A novelist who takes a real case starts with less than the reader assumes. The court file is thin, the newspapers are loud, and the neighbors' version is the one that has been told the longest. What goes into the book depends on which of the three the writer trusts, and the choice leaves marks that outlive the novel. Figures printed by a weekly in 1964 still turn up in coverage of a Netflix series in 2025. A midwife the village needed to blame becomes, in a 1997 novel, the leader of a slave revolt. The ten cases that follow are ones where a published novel, or a body of fiction, sits next to a documented case, and where the distance between the two can be measured. Films appear only where they changed the story; the focus stays on the page.
Fritz Honka lived in Hamburg and, between December 1970 and January 1975, killed four women: Gertraud Bräuer, Anna Beuschel, Frieda Roblick and Ruth Schult. Police arrested him in Hamburg on July 17, 1975, and he confessed on July 29. On December 20, 1976, the Hamburg Regional Court convicted him of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, all with diminished criminal responsibility, and sentenced him to 15 years plus committal to a psychiatric hospital. He was released from psychiatric care in 1993, lived under the name Peter Jensen, was readmitted, and died in October 1998, aged 63.
In 2016 the writer Heinz Strunk published Der goldene Handschuh with Rowohlt, naming it for the bar where Honka drank. In an interview with the taz that March, Strunk described the paper trail he had worked from. He had read the files in the Hamburg State Archive, which gave about one page to each killing. He had located no living witnesses. Many of the people in the book, he said, were invented. The biography he gave Honka came partly from those pages, partly from his own imagination: a hard life marked by abuse, forced farm labor in the 1950s, a skin condition caused by cement, and a jaw broken three times by beatings. Those points, the taz interview makes clear, are the novelist’s account of the records, not findings of the court. The Magdeburg newspaper Volksstimme, working from other material, describes a child of Leipzig who grew up partly in institutional care, left East Germany in 1951 and moved to Hamburg in 1956.
Fatih Akin’s film of the novel premiered in competition at the Berlin festival in February 2019 with Jonas Dassler in the title role. A Swiss critic, Brigitte Häring, writing for SRF, noted what the film left out: the women have no names. The names exist, and they exist because someone else went back to the archives. The historian Frauke Steinhäuser researched the four women for the Hamburg association Garten der Frauen, which set memorial stones for them in 2025 and published her brochure in 2026. Anna Beuschel, born Anna Hahn in Aschersleben in 1919, had been sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942 after the Nazi authorities labeled her "asocial," and she survived the camp system until American troops freed the survivors in April 1945. A novel built on one page of file per killing could not have carried that. A historian reading the same file for the sake of the victims did.
In January 1964 police in Guanajuato freed eleven women from a property belonging to the González Valenzuela sisters near San Francisco del Rincón. Delfina and María were under arrest within days; Luisa surrendered in Guadalajara on February 8. On October 15, 1964, a judge in San Francisco del Rincón sentenced Delfina and María to 40 years each and Luisa to 27, for aggravated homicide, kidnapping, criminal association, procuring and other charges. A Guanajuato appeals chamber confirmed the sentences in 1966, and a partial amparo from Mexico’s Supreme Court followed in 1974.
The figure the public remembered was not the figure in the file. The weekly Alarma! printed claims of hundreds of dead, and Guinness World Records still lists the sisters, as a partnership, at no fewer than 90 victims. The historian Fabiola Bailón Vásquez, who studied the file for a 2011 volume published by the Mexican Supreme Court, reports that the proceedings record the deaths of eight women. The literary scholar Alejandro Lámbarry, who studied the file and the novelist’s manuscripts, counts six bodies and adds that the file cannot say how many people died or who they were, because the names change across three versions of the record.
Jorge Ibargüengoitia, a novelist and playwright born in Guanajuato in 1928, turned to the case in 1964. By Lámbarry’s account he obtained the court file that year, reportedly through the family of the writer Margarita Villaseñor, and kept it for no more than ten hours. In March and April 1965 he drafted a chronicle that was never published, built from the file, the press coverage and visits to the places involved, with the aim of exposing sensational journalism and a corrupt, hypocritical society. He dropped it. Around 1970 he tried again and discarded about 150 pages. In 1974 he renamed the sisters the Baladro sisters and moved the story to an invented town, Cuévano. He finished Las muertas on November 25, 1976, and Joaquín Mortiz published it in 1977. Lámbarry writes that Ibargüengoitia concluded from the file that the newspapers' version was exaggerated and false; in an interview the author said the story showed "la corrupción de un sistema," the corruption of a system. Bailón notes that the novel questions the irregularities of the trial, which lasted about nine months. Ibargüengoitia also doubted a detail the press had accepted, that the death of Delfina’s son came in a shootout with police.
