Marie Fikáčková was a nurse on the maternity ward of the district hospital in Sušice, a small town in the Klatovy district of western Bohemia. On February 23, 1960, two infant girls in her care were fatally injured during her shift. A pathologist examining them saw that two babies had died within a short time of each other from similar injuries, and the police were told. Fikáčková was arrested a few days later and confessed. A court convicted her of murdering both girls and of harming two other infants, and on October 6, 1960, she was sentenced to death. She was hanged at Pankrác prison in Prague on April 13, 1961.
In custody she also spoke of about ten other children she said she had attacked since starting on the ward in 1957. None of those cases was proved. Czech accounts written since the case came to public attention disagree about whether she said those children died or survived, and about how many of them there were. The case was never reported in the Czechoslovak press at the time. It became widely known only decades later, through the work of the journalist Stanislav Motl and Czech television and newspaper reports.
Marie Fikáčková was born Marie Schmidová in Sušice on September 9, 1936, according to Czech Television's news service ČT24. Her father was a laborer of German origin. ČT24 reported in 2012 that he had openly supported the Nazis during the war and treated his daughter harshly, and that she later said her brother, who was mentally ill, had tormented her. Echo24, drawing on Motl's research, described her as a Sudeten German whose family house was placed under a state-appointed administrator after the war. ČT24 in 2010 said the family continued to identify as German after 1945.
Her relationship with her mother was troubled. A local man who knew the family told investigators that she often quarreled with her mother and insulted her, and that she had once struck her. Fikáčková herself later admitted to psychiatric examiners that she had hit her mother several times and had once threatened to kill her, ČT24 reported. Deník, the regional newspaper group, wrote in 2011 that she came from a mixed Czech and German family and that she was small, pleasant and well liked.
She did well at school. In 1955 she finished the secondary school for health workers in Klatovy with excellent results, and the same year she joined the hospital in Sušice as a nurse. In October 1957 she began work on the maternity ward. CNN Prima NEWS reported in 2024 that she had first worked on the children's ward and had been moved to the maternity ward by the hospital's management, and that she asked several times to be transferred, which staff shortages made impossible.
Colleagues regarded her highly. Echo24 wrote that she was liked on the ward, and CNN Prima NEWS said colleagues saw her as conscientious and neighbors as friendly. ČT24 reported that shortly before her arrest the hospital's management was considering making her head nurse.
By 1960 she was married and had no children. Her husband told investigators that the couple had agreed to wait. They were training together for the national Spartakiáda gymnastics display of 1960 and planned a holiday by the sea, and they had put off starting a family until 1961, ČT24 reported. CNN Prima NEWS added that the couple shared a household with her mother and that her husband knew nothing of her difficulties at work or of her anger at small children. At the trial her husband said she had been neither bad-tempered nor nervous, according to Deník. He later moved away from the region with his family.
Several incidents on the ward before February 1960 were later seen in a different light. ČT24 reported in 2012 that a crying newborn had been injured in her hands and that she told the chief physician it had been an accident while lifting the child. He treated it as a first case of carelessness, made no further inquiry and told her to be more careful. Deník dates that injury to September 1959. CNN Prima NEWS reported that management also did not accept that another injury to a baby in her care, put down to rough handling, had been deliberate.
The hospital was crowded. CNN Prima NEWS described a ward where two babies sometimes shared a cot. At the trial the presiding judge, Jaromír Fikerle, observed that injuries to children on the ward in 1959 had not been reported to the district health office or to the regional pediatrician, and that no action had been taken against her, Deník reported.
On February 23, 1960, while Fikáčková was on duty, two infant girls on the ward were fatally injured. One, recorded under the surname Prosserová, was about 20 hours old. The other, Hana Hamelbauerová, was about five weeks old, according to ČT24.
