified of her. They believe she has supernatural powers and as
her official capacity as nurse and midwife gives her access to every family,
she dominates the entire district.”
“But why—” objected Bartok. ‘What’s behind it all?”
“I believe,” said the priest gravely, “that these murders
were originally caused by the grinding poverty of our unfortunate peasantry.
The aged, the crippled and unwanted children have sometimes proved too heavy a
burden for our poor. Then there were men who drank and beat their wives. These
men have gradually disappeared. And in their place the women, under Susi Olah,
have gained the upper hand.
“These villages, gentlemen, are utterly dominated by women.
And the men are all afraid for their lives!”
“Well,” growled Frieska. “they needn’t be while we’re here.”
Dramatically – almost, it seemed, magically – the detective
was given the lie. For as they stepped out of the priest’s house the darkness
suddenly quivered with a terrible howl of anguish. Drawing their guns, the two
detectives ran towards the inn. Suddenly Frieska tripped and sprawled to the
ground. He had fallen over the body of one of the four men with whom they had
talked in the inn — the very man who had told them to visit the padre. This man
was the uncle of Frau Szabo, the woman whom the priest suspected of trying to
murder him. The uncle had talked too much! And, to punish him and warn the
rest, the poisoner had shown the audacity to strike him down almost under the
very noses of investigating police. True, the death certificate said the man
had died of alcoholism – but the detectives, though they said nothing, knew
better. By now they were completely convinced that murder indeed was stalking
those two quiet little villages.
Detective Frieska
makes a bold move:
At the head of a body of police, he marched to Frau Szabo’s
house. Thunderously, he accused her of murdering her uncle. Taken unawares, the
woman broke down and confessed not only to this but to the murder of her father
as well She named Susi Olah and several other women as man-slayers. As a result
she, Susi Olah and six others were arrested and taken to Ezolnok for
questioning. There Frau Szabo calmly retracted her confession. She had been
bullied into making it, she said. What evidence had the police other than the
false admissions that a poor frightened old woman had been forced to make?
Bartok and Frieska scratched their heads They had no further evidence whatever.
A search of the houses of all the women concerned revealed absolutely nothing. So
Susi Olah and all the other women – except Frau Szabo – were released.
And Susi played right into the hands of the police. On the
night of her return to Nagyrev, she stole out of her house – apparently unaware
that detectives were hidden all around. From one neighbor’s house to another
she went – to warn her associates not to talk to the police. And Bartok calmly
noted the name of each family she visited. He felt certain that now he had a
list of women involved in the poisonings. Now, he decided, was the time to
start digging up the Nagyrev graveyard – exhuming the bodies of all men who had
died during recent years. If he could find traces of poison in the remains, his
case would be complete. And so that very night Bartok went to the graveyard to
look it over. And there he received a shock. Fortunately the sleuth approached
through the darkness quietly, and without showing a light. But there was a dim
light in the graveyard. It gleamed on polished tombstone, and on the heads of a
huddled group of women. Bartok slunk behind a massive headstone, and watched.
Nearer he dared not approach and so he couldn’t overhear the muttered
conversation of these crouching, beshawled crones. There were thirteen women in
that graveyard, and when a beam of light fell upon her witch’s face, Bartok
recognized the sinister Susi Olah as the ringleader. Apparently her visits had
been to summon this meeting – and after returning home she had crept out again
herself.
Surely, Bartok thought, these women can’t intend to dig up
the bodies themselves, and thus forestall police action? It would be a terrific
task. Then Susi Olah picked up a spade. She stuck it into the turf, and began
to pry up a small headstone. When the headstone came loose, four of those
huddled figures gripped it in their gnarled hands and moved it away—to another
grave.
Puzzled, Bartok watched while the headstone from this second
grave was removed, and lugged back to the first grave. And then, in a flash,
Bartok realized what they were up to. They were not digging up the bodies of
poisoned victims. Their plan was far subtler and easier to execute than that. They
were shuffling up the headstones!