The invented names did not stop the real ones from circulating. Felipe Cazals’s film Las Poquianchis reached cinemas in 1976, a year before the novel, and Bailón counts its departures from the record: five months of trial instead of nine, four deaths instead of eight, and a charge of trafficking in women that does not appear in the file. Ibargüengoitia declined Cazals’s invitation to write the screenplay. In September 2025 Netflix released a six-episode series called Las muertas, directed by Luis Estrada and based on the novel, and Mexican and foreign outlets wrote the case up again. Many of them repeated a figure of 91 dead. Mexico News Daily, in one passage, called the book a nonfiction account and in another a novel. It is a novel, and its author had judged the newspapers' version exaggerated and false.
Delfina died in prison in Irapuato in 1968. Luisa’s sentence was reported cut to 23 years in 1981, and she died in prison in 1984. María was reported freed after serving her term and is reported to have died in the 1990s.
Yoshio Kodaira was arrested in Tokyo on August 20, 1946, three days after the death of a 17-year-old girl in the Shiba district. He was a former navy petty officer who had already served prison time, sentenced in 1933 to 15 years over a July 1932 assault on his estranged wife’s family in which her father died. Within weeks he confessed to a run of killings of young women that reached back to May 1945. Prosecutors indicted him on ten counts, and the trial opened in the Tokyo District Court on March 3, 1947. The court convicted him on seven counts, acquitted him on three he had denied, and on June 18 sentenced him to death. The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on February 27, 1948, and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on November 16, 1948. He was executed at Miyagi Prison in Sendai on October 5, 1949.
The British novelist David Peace published Tokyo Year Zero with Faber and Faber in 2007. In a 2008 interview printed in the Italian university journal Altre Modernità, Peace said he first learned of the case from a single paragraph in the historian Edward Seidensticker’s book Tokyo Rising, which described two killings in Shiba Park in 1946. Peace’s interviewer called the novel based on the true story of the case. In that interview Peace did not itemize what he kept and what he changed.
What the novel’s setting borrowed from the record is easier to follow in the Japanese reporting. A series in Bunshun Online by a nonfiction writer described the postwar months, when the 1945 harvest had failed partly because of typhoon damage and the food shortage reached its worst point in 1946. A history of the period quoted there records that on November 2 and 3, 1945 alone a million Tokyo residents went out to neighboring prefectures to buy food. An Asahi Shimbun reporter who rode a so-called white rice train from Akita to Ueno in the summer of 1946 saw police order passengers off at Yamagata and confiscate rice, and reported that nine in ten passengers were breaking the rationing rules. Work was as scarce as food: a Ministry of Health and Welfare figure from November 1945 showed 4.13 million workers released from wartime conscripted labor, and an Asahi report of September 1946 noted that only about 50 of 1,029 graduates at one Waseda University ceremony had confirmed jobs.
The newspapers of 1946 were also unreliable. The Asahi linked Kodaira to the death of a 17-year-old schoolgirl in Nikko, a case later shown to be unrelated. A Mainichi report of his earlier record, printed August 21, 1946, contained many errors, and the Bunshun series corrects the date of his first sentence from the indictment and the 1948 appeal judgment. On September 5 the Yomiuri ran an editorial on the "lessons" of the case that urged parents to keep their daughters under strict guidance, with curfews. His own claim to have targeted some 30 other women came from his written account and was never examined in court; those cases are not his in law. A novel set in that ruined city, written six decades later, drew on a record the first reporters had already bent.
