Bela Kiss was born in Hungary in 1877 and by 1900 was living at Czinkota, a village outside Budapest, working as a tinsmith. He was liked locally, had a housekeeper, and was known to have an unlucky private life, his young wife having run off with another man in 1912.
He placed advertisements in the matrimonial columns of Budapest newspapers under an assumed name, corresponded with women, and in several cases persuaded them to hand over money. Between 1900 and 1914 at least twenty-four disappeared. He is remembered as the Monster of Czinkota.
He kept them at the house in metal drums, preserved in wood alcohol. He had told the village constable that the drums held petrol he was stockpiling against the coming war, and the constable had accepted it.
He was called up in 1914. In 1916, with the house standing empty, soldiers searching for stored fuel opened the drums. Each held the body of a woman, strangled, with the neck punctured.
By then Kiss had been reported dead at the front. The Hungarian police concluded he had swapped identity discs with a dead comrade, and there were reported sightings for decades afterwards, in Budapest in 1919, in Romania, and in New York in the 1930s. He was never found and no trial ever took place. Nothing about the later part of his life is established.