On July 19, 1929, the gendarmes came up the lane in Nagyrév to arrest the village midwife. She saw them coming, and by the time they reached her door she was dead. She had taken some of her own poison. Her name was Zsuzsanna Fazekas, born Zsuzsanna Oláh on May 20, 1861, known in the village as Auntie Suzy and in the Hungarian records as Fazekas Gyuláné, Mrs. Gyula Fazekas, a form that English-language writers have long misread as Júlia. For eighteen years she had been the center of what the historian Béla Bodó called the poisoning women of Tiszazug.
She came to Nagyrév, a farming village on the Tisza in central Hungary, in 1911, with a husband who had already disappeared without explanation. There was no doctor, and she became the midwife and the nearest thing to one. Between 1911 and 1921 she was jailed ten times for performing illegal abortions and was acquitted every time. Her cousin was the clerk who filed the village's death certificates.
The women around her lived in marriages arranged by their families, in which divorce was almost impossible to win against a drunken or violent husband. During the First World War, while the men were at the front, prisoners of war were held in and around the village with little restriction, and many women took lovers. When the husbands came home, many took up their old ways. Fazekas offered them a way out: arsenic, boiled out of flypaper and skimmed off, sold in small vials. "Why put up with them?" she is supposed to have asked. After husbands came parents who had become a burden, relatives with an inheritance, lovers and, in some cases, sons. By the mid-1920s Nagyrév was known as the murder district.
How it came to light is told three ways. In one, a woman named Szabó was caught when two people she tried to poison survived, and named a Mrs. Bukenoveski, who named the midwife. In another, a medical student found arsenic in a body washed up on the riverbank. Bodó, who wrote the first scholarly study of the case, traced it to an anonymous letter to a small local newspaper in 1929 accusing the women of the Tiszazug of poisoning their families. The authorities exhumed some fifty recent bodies from the Nagyrév cemetery, and forty-six of them held arsenic.
Twenty-six women and two men were eventually tried, in a dozen trials held from 1929 to 1931 and kept separate to limit publicity. Accounts of the outcome differ: one gives six death sentences, of which three were carried out, eight life sentences and two shorter terms; another gives eight death sentences with two executions and twelve prison terms. Similar poisonings were found in Tiszakürt, Tiszaföldvár, Kunszentmárton and other villages of the region. Bodó put the confirmed deaths at forty-five to fifty. Other estimates, never proved, run as high as three hundred.
Fazekas herself was never tried, and no court ever ruled on her part. At the trials the women who had come to her named her as the one who had started it, and she has been remembered that way since. The case was the subject of the documentary The Angelmakers and the feature film Hukkle.