In the spring of 1906, young women were going missing in Marrakesh, Morocco. According to Yabiladi, the Moroccan news site that published the fullest recent histories of the case, the family of one of them traced her to the shop of Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, an older man who mended shoes and wrote letters for people who could not write. An older woman said to have worked with him named him, and he was arrested and confessed. A cable sent from Tangier and printed in an American newspaper, The Times and Democrat of South Carolina, on June 28, 1906, said he was guilty of the deaths of 36 young women and condemned to crucifixion. Foreign officials in Morocco objected to that sentence, and it was replaced. By those accounts he was publicly flogged in the market from May 15 and put to death on June 11, 1906, and was dead by June 13. The case reaches the present through that cable and through later retellings, including a May 2024 survey of Moroccan criminal history in Arabic Post. The women are not named in any of them.
The novelist Saeida Rouass, a British-Moroccan writer from East London, came across the story in an old newspaper while working for an environmental charity in Oman, and at first she doubted it. At the British Library she then located many newspapers that had reported the murders in 1906. She looked for material at the American Legation in Tangier and spent six months in Marrakech gathering records on the killings, on Mesfewi’s background and on the city’s history. What she could not locate, she told Yabiladi and wrote for the Crime Readers' Association, was anything about the women except the total. Her answer was to make them characters: "It was important to me they too were characters, and not just nameless victims or numbers."
The result was a detective novel, Assembly of the Dead, published in 2017 and titled in Arabic Jemaa el-Fnaa. Its investigator, Farook al Alami, is invented, sent from Tangier to look into the killings. The book was launched in Marrakech in 2018, and a Hollywood producer later took an interest in adapting it, according to Yabiladi and the Al-Hasaniya Moroccan Women’s Centre in London. Rouass wrote that the case has not passed into Moroccan legend.
The setting is documented independently. Morocco in 1906 was still an independent sultanate, ruled since 1894 by Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz; an international conference at Algeciras that year was deciding its future, and in 1912 it became a French protectorate, according to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian. Rouass told Yabiladi that Marrakesh then faced locusts, tribal revolts and fear of famine.
Dagmar Overbye, born April 23, 1887, at Assendrup in Jutland, took infants from mothers, most of them unmarried and poor, for a one-time payment and promised to place them with families. Danish reference works spell her surname Overby; much English-language writing uses Overbye. In 1921 a jury at Østre Landsret in Copenhagen convicted her of killing infants in her care. Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon and Den Store Danske give nine counts, eight foster children and one of her own children; TV 2 Kosmopol and Videnskab.dk give eight killings of infants, 1916 to 1920. She was sentenced to death, did not appeal, and was pardoned about a month later on condition that she was never released. She died in Vestre Fængsel on May 6, 1929. She had confessed to up to 16 killings in the city court.
Every larger number comes from outside the courtroom. The novelist Karen Søndergaard Jensen wrote a book about the case, Englemagersken (The Angel Maker), and in a 2007 report Avisen.dk, quoting her, said Overbye killed more than 20 children. That figure comes from the novelist’s account and was never tested in court. The Copenhagen Post said in 2016 that she is believed to have killed 25 infants, drawing on the retired police officer and lecturer Poul Fjeldgård, and the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound repeated "as many as 25" in a review of the 2024 film The Girl with the Needle. None of these totals was proved. The dramatist Lotte Arnsbjerg wrote a play about the case after reading a newspaper article; it was staged at Teatret ved Sorte Hest in Copenhagen.
The film, directed by Magnus von Horn, premiered at Cannes in May 2024, opened in Danish cinemas in January 2025 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Von Horn told Nordisk Film & TV Fond that he did not want a conventional biopic and chose to tell the story through someone "not the perpetrator, but a person that meets this evil person." He told The Moveable Fest that the heroine, Karoline, was invented to give the audience a main character. The film’s heroine shares a first name with Karoline Aagesen, the real mother whose visit to the police led to the arrest in 1920; the film’s events, characters and dialogue belong to the screenplay.
The historian Agnete Birger Madsen, author of a book on infanticide in Denmark from 1900 to 1950, told the newspaper Information that between 16 and 17 women a year were convicted at that time of killing infants or of gross neglect, nearly all of them from the bottom of the social order. Against that pattern, she said, "the Dagmar Overby case is a completely different story; she is very atypical." She had come across no other woman who placed newspaper advertisements intending to kill the children she received. The case set off a public argument about what Denmark owed women who had children outside marriage and the children themselves, and Danish reference works say it led directly to the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children of 1923.