If Bartok hadn’t caught them at it, he would have been
utterly baffled, when toxicologists later analyzed the remains found in the
graves. For, of course, the thirteen witches were putting the headstones of
their victims and placing them upon graves containing: the bodies of men who
had died naturally. Consequently the police scientists, when they came to
examine the bodies, would find no traces of poison whatever. Thanks to Susi
Olah’s scheme the investigation, instead of convicting the poisoners, would
give them an absolutely clean bill of health! And if Bartok hadn’t happened to
visit the graveyard that night, Susi would have got away with it. But Bartok
was there. Revolver in hand, his police whistle at his lips, the detective
leaped out from behind the stone. A shrill blast of the whistle split the
night, frightening the women into immobility, wakening the village, summoning
the other police officers. And Bartok’s gun kept them standing there, huddled
together with their shawls over their heads, until help came to arrest them. Next
day the grave-digger and ten grim men of the village set to work in the grisly
task of bringing back their dead friends from the grave, in order that their
mute and tragic testimony might serve to protect the living from a like fate.
The receiving vault of the cemetery was turned into a
temporary morgue. There doctors and laboratory technicians from Szolnok worked
far into the night testing the bodies for traces of arsenic. There seemed to be
no end to that horrid procession of bodies. And – each one contained arsenic,
including the corpse of a little child. In the coffin of one of Susi Olah’s
husbands (she had had two, and both had died mysteriously) a bottle of thick
syrup was found. It contained a deadly poison. More than 100 bodies contained
arsenic!
As a result of these horrible discoveries, 80 widows and two
men were arrested. Five were hanged, ten went to jail for life. And Susi Olah cheated
the gallows by taking some of her own “medicine.” One of her principal
assistants, another was named Balint Czordas, hanged herself with a rope of
bedding. But before she killed herself, Susi confessed. Her first murder, back
in 1911, had been to rid herself of her unpleasant old husband. Later, while
coming into contact with her neighbor women as midwife and nurse, it occurred
to her that there were many women who were fed up with their current husbands.
So she began to sell poison, with careful directions how it should be used. She
accepted her money in three equal payments—120 penges (about $20) down, another
$20 after the funeral and a third payment when the estate was settled. But not
always did Susi murder for money. There was her second husband, for example – a
handsome Don Juan who carried on with the younger and prettier women of the
village. Susi stood that for a very little while. Then, gleefully, she slipped
him a dose of “medicine” that effectively removed such ideas – and all other
ideas – from his mind forever.
HUNGARY, for some strange reason, seems to have occasional
epidemics of husband slaying. Similar to Susi’s profitable murder-business was
the brisk trade in death done by a 70- year-old widow Juliana Janos Nagy,
native of the little village of Csokmo in the Hungarian lowlands. In 1935 she
was hanged for murdering twenty husbands. She had started by poisoning her own
husband’s first wife so she could marry him. Then she poisoned him, and also
their five children, one by one, so that she would inherit all the dead man’s
estate. Then there was “Smoking Peter,” a big, man-hating woman who disguised
herself as a man. She taught disgruntled wives how to make their husbands
helpless by a peculiar tap on the back of the head then how to hang them up by
the neck, to make it appear suicide. But when one extra-husky and zealous wife
fractured her husband’s skull with the peculiar tap, the coroner investigated.
“Smoking Peter” went to the rope she had uncoiled for many a husband; two
widows were sentenced to life imprisonment and the rest to various shorter
terms.”
But none of these lesser man-slayers even approached Susi
Olah in the magnitude of her businesslike, large-scale widow-making – which
entitles her to go down in history as the only murderer to ever peddle death on
the installment plan!
