Béla Kiss was a tinsmith in Cinkota, a village just outside Budapest, when the First World War began. In 1914 he went into the army and did not come back. In May 1916, while the war was still being fought, seven sealed metal drums he had left behind were opened at Cinkota. Each held the body of a woman. Police in Budapest quickly concluded that Kiss had met the women through marriage ads, taken their savings and strangled them, and the case pushed war news off the front pages of Hungarian newspapers for a time, according to a later account in the weekly HVG.
He was never arrested. By the time the bodies were found, the army had already recorded him as a prisoner of war who had died of typhus at Valjevo in Serbia. Police did not trust that record, a court offered a reward for his capture alive, and for years afterward newspapers in Europe and America printed reports that he had been seen. None was confirmed. No court ever tried him, so each of the killings is attributed to him by the police and press of the time, not proven against him. Hungarian criminology writing counts him as the country's first serial killer, HVG reported in 2007, though he remained little known in Hungary itself.
In Hungarian the family name comes first, so contemporary Hungarian papers wrote of "Kiss Béla". In German he has been called "Bela Kuss," HVG noted. The village appears as Cinkota in the Hungarian press of 1916.
Little about Kiss's early life can be confirmed. The Hungarian press of May 1916 concentrated on the case, not on his childhood. The writer Dezső Kosztolányi, writing in the papers Világ and Hét, visited the house and tied Kiss's criminality to an unhappy childhood without parents, according to a 2014 study of the case by Henrietta Trádler. That was Kosztolányi's interpretation, offered as journalism, and it is not a documented record of Kiss's upbringing.
Some of his adult movements were traced by the police in 1916. At the request of the Budapest state police, the Vienna police established that Kiss had lived in Vienna and had kept three apartments there over time. From 1898 to 1900 he worked in Vienna for an electrical engineer, who told police that Kiss liked the company of maids and sought them out, according to the Nagyvárad paper Tiszántúl of May 18, 1916. The same report said that in Vienna he had lived for a time with a woman in her twenties who had come from Budapest, and that they had a child together. The Vienna police thought this woman was probably Julia Pesadik, a name that later appeared in Budapest lists of the Cinkota victims.
By 1933 the Budapest police file, as described by the paper Hétfői Napló, placed his residence in Cinkota from 1903 until 1914. He worked there as a tinsmith.
The common thread in the police findings was the marriage ad. Kiss placed small notices in Budapest papers seeking a wife or a partner. Trádler's study names the Friss Újság as one of the papers he used. He signed his notices with the code "red carnation, white carnation," HVG reported. Several hundred letters from women were later found in his home, and police established that he had written to more women than the seven found at Cinkota, some of whom had been reported missing.
Women who answered were invited to meet him in Budapest and then to visit Cinkota. The press accounts of 1916 described a consistent pattern. Kiss promised marriage, often talked of emigrating together to America, and persuaded the woman to bring or send her savings. In the cases reported, he spoke of emigrating to America. The Tiszántúl wrote on May 14, 1916, that whenever the police had questioned him about a missing woman, he said he had sent her to America and the inquiry was closed. The paper estimated at that point that eight to ten women had been robbed and killed over about ten years, and it blamed the lonely-hearts columns of the Budapest press for giving him his opportunity.
One early encounter was reconstructed by investigators in May 1916. A woman who had placed an ad in 1903, looking to marry a state employee and having some money of her own, was met at an inn by three men. One introduced himself as Kiss János, an employee of the state railways, and presented a woman as his cousin. He pressed for a quick engagement and produced two rings. A friend of the woman then warned her that the suitor was really Béla Kiss, a tinsmith, and said that Kiss had also promised to marry her and had taken 80 forints from her in Cinkota. The friend later disappeared from Budapest, and the paper suspected she had become one of his victims. That suspicion was never confirmed.
Kiss was called up in July 1914, according to the police file summarized by Hétfői Napló in 1933. The last official report placed him in Serbian captivity in December 1914, held at Valjevo. A military report, as described by HVG in 2007, said he had been taken prisoner and died of typhus at Valjevo on February 5, 1915. The 1933 police summary added a different version: that he had been freed when Austro-Hungarian forces retook the town, and then disappeared.
Before he left, he gave a bundle of letters to the woman who cleaned for him. Those letters later became evidence.
The bodies were found in early May 1916. Trádler dates the discovery to May 9, 1916. The Pesti Hírlap reported the case on May 14, according to HVG.
The authorities, already sure that Kiss was responsible, set about identifying the women.
The police also sought a man who had worked for Kiss. A Cinkota blacksmith told them that Kiss had carted tin drums away years earlier, and the authorities ordered digging elsewhere in the village, the Tiszántúl reported on May 12. Searches across Cinkota found no further victims, HVG wrote in 2007.
The drums were opened in the presence of officials, among them an official physician, Dr. Andreánszky. Relatives and acquaintances came to look at clothing and belongings. The Tiszántúl's issues of May 12 and 13 reported the identifications as they were made.