In July 2007 the writer Manuel da Silva Ramos presented a novel, A ponte submersa, published by Dom Quixote, in Santa Comba Dão, the Portuguese municipality of the victims, while the trial of António Luís Costa was in its last days. Lusa reported that the verdict was ten days away. The book gives the victims and the corporal fictional names, and its author used it to criticize the Guarda Nacional Republicana, the rural police force Costa had served in, and the Church. Almeida Rodrigues of the Polícia Judiciária and relatives of the victims attended the presentation.
Costa, called Cabo Costa, was a retired GNR corporal from the village of Cabecinha de Rei. Between May 24, 2005 and May 8, 2006, three young women from the village were killed: Isabel Cristina Isidoro, Mariana Lourenço and Joana Oliveira, all of whom he had known since they were children. Neighbors thought well of him. A neighbor, 74, told Lusa after his arrest that he was a very good person and that the news seemed like something from a horror film. The Polícia Judiciária arrested him in June 2006. Diário de Viseu, summarizing the case in 2026, reported that he confessed to the three homicides that month; in court he retracted and blamed a relative of one of the victims. A forensic psychiatric report, signed by two psychiatrists and delivered in early July 2007, said he did not suffer from mental illness in the strict sense and that there was no psychiatric reason to exclude or reduce his criminal responsibility.
On July 31, 2007, the court at Figueira da Foz convicted him of the three homicides, two of them qualified homicide, with other charges, and imposed a combined sentence of 25 years, the maximum under Portuguese law. The prosecutor had told the court he deserved more than the law allowed, and Mariana’s family’s lawyer called for a review of the conditional release rules. The Coimbra Court of Appeal dismissed his appeals in February 2008, and the Supreme Court of Justice confirmed the sentence in June 2008.
The novel was therefore on the shelves while the case was still open, and its fictional names were chosen before the court had spoken. The later story belongs to the families. On May 31, 2021, at 68, Costa left the prison at Évora for the first time since his conviction, on a three-day leave granted by the sentence enforcement court. Joana’s mother told the Viseu paper Jornal do Centro she was shocked and devastated and hoped he would not come to Santa Comba Dão. As of August 31, 2026, Diário de Viseu, citing SIC, reported that he would be released in April 2027.
In the summer of 1929 an inquiry in the Tiszazug, a district of small farming villages on the Tisza in central Hungary, led to the arrest of more than forty people, nearly all of them women, in a series of deaths within families. Of 28 people charged by the Szolnok prosecutor, 16 were convicted. Gendarmerie reports named 101 victims across the district, the historian Ládonyi Emese counts 78 in Nagyrév, and the historian Béla Bodó put the confirmed killings at 45 to 50. The press fixed on one person: Fazekas Gyuláné, born Oláh Zsuzsanna, the elderly midwife of Nagyrév, whom it called the head of a criminal ring. Women under questioning said she had supplied the means and told them what to do. She was detained by the gendarmerie in the summer of 1929 and released. On July 19, 1929, as gendarmes came to take her in again, she died by suicide, according to the Nagyrév death register as Ládonyi reported it. She was never charged and never tried.
Ládonyi, who studied her life in county archives and parish registers for the journal Korall in 2007, concluded that the midwife was a central figure in the deaths but not the only one, and that the village and the press judged it convenient to load the guilt onto a dead woman with a questionable past. The literature did the same. József Attila published a poem called "Tiszazug" in the journal Toll on September 8, 1929. Móricz Zsigmond, who reported on the case for the Pesti Napló, published a long essay, "Tiszazugi méregkeverők," in the literary review Nyugat in February 1930. He presented the midwife as the spiritual and moral authority who led the women into crime, the representative of the devil, a woman who ate meat three times a day in a village where peasants tasted it only at the pig slaughter. Ládonyi points out that his account partly mirrors the sensational press.
The novels followed. Kosáryné Réz Lola drew on the case for her 1941 novel Különös ismertetőjegye: nincs. Háy Gyula wrote a drama, Tiszazug, in 1934 to 1936, printed in 1945 and staged from May of that year, with 57 performances at the Magyar Színház by September. Saád Katalin wrote the novel Csupaszon in Nagyrév after 1979; it was published in 1997, and in it the midwife appears as the leader of the women who killed, "a rabszolgalázadók vezére," the leader of the slave rebels. Sociographies of the district appeared in 1935 and 1961. In 2005 the Dutch filmmaker Astrid Bussink made a documentary, The Angelmakers, which the weekly HVG described in 2006 as putting the number of victims at 162. That figure sits well above anything the gendarmerie reported.