*****
100 Husband
Poisoners Trapped Tell-Tale Finger Nails:
Budapest: A little knowledge of chemistry - recently
unlocked the secret to one of the most atrocious and astounding wholesale
murder plots of modern times. It revealed for the first time how 100 unwanted
husbands, in the little Hungarian village of Nagyrev, not far from here, have
been fatally poisoned by their own wives. The murder-crazed wives fed their
husbands a solution containing arsenic, dissolved from flypaper. The sudden
deaths of men of rugged health caused no suspicion, chiefly because of the lack
of proper medical supervision. But one day a strange, fantastic rumor reached
the authorities. Their investigation resulted in the bodies of several of the
husbands being removed from their graves. Even then the murderous wives felt
safe. The bodies had been buried so long that the flesh had disappeared and
they believed that traces of the arsenic solution would not be found.
The poison was discovered, however, another baby would be
reported dead by a simple test. For arsenic can be found on the finger nails of
those who die from its poisonous influence! Thus began a series of wholesale
arrests of many widows of Nagyrev. And out of the hitherto peaceful village
came a story of sinister proportions seldom equaled in the criminal history of
the world. It was unfolded in the Szolnok courthouse and the penalties imposed
upon the 100 wives ranged from hanging to at least fifteen years in prison. It
was a story of post-war greed for land, of family intrigues of a strange called
Mrs. Suzanne Fazekas, who moved through the village like a veritable she-devil.
According to the court testimony, it was she, who, for years, had instigated murder,
by selling the flypaper poison solution to wives who wanted to get rid of their
husbands. And, in the end, just as she was about to be arrested, she swallowed
a big dose of the fatal poison herself and died. Perhaps the most striking
explanation of the fiendish blight that had fallen upon the village was given
during one of the trials by the attorney for the defense, Dr. J. Viragy. After
picturing the smiling villages of Hungary in the long dead post-war days, he
said:
“Nagyrev was Eden then. Then the war came, the peace came;
poverty followed. Instead of plenty there was bareness, instead of joy –
despair. No priest ever visited them, no doctor came to cure their sick. In
Nagyrev – where most people could not read or write – desperation was breeding
greed.”
“And then comes into their midst the spirit of evil, re-born
in Suzanne Fazekas – an unlicensed village doctor, but known far and wide as
the ‘white Devil.’ She tempted them, as perhaps no women have ever been
tempted.”
Suzanne Fazekas was, indeed, respected everywhere in the
village by the dumb, red-cheeked peasants. She was a good doctor, an expert in
the sickroom. They spoke of her, in that superstitious village, as a wise
woman. It was the practice of many parents in the little village to have only
one child – so that the land would not be divided after their death. Often,
when an additional baby was born Mrs. Fazekas was called in. Soon after another
baby would be reported dead. Mrs. Fazekas’ first husband, died after a short
illness, but she did not mourn him for a long time. She married Fazekas, a
well-to-do peasant, who owned a house and. several acres of land. Less than two
years later he contracted a mysterious “disease” and died, leaving her his
little fortune. There were many women in the village who envied the Widow
Fazekas. She now owned her own property, and had no husband to bother her or
dictate to her. There was one woman, whose disabled husband was a burden on her
shoulders; another, whose husband came home from the war blind, while she had
to care for the small farm; another, whose husband could not work; another, who
liked to have a good time, but could not because of her husband’s objections.
And another – and another – and another.
She showed the women how to soak the poisonous paper in
water – she sold them the arsenic-imbued liquid, half a tumblerful of which
would suffice to kill five horses – or an unfortunate, trusting husband, or
brother. If a doctor were called in from a neighboring town, and he prescribed
any medicine, the best thing to do was to pour the fly-tox arsenic into it.
Whose fault if the prescription didn’t agree with the patient and he died half
an hour after taking it or maybe several days later? But the doctors seldom
came. Like many other parts of Hungary since the war, this area has been
poverty stricken, and has practiced the strictest economy in government and
private endeavors. Proper medical supervision was impossible, and the few,
overworked, underpaid doctors seldom visited Nagyrev. They thought that Suzanne
Fazekas was competent enough to attend to the medical needs of the small
populace. And thus it was that year after year more mysterious deaths of more
robust husbands were reported. For twenty years this horrible nightmare continued.