At first the deaths were not treated as suspicious. ČT24 wrote in 2012 that the staff considered each death natural and that doctors put such deaths down to difficult births. The turning point came at the autopsy. The pathologist noticed that the two babies had died close together from similar injuries and alerted the police, and forensic pathologists from the Institute of Forensic Medicine carried out forensic autopsies. They found that both girls had died of head injuries that could not be explained by natural causes.
Reports give the dates of death differently. ČT24 in 2010 described both girls as dying after the attacks of February 23. ČT24 in 2012 said the first girl died the following day and Hana Hamelbauerová at eight in the morning on February 25. CNN Prima NEWS, in a later account, placed the first fatal attack in late 1959 and described that victim as a girl several months old who had come back into hospital with her mother.
Police arrested Fikáčková on the maternity ward on the morning of February 27, 1960, according to ČT24 and Echo24. Deník, which spoke with people connected to the case in 2011, wrote that officers were waiting for her on the evening of February 26, when she arrived for a night shift that began at seven.
She seemed calm and natural when she was detained, ČT24 reported, and she later told investigators that her arrest had come as a relief.
Her first interrogation began at one in the morning on February 28, 1960, and ran until half past six, according to ČT24. During it she confessed to the deaths of both girls. Deník reported in 2011 that her confession was detailed, that she said she had meant to kill the second child and that she had known both children would die.
She went further. ČT24 reported that she spoke of about ten other children she had attacked and of a first killing in 1957. Echo24 and the Czech News Agency, ČTK, quoted the court file as recording her statement that she had killed at least ten children, perhaps more, but could not remember their names. On April 1, 1960, she wrote out several pages by hand in which she named four more infants she said she had killed between 1958 and 1960 and two who had survived her attacks, Deník reported after seeing the document.
ČT24 reported in 2010 that a review of the records found no other suspicious cases. Two surviving infants were included in the charges. Deník reported that she was convicted of the two girls' murders and of injuring two other children, one of them the crying newborn whose injury in 1959 had been put down to carelessness, and that other claims made about her could not be proved.
Fikáčková gave different explanations at different times, and none was settled. In her first statement, according to Motl as quoted by Echo24 and ČTK, she said she had killed because she hated Czechs, and Motl said that one of the dead children was the granddaughter of the man who had administered her family's house. Deník reported a related account: that she wanted revenge on Czech children because a local man had insulted her German family.
Later she said the crying of the babies had made her furious, especially around the time of her menstrual period, and that the irritation had turned into hatred of children, Echo24 and ČTK reported from the court file. At other times she said the mothers had angered her, according to Deník. ČT24 reported in 2012 that she also appeared to have been infatuated with one of the doctors and may have wanted revenge when he did not respond.
ČT24 concluded in 2010 that the police and the court accepted the crying of the babies as the motive and dropped the early theory of a hatred of Czechs. In 2012 the same reporter wrote that the motive was never clearly established.
Psychologists and psychiatrists examined her before trial. They found her sane, but recorded tendencies to depression and hysteria and to uncontrolled outbursts of anger, ČT24 reported. A psychiatric report from Dobřany, quoted by Deník, said she could have killed a child of her own if its crying had provoked her. CNN Prima NEWS reported that she tried at trial to argue that she had not been sane when she acted, and that the medical reports rejected this.
More than 50 years later the forensic psychologist Ludmila Čírtková read the file for Czech Television. She described Fikáčková as an ordinary serial killer, perhaps with the addition of a particular moral corruption, ČT24 reported.
The case was heard in 1960. Deník reported that she was sentenced by the court in Klatovy, with Jaromír Fikerle presiding, and quoted a later deputy chairman of the district court in Klatovy, Jaromír Veselý, as saying that the judgment was entirely exceptional for Klatovy and that she was the only defendant a regular court there had sentenced to death. Veselý also noted that after a change to the criminal code in 1961, district courts could no longer impose the death penalty.
Relatives of children from the ward remembered the hearings. One mother whose baby had been injured told Deník that guards watched the families and seated them apart, and that Fikáčková spoke to her in a corridor and told her she had been very lucky. The same mother recalled being taken to court in Plzeň, which does not square with the Klatovy account.