The record shows a smaller and harder-to-narrate woman. Hungarian practice named a married woman by her husband’s full name with the suffix "-né," so Oláh Zsuzsanna, who married Fazekas Gyula in 1884, became Fazekas Gyuláné. Many English-language accounts call her "Júlia Fazekas," which appears to be a misreading of Gyuláné; she is not called Júlia in the Hungarian records historians have published. In Saád’s novel she leads a rebellion; in law she led nothing, because no court ever heard her. Ládonyi’s reading is that her story has to be pieced together from parish registers, court files and the testimony of the women who blamed her, and that her own account is missing.
Cayetano Santos Godino was arrested in Buenos Aires on December 4, 1912, at 16, the day after a three-year-old boy was killed. He confessed within hours. La Nación reported on December 5 that he had confessed to four homicides, seven attempted homicides and seven deliberate fires. The historian María Carolina Zapiola, whose 2006 study of the case is titled "Niños asesinos de niños" ("Children who killed children"), traced how the papers handled him. La Nación called him an "ejemplar extraordinario" of the "fauna criminal" and by December 7 a "monstruo sanguinario." La Vanguardia called him "la bestia humana." Caras y Caretas told its readers he was "un caso de hombre fiera." Zapiola argues the papers borrowed the vocabulary of positivist criminology but mixed it with common sense and used words such as "sadist" loosely.
The law was less certain than the headlines. Judge José Antonio de Oro and the Cámara de lo Criminal acquitted him on medical grounds, and he was committed to the Hospicio de las Mercedes. On the prosecutor’s further appeal he was declared criminally responsible and sent to the Penitenciaría Nacional, then to the prison at Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, in 1915 by one account and 1923 by two others. He died there on November 15, 1944, aged 48; the official cause was internal bleeding from a gastroduodenal ulcer. Of the diagnosis that he was not responsible, the writer María Moreno told La Gaceta of Tucumán in 2021 that it "no pudo imponerse," could not prevail. Reviewing the Italian edition of her book in 2025, S. Regazzoni wrote that within a few years the police, forensic and psychiatric authorities changed their verdicts and sent him to Ushuaia.
Moreno has written about him three times. By Regazzoni’s account a first version appeared in 1976, a second in 1994 in the collection Memoria del crimen, and a third, expanded version in 2021 with dialogues, poems and popular voices; La Gaceta reports that the first version was lost and that the 1994 text, also published in Página/12, reopened the case. Galeano and Sinay in Página/12 name Planeta as the publisher of the collection; La Gaceta names Tusquets for the 2021 book, and an Italian translation by Francesca Lazzarato appeared in 2024. Moreno told La Gaceta she wanted to avoid both the colorful police chronicle and a moral crusade against the killing of children, and that she tried to take the myth apart through extended study. In the description of the paper’s critic, the book has Godino speak of himself as a sick man who cannot be blamed: "¿qué culpa tengo yo si no puedo sujetarme?"
Others have used him in other ways. Regazzoni names Laura Pariani’s 2007 Italian novel Dio non ama i bambini and Mariana Enríquez’s short piece "Pablito clavó un clavito: Una evocación del Petiso Orejudo" in her 2016 collection Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego. Galeano and Sinay mention Julio Ordano’s play El Petiso Orejudo and Osvaldo Aguirre’s book Enemigos públicos. In 2022 Tiempo Argentino reviewed La cárcel del fin del mundo, a comic by Santiago Sánchez Kutica and the artist Kundo Krunch that adapts the 1933 prison chronicles of Juan José de Soiza Reilly and counts Godino among its eight prisoners. A life-size plaster figure of him stands in his cell at the former Ushuaia prison, which visitors photograph. Galeano and Sinay called him the only criminal in Argentine history whose name passed from generation to generation.
Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian countess from one of the most powerful families in the kingdom. In 1610, when she was a widow managing large estates, a royal investigation took statements from hundreds of witnesses about girls and young women said to have died in her household. On December 29, 1610, the men of the palatine, György Thurzó, seized her at Čachtice in what is now western Slovakia. Four members of her household were tried at Bytča, and three were executed in January 1611. She was never charged and never tried. She lived under guard at Čachtice Castle until she died there on August 21, 1614.
What the record holds is a set of witness depositions, servants' confessions given in custody, and the decisions of men with reasons of their own to close the matter quietly. The historian Gábor Várkonyi, writing for the Common Past project, reads the case as shelved because the testimony would not have stood up in court, while the execution of the servants preserved the palatine’s authority and the appearance of justice. The story most people know, that she bathed in the blood of girls to stay young, is not in that record. Várkonyi and the historian Tünde Lengyel trace its first printed appearance to Ungaria suis cum regibus compendio data, a history of Hungary by the Jesuit scholar László Turóczi, published in 1729; Várkonyi reads Turóczi’s tale as a moral parable about a noblewoman who abandoned the true Catholic faith and fell to the devil. National Geographic, quoting the King’s College London historian Tony Thorne, dates the book to 1744, and the Slovak news agency TASR names Turóczi as the first writer to portray her as a "bloody countess." The Slovak Spectator, in 2014, credited the novelist Jožo Nižnánsky with first calling her "the blood countess." The sources disagree about who coined the label. They agree that it came long after her death.
From Turóczi the story passed from book to book. Mátyás Bél repeated it in his Notitia, and Alajos Mednyánszky retold the story of the maid’s nosebleed in a travel book on the Váh valley in 1826. The Slovak scholar František Sasinek published texts of the interrogations in 1880. In the 1890s came R. A. von Elsberg’s Die Blutgräfin, and in 1908 Dezső Rexa’s Báthory Erzsébet, Nádasdy Ferencné, which Lengyel calls the most influential source of the horror story because it portrayed her as a sadistic psychopath. In 1932 Nižnánsky serialized his novel Čachtická pani in the newspaper Slovenská politika. Lengyel writes that the book, which prints interrogation transcripts at the end, has sold more than two million copies with its translations. A novel that carries the transcripts in an appendix tells the reader where the author thinks the evidence lies, and the sales figure suggests where readers placed their trust.
The numbers followed the books. The figure most often attached to her is 650, and it comes from a single witness. Guinness World Records, whose record book had credited her with up to 650 victims, explained in 2023 that the figure came from a servant girl, Zsuzsanna in Várkonyi’s account, who said that a courtier, Jakab Szilvásy, had told her he had seen the number written in the countess’s private book. Szilvásy never mentioned this in his own testimony, and the book was never produced. The State Archive in Prešov gives the range in the witness statements as 2 to 650. National Geographic quoted a figure of 80. None of these numbers was tested by a court. Guinness, revisiting its own listing, said there is no real evidence that she drank or bathed in blood.
The revision began in Hungary in the 1980s. László Nagy’s 1984 book, translated by Lengyel as The Disreputable Báthory Family, judged the image of the countess false and defamatory. In 1993 the judge Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss published Báthory Erzsébet igazsága (The Truth of Erzsébet Báthory), which treated the proceedings as a show trial and pointed to legal errors, contradictions between witnesses and the interests of the royal court. Lengyel writes that it was poorly received in Slovakia, where the archivist Kočiš dismissed it. Kočiš is himself part of the story. Lengyel reports that when he published a letter about the countess’s death in his 1981 book, he added a sentence to his translation suggesting she regretted the killings; a photocopy of the original, printed in the same book, contains no such sentence, and for a long time no one noticed. Even the scholars who corrected the legend were not always working from the page.
Amelia Sach ran a lying-in house in East Finchley, in north London, where unmarried women could give birth in private and, for a fee, leave their babies to be adopted. Her advertisements, as the journalist and author Caitlin Davies summarized them in the Camden New Journal in 2009, offered accouchement and skilled nursing, and added that the baby "can remain." In November 1902 her associate Annie Walters was arrested with one of those babies, a boy a few days old, dead. Both women were charged with murder, Sach as an accessory, and both were convicted of the death of that one child. They were suspected of killing many more, but no other death was tried. On February 3, 1903, they were executed together at Holloway Prison, the first women put to death there. Davies described the execution as the first of women at the prison and the last double execution of women in Britain. The Finchley Society has recorded them as the first women executed at Holloway.
