About a month before his arrest, the body of a woman was found in the old Macedonian trenches, the dugouts left in northern Greece by the First World War, decomposed and bearing signs of brutal violence. She was the wife of a man named Peter Kulaxides. When the body was discovered, he disappeared.
The police found him in Athens in late September 1930, at an intimate dinner with a young widow he was to marry the next day. It would have been his eighth wedding. He was charged with murdering all seven of the women he had married before her. The foreign papers that picked up the story from Athens in October called him a Greek Bluebeard; one American dispatch named him the Dragon of Hamelo and described him as a refugee from Pontus, one of the more than a million Greeks who had come from Asia Minor and the Black Sea coast in the exchange of populations after 1923. The charge, as reported, was that he had married each woman for her dowry, spent it and killed her.
What he said to the police was reported in Time that December. His first wife, he said, had died of excitement and joy when he was released from prison after a long sentence. The next five he had not killed. The seventh he had murdered because she had told him lies.
The evidence, one report noted, existed only for the last wife, the woman in the trenches. Nothing in the dispatches names her or any of the others, gives the dates or places of the six earlier deaths, or says how they were counted as murders at all.
No record of a trial has been found. No verdict, sentence or date of death has been traced in the English-language press that carried the arrest, and the Greek court records of the period have not been located. The case survives as the arrest, the charge and his account of it.