On October 6, 1960, the court convicted her of the murders of the two girls and of two counts of bodily harm and sentenced her to death. CNN Prima NEWS reported that she collapsed when the sentence was read.
Her defense lawyer appealed, but the appeals did not change the verdict, ČT24 reported. In a letter to her mother quoted by Deník, she wrote that she had been sentenced to death and still hoped the sentence would be changed to 25 years. Her plea for clemency was refused.
Marie Fikáčková was hanged at Pankrác prison in Prague on April 13, 1961.
The case was not reported at the time. ČT24 suggested in 2010 that the silence may have reflected the Communist regime's wish to avoid alarming pregnant women. Parents were told that their babies had died of postpartum shock or heart failure, ČT24 reported, though some later received a medical report describing the injuries. Relatives told Deník in 2011 that they were never officially told what had happened.
Motl, who studied the investigation file, said on his program Stopy, fakta, tajemství that it contained no sign that any responsible doctor was investigated or charged for neglect, although Fikáčková herself had named several doctors she believed had failed in their duties, ČT24 reported in 2012. Motl also argued, in a 2010 interview with ČT24, that mistakes by hospital staff may have played a part.
The number of victims. The court found two killings. Motl has said that the case involves at least ten more dead children and that some of the children who survived her attacks are mentally disabled, ČT24 reported in 2010; Echo24 and ČTK reported in 2020 that she admitted at least ten murders of newborns between 1957 and 1960. ČT24 in 2010, by contrast, summarized her confession as describing about ten other newborns who survived, and in 2012 described her account as ten more children beaten to death. Deník reported that her handwritten statement of April 1, 1960, named four further deaths and two surviving infants. None of these accounts was tested in court.
The 2007 tabloid figures. In early 2007 tabloid newspapers called her the most prolific female killer in modern Czech history and claimed at least ten more babies had died. ČT24 wrote in 2010 that there was no direct or indirect evidence for those claims and that they ignored the medical practice of the time, under which every newborn death required a pathological autopsy; the records review found no other suspicious case. Motl's explanation, in the same report, was that the court could not prove more deaths because the earlier bodies could no longer be examined.
Polio and other illness. CNN Prima NEWS reported that children were not yet vaccinated against polio when she began on the ward, which made it hard to tell whether harm to some children came from her or from disease.
Families' suspicions. Relatives of several children born at the Sušice ward between 1957 and 1959 told Deník in 2011 that they believed she had harmed their children, including one child who died in 1958 after leaving the hospital and one who has lived with lasting impairment. Their accounts were not tested in court.
The first killing. ČT24 in 2012 and Echo24 place her first killing, by her own account, in 1957. CNN Prima NEWS described the first fatal attack as taking place in late 1959. The court record, as reported, covers only the deaths after February 23, 1960.
September 9, 1936: born Marie Schmidová in Sušice.
1955: finishes the secondary school for health workers in Klatovy; joins the hospital in Sušice.
October 1957: begins work on the maternity ward.
1957 to 1960: the period in which she later said she had attacked other children; never proved.
1959: an injury to a crying newborn in her care is treated by the chief physician as carelessness (dated September 1959 by Deník).
February 23, 1960: two infant girls are fatally injured during her shift.
February 25, 1960: Hana Hamelbauerová dies (ČT24, 2012).
February 26 or 27, 1960: arrested on the maternity ward.
February 28, 1960: first interrogation, from one in the morning; she confesses.
April 1, 1960: writes a further statement by hand naming other children.
October 6, 1960: convicted of two murders and two counts of bodily harm; sentenced to death.
1960 to 1961: appeals and a plea for clemency fail.
April 13, 1961: hanged at Pankrác prison, Prague.
January 2007: Stanislav Motl discusses the case on TV Nova; tabloid coverage follows.
2010 to 2024: Czech Television, Deník, Echo24 and CNN Prima NEWS publish accounts of the case.