A woman identified the first body as her sister, Mária Tóth. A second was identified as Margit Tóth; her father's name was given in the report. A third was identified as Katalin Varga, a maid. The sixth drum, reported in the May 13 issue, held a woman whom her sister identified as Katalin Kukán. Katalin had disappeared from Budapest in 1912. She had written once afterward, saying she had found a position with a family and was going to America.
When the Hétfői Napló reviewed the file in 1933, it listed five victims identified by name: Katalin Vargha, Margit Tóth, Katalin Kukán, Mária Tóth and Juliska Pesadik. The 1933 list does not include a sixth woman whose identification was reported in 1916.
That woman was Eszter Fekete, known as Eszti, from the village of Csatár in Bihar County. Her story is the fullest of any victim in the record, because her sister gave a long interview to the Tiszántúl and her father came to see the bodies. According to her sister, Eszti was born in 1882 to a well-off farming family. She married a knife-grinder in Nagyvárad in 1902 and left him in 1909, saying he had mistreated her. She then went to Cinkota to work as a cook in a restaurant and stayed until 1911. In early March 1911 she came home to Csatár and told her family she was engaged to a tinsmith who wanted to emigrate to America. She said she needed about 400 crowns and had only about 300, and asked her parents for 100 crowns and bedding. Her father refused. She went back to Cinkota on March 4, and the family heard no more. They assumed she was in America until they read about the Cinkota case in the newspaper.
Her sister described her as an attractive, red-haired woman of medium height who wanted to marry again. Among the letters Kiss had left with his cleaner, police found letters from Eszti and letters from Kiss to her, along with one addressed to her father. One, signed with her name, said she had arrived safely, was managing, and had found a family with whom she was going to America. Her father identified her, and he recognized her handwriting among the seized letters. The police then confirmed, the paper reported on May 16, that she had not gone to America but had been killed at Cinkota.
A soldier who had known her wrote to the Nagyvárad police that spring. He said she had held an accident insurance policy whose premiums were later paid by others, and he suggested that Kiss might have tried to collect on it. The Nagyvárad police passed the letter to the state police. No result of that inquiry was reported.
The press of 1916 often called the victims maidservants and cooks. Trádler's research into their lives found a more varied group, including older single women with uncertain finances.
The finding at Cinkota set off a wave of reports from people who had lost touch with a woman. Some leads pointed to further victims; others ended well. A seamstress told police that in 1909 a maid named Irma, for whom she had made clothes, had been taken with Kiss and had been missing since. A cleaning woman in Budapest told police she believed her sister Juliska had been killed in 1913. A merchant from Kraków reported that a cook who worked for him had left her savings with him and asked him to send the money only when she wrote with an agreed sign; she later wrote that she was living with a tinsmith in Cinkota, he sent the money, and he never heard from her again. None of these women was among those identified at Cinkota.
Other missing women turned out to be alive. Police established in May 1916 that Julia Besan, who had been reported missing, was married and living elsewhere, the Tiszántúl reported on May 13.
In the first days of the inquiry police focused on a man who had worked for Kiss. On May 12 the Tiszántúl reported that a Budapest detective, Imre Helányi, had taken a statement from J. N., described as a friend who had shared a hospital room with Kiss. J. N. was said to have told the detective that he knew of cases in which Kiss moved barrels and that he had helped Kiss buy sheet metal for them. The paper said his account was inconsistent, which made him a suspect. He was taken to Budapest police headquarters, the paper reported on May 13.
By May 16, according to the Tiszántúl, he had given a fuller statement. He said Kiss had hired him in 1911 as a day laborer at three crowns a day, that he had no close relationship with Kiss, and that he had asked about the barrels and been told they belonged to the landlord and were not to be touched. He admitted that he had often carried Kiss's written notices to newspaper offices and brought back the replies. Police captain Kóródy had arrested him as an accomplice. He was fingerprinted and questioned again. On May 19 the paper said he had repeated his earlier testimony to the investigating judge.
One report complicates the picture. The Tiszántúl of May 17 said police had found a man of the same name, an electrical fitter described as a friend of Kiss, at the airfield in Klosterneuburg and were bringing him to Budapest. Whether this was the same man as the day laborer is not clear.
The case against J. N. went to court. He was acquitted in 1918, Trádler writes, and with that acquittal no one was ever punished for the seven killings.
The first question was whether Kiss was alive. On May 12 the Tiszántúl reported the testimony of a soldier who said he had seen Kiss die at Valjevo and had seen him buried there.
Other witnesses said otherwise. A woman who ran a food stall told Budapest police that a soldier who had eaten at her stand matched Kiss's description. He told her he had just been released from Serbian captivity and wanted to marry, that he had placed ads and received many replies, and he asked her to answer the letters for him. She refused. A waiter who had served at Valjevo told investigators that he knew Kiss and that Kiss had vanished without trace when Valjevo was evacuated. Letters reached the Vienna authorities, mostly from around that city, claiming that Kiss was alive in Vienna under another name.
On May 20 the Tiszántúl reported that the Pest district court had offered 3,000 crowns to anyone who captured Kiss alive, or who gave the authorities information that led to his capture alive. Police never closed the file, HVG reported in 2007. They suspected that he had taken on a new identity during the war. His body was never found.