Davies came to the case as a journalist, writing about it in 2009, the year the Islington Museum showed it in an exhibition on crime and punishment. She went on to use it as the starting point for a novel, The Ghost of Lily Painter, and in November 2017 she gave the Finchley Society’s Jean Scott Memorial Lecture on "The East Finchley Baby Farmers: The True Story." The pairing of the two titles, a novel and a lecture carrying "the true story," marks the arrangement many of these writers have settled on: the book is allowed to invent, and a separate piece of work holds the record.
Davies wrote that the execution of Sach and Walters played a part in the pressure that led to the Children Act of 1908. She also noted that baby farming had almost ended by the 1920s. Laura Thompson, in a 2018 excerpt from her book on women executed in Britain published by CrimeReads, puts Sach at about twenty years younger than Walters and quotes the executioner Henry Pierrepoint calling them "baby farmers of the worst kind."
Set side by side, the ten cases show a few habits. The novelists who stayed closest to the record, Strunk with his page per killing and Rouass with her six months in Marrakech, say plainly how little they had. The writers who worked from the press, as Saád and Nižnánsky did, inherited its verdicts along with its plots. A number once printed outlives its source: 90 for the Mexican sisters, 650 for the countess, 162 for the Hungarian villages, 25 for the Danish foster mother. In the Portuguese case a novel reached readers before the verdict, so that the fiction was complete while the law was not. In the Argentine case the writer returned to the same boy in 1976, 1994 and 2021 and changed the book each time.
The courts meanwhile went on with their own arithmetic: eight dead women in Guanajuato, nine counts or eight in Copenhagen, seven convictions and three acquittals in Tokyo, 25 years, the maximum, at Figueira da Foz. None of it makes a better plot than the legend. All of it is what happened.
• December 29, 1610: Elizabeth Báthory is seized at Čachtice; four servants are tried at Bytča and three are executed in January 1611.
• August 21, 1614: Báthory dies at Čachtice Castle, never tried.
• 1729: László Turóczi’s history of Hungary prints the blood-bath story.
• 1884: Oláh Zsuzsanna marries Fazekas Gyula and becomes Fazekas Gyuláné.
• November 1902: Annie Walters is arrested; Amelia Sach is charged as an accessory.
• February 3, 1903: Sach and Walters are executed at Holloway.
• May to June 1906: Mesfewi is reported flogged in Marrakesh and put to death on June 11; a Tangier cable is printed in South Carolina on June 28.
• December 4, 1912: Cayetano Santos Godino is arrested in Buenos Aires; La Nación reports his confession the next day.
• 1921: A jury at Østre Landsret convicts Dagmar Overbye; she is pardoned about a month after the death sentence.
• 1923: Denmark passes the Act on the Supervision of Foster Children.
• July 19, 1929: Fazekas Gyuláné dies by suicide as gendarmes come to take her in; József Attila’s poem "Tiszazug" appears September 8, 1929.
• 1932: Nižnánsky’s Čachtická pani is serialized in Slovenská politika.
• August 20, 1946: Yoshio Kodaira is arrested in Tokyo; he is executed October 5, 1949.
• January 1964: Guanajuato police free eleven women; Delfina and María González Valenzuela are arrested. October 15, 1964: sentences.
• 1976: Moreno’s first Godino text (since lost); 1994 and 2021 versions follow.
• November 25, 1976: Ibargüengoitia finishes Las muertas; Joaquín Mortiz publishes it in 1977.
• December 20, 1976: Fritz Honka is convicted by the Hamburg Regional Court.
• 2007: Peace publishes Tokyo Year Zero; Pariani publishes Dio non ama i bambini.
• July 2007: A ponte submersa is presented in Santa Comba Dão; July 31, 2007: Costa is convicted at Figueira da Foz.
• 2016: Strunk publishes Der goldene Handschuh.
• 2017: Rouass publishes Assembly of the Dead.
• February 2019: Akin’s film of Strunk’s novel premieres in Berlin.
• May 2024: The Girl with the Needle premieres at Cannes.
• September 2025: Netflix releases Las muertas.
• August 31, 2026: Diário de Viseu reports Costa’s release is expected in April 2027.