On February 23, 1960, two newborn girls died during one nurse's shift on the maternity ward of the hospital at Sušice, in the Klatovy district of western Bohemia. The pathologist who examined them did not believe that two babies could die so close together of the same injuries. The post-mortems found severe crushing injuries to both skulls, and in one of the girls, fractures of both arms. The senior physician was told at once. On February 27 the police came to the hospital and arrested the nurse who had been on duty, Marie Fikáčková, twenty-three.
She had been born Marie Schmidl at Sušice on September 9, 1936, into a poor household. Her father was a Sudeten German, unwanted in Czechoslovakia after the war, and after 1945 the family house was put under a state-appointed administrator. Her mother was submissive and her brother mentally ill. She was beaten at home and brought up to be quiet and obedient and to keep her feelings to herself.
She graduated with honors from the nursing school at Klatovy in 1955 and went to work on the Sušice maternity ward, a twenty-three-bed women's department converted from an infectious-disease pavilion in 1954. Colleagues liked her and thought her hard-working and kind, and the senior physician wanted to make her head nurse despite her age.
The interrogation ran through the night. She admitted pressing in the babies' heads and breaking one child's arms. Her reasons shifted. In her first statement, according to the journalist Stanislav Motl, who described the case on Czech television in 2007, she said she had killed because she hated Czechs, and one of the dead children was the granddaughter of the man who had administered her family's house. Later she said she could not bear the crying, and that she had done it around the time of her periods. "I did it at the time when I was about to get my period or during my period," she said.
Then she said there had been others, about ten infants attacked since the autumn of 1957. Accounts of what she said about them conflict. Some Czech reporting says she confessed to at least ten killings; others say she described about ten attacks on children who survived, some with lifelong injuries. She could not remember their names, and they were never traced. Two injured babies were identified from the hospital records, hurt during her shifts in ways that had been put down to rough handling during weighing and changing, and she was charged over them.
A Czech criminalistics study of the case argues that ten further deaths could not have gone unnoticed. No newborn could be buried in Czechoslovakia without a post-mortem, and where another person was suspected, the medical autopsy stopped and a forensic one began, with two pathologists from the institute of forensic medicine required to attend, as happened with the two girls on February 23. The study says that a check of the ward's records, the autopsy protocols and the duty rosters found no further case that was even suspicious. It traces the ten-victims figure to the tabloid press of early 2007, which called her the worst mass murderer in modern Czech history.
Psychiatrists and forensic doctors found her sane, while recording depression, uncontrolled outbursts of rage and hysteria. Her trial before the Regional Court in České Budějovice was held entirely in closed session and in complete secrecy. The defense pointed to her mental instability and her childhood. On October 6, 1960, less than eight months after her arrest, she was convicted of murdering the two newborns and of two counts of bodily harm and sentenced to death. Her counsel appealed twice without result. She was hanged in the basement of Pankrác prison in Prague on the morning of April 13, 1961, at twenty-four. One Czech account says she was the first woman executed in Czechoslovakia since the state was founded in 1918.
The secrecy went beyond the courtroom. The regime did not want the case frightening parents or unsettling hospitals, so the medical files were locked away and the families were given invented causes of death. Nothing was said about the case under socialism. It surfaced only after 1989, and with it came calls for psychological screening of medical staff and for closer tracking of unexplained events on hospital wards.
The maternity unit closed soon afterward and a radiotherapy department moved into the building, which itself closed in the late 1990s. The building still stands in the hospital grounds on Chmelenská Street. Most people in Sušice point instead to a later maternity hospital at the edge of town, on the road from Hrádek, where babies were not delivered until after she was dead. A reporter who went to Sušice in 2025, sixty-four years after the execution, found the town's attitude summed up in a phrase: don't drag it up, forget it.