The ignorant, hard-hearted, greedy peasant women were the tools of Suzanne
Fazekas, and paid her in land, in money and in grain. Thus grew lip an almost
incredible widow-making syndicate. The men of die village trembled when robust
friends they knew so well, suddenly died. But they did not understand. They did
not understand, perhaps, until the last few moments of life, when, writhing in
agony, the awful realization of what had happened dawned upon them, and they
saw the fiendish glitter in the eyes of their wives.
Still the secret remained. The authorities did not suspect.
There was not even a rumor to disturb the merry widows of Nagyrev. Then one day
the ten-yearly census was taken in Hungary. The authorities, examining the
statistics, were struck by the fact that at Nagyrev, where in 1919 the
population was 3,700, the birth-rate exceeded the death rate by only 36,
instead of at least 340, as it should have been on the usual basis. An
investigation was started. It revealed the sudden deaths of young and
middle-aged men in good health. The causes of their illnesses were vaguely
explained. Suzanne Fazekas was arrested. She denied knowing anything
extraordinary about the deaths of the husbands. When she was allowed to go home
free, under the impression that she had outwitted the authorities. Meanwhile
her me was searched. In the attic was found a large supply of the arsenic
fly-paper. Neatly arranged, on shelves were bottles filled with water, in which
the flypaper was soaking. Other bottles contained the arsenic-saturated
solution from which the been removed.
The moment Mrs. Fazekas returned from Budapest to Nagyrev
she was followed, though she did not know it. Detectives observed that she made
hasty visits to many women in the village. They heard words of warning to the
merry – but now rather startled – widows. Hoping to steal a march on the
widows, the authorities went to the village cemetery. Grave diggers were put to
work to disinter several bodies of men who had died mysteriously, so that they
might be examined.
But they found some of the widows had been ahead of them.
They had visited the cemetery and changed around the tombstones to confuse the
authorities. The latter, however, succeeded in removing the bodies of some of
the poisoned husbands. The widows went to Suzanne Fazekas in fear. But she
assured them that arsenic, in solution, could not be traced in a disintegrated
body. But the authorities, meanwhile, had learned about a telltale finger nail
test. They looked for dark splotches under the finger nails which conclusively
proved the presence of arsenic poisoning.
With this evidence they went first to the home of Suzanne
Fazekas. She saw them come in. She looked wildly about her for a chance to
escape. There was none. But on the table was a bottle containing the arsenic
solution – intended for another unwanted husband. The “wise woman” of Nagyrev
seized it and poured part of the contents down her throat. Then from her came a
wild scream. Her death was as agonizing as those of her victims. After that the
authorities checked up on additional rumors, on records strangely kept in
Suzanne’s room and within a short time 100 widows were arrested – charged with
murdering their husbands! Some of them were even accused of poisoning their
fathers and brothers. With the word of Suzanne’s suicide the other widows
became panic stricken. Four of them committed suicide in jail while awaiting
trial of the first batch of prisoners brought to trial one was sentenced to
death and four to life imprisonment. All were ordered to pay the costs of the
prosecution, with the result that the little cottages, the small patches of
land, which were their incentives to commit murder, were sold.
This was not the first time, however, that a nightmarish
orgy of murders, instigated by women, has descended upon the peasants of
Hungary. The nation has known cases similar in every detail; the same horror,
inhuman purpose and indifferent disregard for human life. So it is not entirely
surprising that these horrible tales should have fired a spark in the distorted
mind of Suzanne Fazekas. Where she came from, when first she entered Nagyrev
twenty years ago, no one knew. She appeared to have many high recommendations
from physicians and, because of the inaccessibility of the village, authorities
were glad there was someone to minister to the need? of the populace. With the
passing of the wise woman and the arrests of the murderers, peace is settling
once more upon the village of Nagyrev.
