Julia Fazekas arrived in the village of Nagyrev, on the Tisza river in central Hungary, in 1911, as the community midwife. She had been tried several times for performing abortions and acquitted each time.
Nagyrev in that period was a place where marriages were arranged, divorce was effectively unavailable, and during the First World War a prisoner of war camp was established nearby, so that the village's women spent years with foreign prisoners billeted among them while their husbands were at the front. When the husbands came back, a good many of the marriages were unsurvivable.
Fazekas supplied arsenic, boiled off flypaper, and instruction. Over eighteen years the women of Nagyrev and the neighbouring village of Tiszakurt poisoned husbands, elderly parents, in-laws and in some cases children. Fazekas's cousin ran the local death registry, which meant no certificate was ever queried. Estimates of the total run from forty-five to well over a hundred, and the village came to be known as the murder district.
It ended in 1929, in the usual way, with an anonymous letter and then a body with arsenic in it. Exhumations began at the Nagyrev cemetery. When police came to arrest Julia Fazekas in November 1929 she drank her own poison. Twenty-six women were brought to trial, eight were sentenced to death and two were hanged, and the rest received prison terms. It is one of the largest mass poisoning cases on record anywhere.