The Cinkota case became a sensation in wartime Hungary, and the press argued about its own role. The Tiszántúl's editorial of May 14 called for the government to ban lonely-hearts and marriage-broker columns for the duration of the state of emergency, and permanently after the war. It asked which Budapest paper's advertising editor had helped him, and whether the papers that had taken his money would be held responsible. A later editorial returned to the subject and urged readers to throw such papers out.
Ignotus, in a published comment, complained that he saw children reading the Cinkota news on trams and in parks, and asked whether such material could be kept from them; the Tiszántúl answered that the press that had enjoyed complete freedom was now discovering the harm. The paper Népszava reported that ballads about the killings were being sung by vendors at a Budapest fair to crowds of children and adults, and that cheap pamphlets on the case were selling widely. It blamed the afternoon papers for writing, in effect, for the same readers. Trádler's study found that the penny literature of the time cast Kiss as a demon, often picturing him suffering in Hell. Police also found in the house a book about the Austrian serial killer Hugo Schenk, Trádler notes. Kosztolányi, by contrast, wrote psychological portraits of him in Világ and Hét.
Over the following decades Kiss was reported in many places. None of these reports was confirmed.
A fellow villager said he had partied with Kiss in Győr long after his reported death, HVG wrote. Years after the war, he was reportedly recognized as a harsh sergeant of the French Foreign Legion. The Hungarian police sent their file to France, and the Belgian writer Jean-Marie Parasie later found it among French intelligence papers, according to HVG.
In 1932, HVG wrote, American sources claimed that a New York detective believed he had seen Kiss in Times Square, recognizing him from a published photograph, and lost him in the crowd.
In July 1933, the Hétfői Napló reported that police in Kansas City had detained an elderly Hungarian-born farmer on suspicion of being Kiss, after a business dispute led to questions about his papers. He denied it, said he had never met Kiss, and said he had come to the United States in 1920. The Kansas City police asked Budapest for Kiss's photograph and records. The Budapest police pulled an old photograph of him in uniform with a rifle and a large mustache. The paper called the earlier rumors from Serbia, Turkey and the Foreign Legion baseless, and described the Kansas City inquiry as the first official lead in years. The outcome of that inquiry is not known.
Around the year 2000 the journalist and local historian György Réz researched the case, with Ágnes Benedek, also a journalist and local historian, HVG reported in 2007. Réz noted that claims about Kiss's large library and his links to an occult circle in Budapest were unproven. In 2007 Parasie was writing a documentary novel about the case. Trádler's 2014 study, published in the yearbook of the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre, argued that the case had never been properly analyzed in its historical setting and examined how the press, writers and penny literature had interpreted it.
The case has a long life in popular culture outside Hungary. Antonin Artaud wrote a screenplay, "Thirty-Two," for a silent film that was never made; in it Kiss is a professor, not a tinsmith, HVG noted. A Canadian comics artist named a wizard in a 1991 comic after him, and bands in New York and Finland have used his name or story.
The number of victims. The official count from 1916 is seven women, the number of bodies found. Foreign articles later gave nine or 23, and Artaud's screenplay used 32, HVG reported. Police believed there were more victims among the women he had written to, but no further bodies were found.
Who the victims were. Five names appear in the 1933 police summary and a sixth, Eszter Fekete, was reported identified in 1916. Spellings vary between reports.
Whether Kiss died in 1915. A military report and one soldier's testimony said he died at Valjevo. Other witnesses said he vanished alive, and the police never accepted his death as proven.
The later sightings in Győr, Vienna, the Foreign Legion, New York and Kansas City were never confirmed.
1898 to 1900: Kiss works in Vienna for an electrical engineer (Vienna police, 1916).
1903: A woman who answered his ad meets a suitor calling himself Kiss János.
1903 to 1914: Lives in Cinkota, near Budapest, as a tinsmith (Budapest police file, as summarized in 1933).
1909: A maid named Irma, later linked to him, goes missing.
1911: Hires a day laborer, J. N.; in March, Eszter Fekete returns to Cinkota after telling her family she was engaged to a tinsmith, and is not heard from again.
1912: Katalin Kukán disappears from Budapest.
July 1914: Called up to the army.
December 1914: Reported in Serbian captivity at Valjevo.
February 5, 1915: Date of his death from typhus at Valjevo given in a military report.
May 1916: Seven sealed drums containing the bodies of women are found at Cinkota (Trádler dates the discovery to May 9).
May 12 and 13, 1916: The Tiszántúl reports the opening of the drums and the identification of several women by relatives.
May 13, 1916: The Tiszántúl reports that J. N. has been taken to Budapest police headquarters; he is later arrested as an accomplice.
May 14, 1916: Pesti Hírlap reports the case.
May 20, 1916: Reward of 3,000 crowns reported for Kiss's capture alive.
1918: J. N. acquitted.
1932: Reported sighting in Times Square, New York; never confirmed.
July 1933: Kansas City police detain a Hungarian-born farmer on suspicion of being Kiss; Budapest sends records.
2007: HVG reports that the police file was never closed and that a Belgian writer found the Foreign Legion file in French archives.
2014: Henrietta Trádler's study of the case is published in Szentendre.