Júlia FAZEKAS
"The Angel Makers of Nagyrév"
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Poisoner - Group of women who poisoned to death an estimated 300 people
Number of victims: 45 +
Date of murder: 1911 - 1929
Date of arrest: November 1929
Date of birth: ????
Victim profile: Men (husbands, fathers, brothers)
Method of murder: Poisoning (arsenic)
Location: Nagyrév/Tiszakurt, Satolnok, Hungary
Status: Committed suicide by hanging herself in November 1929
"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.
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 POWs 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 1920s, 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.
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 newspaper 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
By Katherine Ramsland - Trutv.com
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
By Jim Fish - BBC News
March 29, 2004
A two-hour drive south-east of Budapest, the village of Nagyrev is like countless others dotted across the Danubian plain.
Modest single-storey homes line its few muddy streets. But beneath its pastoral exterior, Nagyrev nurses a dark secret.
Nearly a century ago, with Worl 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.
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 realised 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 onwards, 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".
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 behaviour to their wives "improved markedly".
Zsuzsi Fazekas, Hungarian Serial Killer Leader of Serial Killers – 1929
UnknownMisandry.org
100 Self-Made Widows in One Jail – Husband Poisoners
Rumours 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
The American Weekly
Nov. 24, 1929
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 precentor of Nagyrev let it out in a burst of temper. It seems that the precentor, 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 precentor 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 precentor 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 precentor’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 precentor’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
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How Wives Gained Power By Mass-Murder of Husbands - Hungary 1929
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How Wives Gained Power By Mass-Murder Of Husbands
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
Oakland Tribune
Nov. 7, 1937
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 decided on 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
How an Unfailing Microscopic Test Led to Wholesale Arrests of Much Surprised Widows Charged With Getting Rid of Husbands They Didn’t Want
Ogden Standard-Examiner
Feb. 9, 1930
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
LeMars Globe-Post
Nov. 11, 1929
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.
Used Toadstools, 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.
Midwives Offer 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.”
