In the spring of 1916 Márton Kresinszky, who owned the house in Cinkota outside Budapest that his tenant Béla Kiss had left when he went to war, decided to renovate it. A neighbor who had known him for years, the pharmacist Béla Takács, told him Kiss had been called up in 1914 and was said to have died in 1915, and went with him to the room beside Kiss's workshop to look for building material. There they found seven tin drums, each about a meter long and half a meter wide, their lids sealed airtight with lead. They pried the top one open with an axe. There was a terrible smell, and inside was a bag, and in the bag was the body of a woman. When they opened a second drum a lock of blonde hair fell out. They went to the authorities, and the chief notary, Gyula Huszka, and the police found a woman's body in every one of the seven. The search of the property went on until it had found twenty-four bodies: twenty-three women and one man.
Kiss was born in 1877 in Izsák, in Hungary, to János Kiss and Verona Varga, and had lived in Cinkota since 1900. In 1907 the newspaper Magyar Nemzet described him as an unmarried tinsmith with his own business, of good character, out of debt and good for credit. He was well liked, though never intimate with his neighbors. In 1912 he hired a housekeeper, a Mrs. Jakubec, who noticed that he wrote to a great many women, through advertisements he placed offering himself as a matrimonial agent or a fortune teller, and that he sometimes brought one of them home alone. The townspeople noticed he had been collecting metal drums, and when the local police asked about them he said he was filling them with fuel against the rationing that war would bring.
The writer Frigyes Karinthy was at the Cinkota cemetery when the drums were opened on the autopsy table. He described how, after the second, everyone present knew how to turn the drum, how deep to reach, and where to find the cord around the neck of the woman inside, with its loop leading down to the legs and knotted there, the work of a collector who understood his craft and "likes order." Each woman had been strangled and preserved in alcohol in the sealed drum. The police found puncture marks on the necks and bodies drained of blood, and some believed Kiss had been practicing vampirism.
Charles Nagy, the head of the Budapest detectives, asked the army to arrest Kiss at once if he was still alive and possibly a prisoner of war; his name was a very common one. Nagy held the housekeeper and asked the post office to intercept letters to Kiss in case he had an accomplice. Kiss had left Jakubec money in his will, but she said she knew nothing of the murders, and she showed the police a locked room he had told her never to enter. It held bookcases, many of the books about poisons and strangulation, and a desk containing a photograph album and his correspondence with seventy-four women, the oldest letters dating from 1903. From them Nagy worked out the method. Kiss answered women looking for marriage, usually middle-aged, chose those with no relatives nearby and no one who would quickly miss them, courted them and persuaded them to send him money. Old court records showed that two of the women had sued him for money he had taken. Both had disappeared, and both cases had been dismissed.
On October 4, 1916, Nagy received a letter saying Kiss was being treated in a hospital in Serbia, where he had fought and been captured. By the time Nagy got there Kiss had gone, leaving the body of another soldier in his bed. Every sighting the Hungarian police followed up after that proved false.
The theory grew that he had faked his death by exchanging identities with a dead soldier named Mackaree. Rumors had him in a Romanian prison for burglary, or dead of yellow fever in Turkey. In 1920 a soldier of the French Foreign Legion reported a fellow legionnaire called Hoffman, a name Kiss had used in some of his letters, who boasted of how well he could use a garrote and who fitted Kiss's description; Hoffman deserted before the police reached him. The last supposed sighting came in 1932, when a New York homicide detective, Henry Oswald, was certain he had seen Kiss coming out of the subway at Times Square. There were rumors he was working in the city as a janitor, and when the police went to question the janitor he had already left. Kiss was never tried, and neither his fate nor the true number of his victims has ever been established. Antonin Artaud's play Thirty-Two was drawn from the case.