On the night of December 29, 1610, György Thurzó, the Palatine of Hungary, arrived at the castle of Csejte, in what is now western Slovakia, and arrested its owner at her dinner table. Elizabeth Báthory was fifty, the widow of one of the kingdom's most celebrated soldiers and a member of one of its most powerful families. In a letter to his wife Thurzó described what he had found in the house: one girl dead and another still alive. No one appears to have asked the survivor what had happened to her; she recovered and did not testify. What he told her guests and the people of the district was that he had caught her in the act. The two accounts do not match, and that gap between the letter and the announcement runs through everything that is known about the case.
He also arrested four servants who were said to have done the killing with her or for her: Ilona Jó, who had been nurse to her children; Dorottya Szentes, called Dorkó; János Újváry, called Ficzkó, a young man; and Katarína Benická, a washerwoman. They were taken to Thurzó's seat at Bytča and tried there in two hearings, on January 2 and January 7, 1611, before a panel led by the royal judge Teodor Syrmiensis. All four had been tortured before they testified, as was ordinary practice at the time. They admitted to helping their mistress torture young women and to burying them, and put the number of dead at anywhere from thirty-six to fifty-one, the figure shifting from one deposition to the next. They blamed each other, blamed Báthory, and blamed a servant named Anna Darvulia, who was already dead.
What they described was systematic cruelty inside the household: girls beaten, burned, starved, stuck with pins, left out in the cold, and buried secretly when they died. The victims they described were at first peasant girls taken into service and later daughters of the lesser nobility sent to the household, as was the custom, to be trained. The sentences were carried out at once. Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentes had their fingers torn off with red-hot pincers and were burned alive. Újváry, as the youngest, was beheaded before his body was burned. Benická said she had been abused by the others and forced to take part, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Another woman accused as an accomplice, Erzsi Majorova, escaped the first arrests; she was caught later and burned alive.
Báthory herself was never tried. Thurzó had gathered the statements of 289 witnesses in the course of his investigation, and on paper that is an overwhelming case. Read closely it is much thinner. More than 250 of those witnesses offered hearsay or nothing at all. The famous figure of 650 victims comes from a single witness at the second hearing, a woman named Zsuzanna, who testified that Báthory's court official, Jakab Szilvássy, had seen a list in one of her private books. Szilvássy gave evidence himself and never mentioned it, and the book was never produced.
The decision not to try her was a decision about her family as much as about her. A trial and a conviction would have meant the forfeiture of her estates and a public shame on some of the greatest names in Hungary. Her relatives were grateful. On February 12, 1611, her son-in-law Miklós Zrínyi wrote to Thurzó thanking him for choosing the lesser of two evils, a judgment that, he said, had preserved the family's honor and shielded it from too great a shame. Because she was never convicted, her property passed to her family instead of to the Crown.
She was born Erzsébet Báthory in 1560, by the usual account on August 7, on a family estate at Nyírbátor in eastern Hungary, and grew up at Ecsed Castle. Her father, George Báthory, and her mother, Anna Báthory of Somlyó, came from the two branches of the same family, and both were dead by 1570. Through her mother she was the niece of Stephen Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, who became King of Poland. She was engaged at fourteen, and on May 8, 1575, at the palace of Varannó, she married Ferenc Nádasdy, in a match that joined two great estates. He spent much of their marriage fighting the Ottomans and became famous for it, and for years she ran their estates on her own while he was at war. Their daughter Anna was born in 1585 and later married Miklós Zrínyi; Orsolya followed in 1590 and Katalin in 1594; a son, András, died in childhood in 1603; and Pál, born in 1598, became the heir. Nádasdy died on January 4, 1604, aged forty-eight, after an illness that had begun three years earlier with crippling pain in his legs. She was left one of the richest landowners in the kingdom, and by most accounts the Crown owed her family large sums. Her nephew Gabriel Báthory was Prince of Transylvania, on poor terms with King Matthias II, and in the same months that Thurzó began taking statements in 1610 there was a failed attempt on Gabriel's life. Historians who doubt the case against her point to all of this: a rich widow, a debt the Crown did not want to pay, a family whose politics had become inconvenient, and an investigation led by a man with his own interests in the outcome. Others answer that the testimony of the servants and of the witnesses who had actually worked in her houses was detailed about deaths that happened. Neither side has settled it.
She was confined at Csejte from December 1610. The popular account says the windows and doors of her rooms were bricked up, leaving only slits for food and air. Whether or not it was done that way, she never left. She died there on August 21, 1614, at fifty-four.
The story everyone now knows about her, that she bathed in the blood of young girls to keep herself young, does not appear anywhere in the depositions of 1610 and 1611. It first appeared in print in 1729, in Tragica Historia, by the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi, more than a century after she died. The depositions themselves resurfaced in 1765 and were first published in 1817, and there is no bathing in blood anywhere in them. The servants who were tortured into confessing never mentioned it. It has become the only detail most people can name.