The peasants gather in clusters in the
dusk and speak with awe of the “White Devil,” and of the “she-devils,” for they
are superstitious and many of them fear the Evil Eye.
They say now that an evil, spread over twenty years, at last
has been banished. And they are happy, like children are in the broad daylight,
when they, think back on some fantastic nightmare.
*****
Many Husbands Poison Victims
Scores of Women in Hungary Accused of Murder of Spouses
(Reprinted with permission from The LeMars Globe-Post, Nov. 11, 1929, @ pages A-5 and A-8)
Budapest.—Further details of the wholesale poisoning of
husbands In the Hungarian province of Satolnok, on the Theiss, 54 miles
southeast of here, are causing a sensation. In this country. More than fifty exhumations in Nagyren and
Tiszakurt and neighboring villages have brought the number of husbands known to
have been poisoned to death up to an even hundred, while scores of widows have
been arrested charged with murder, or held as suspects, until the causes of the
demise of their husbands can be Investigated.
So far the police have traced these murders back over a
period of 15 years – and suspect several of an earlier date. According to the
national police. It has been proved that in the winter of 1914-15, after all
able-bodied men had departed for the World war, some of their wives, being
lonely, begun to go about with young men below military age, and, first in jest
and then seriously, organized a “war widow cult,” which devised means to get
rid of the husbands who returned from the war.
They Used
Toadstools and Rat Poison:
The “cult” has been talked about jokingly ever since the
war, until three of the second husbands riled mysterious deaths and a fourth,
feeling that he had been poisoned, told the police. They received his
information with incredulity, but an investigation was started, and recently
the first arrests were made, confessions of some were recorded, and the series
of exhumations began. According to the confessions the principal poisons used
were toadstools served as mushrooms, and rat poison containing arsenic. The
founders of the “cult,” according to the police, are three widows who disposed
of their husbands In 1918, although before the existence of the organization
other husbands had died from poison, as their exhumed bodies revealed.
Apparently envious of the facility of the trio in exchanging old mates for new,
other women from time to time followed their example with great success. Only
when the alarming percentage of deaths among supposedly healthy land owners of
the province of Szolnok became the subject of general gossip did the police
step in.
98 Women Arrested:
“The official investigation quickly spread from Tiszakurt
and Nagyren to Nagy-Nev and Ujecske. Of the 98 women arrested the evidence
resulting from exhumations is overwhelming against 51. These and the remainder
under suspicion have been transferred to the prison at Szolnok, capital of the
province, lest the men in the region storm the village jail to revenge their
brothers and friends who have been done to death. “In the present instance,”
the police report says, “gossip at Tizakurt pointed it finger to two midwives,
Mmes. Fazekas and Papal who in the last ten years were reported to have amassed
sizable fortunes; gossip also said they were addicted to blackmail, and whenever
in need of cash knew how to raise a hundred of pengoes from widows and others.”
The two midwives fled before the police could arrest them and hanged themselves
from the rafers of a kitchen in a house where they sought asylum.
TheMidwives Offered Their Services:
From the accusations which followed these dramatic deaths,
which also amounted to confessions in the ease of almost every person who made
them, the police learned that the two women, as early as 1911 had visited
various households where the husbands were either blind, in their dotage or
otherwise troublesome, and offered their services. One of the accused widows,
who has been more frequently blackmailed by the pair, made use of them an seven
occasions. The mental attitude of the wives of Szolnok is thus analyzed by
Father Laszlo Toth, pastor of Tiszakurt, the whole community of which is
Calvinist:
“The peasants hereabouts are mean and grasping, and think
only of money and comfort. All the women, who somehow seem stronger than the
men, are married two or three times. Spiritually they have no existence, nor
yearning for spirituality. My church is empty although I must admit that among
the accused are several of my few faithful – women who have been active in all
kinds of parish work.”
As always, stay safe !
Bird
***
