Between September 1972 and February 1974, a series of attacks on women in Cluj, in northwestern Romania, led to one of the largest militia investigations the city had seen. Investigators attributed the attacks, at least three of them fatal, to Romulus Vereș, a former locomotive driver who had been retired on medical grounds. He was taken from his flat to a psychiatric hospital in February 1974. Psychiatrists diagnosed paraphrenia and found that he lacked discernment, and the prosecutor in charge, Iuliu Andrei, issued a decision not to begin a criminal prosecution and recommended that he be committed. Vereș was never tried. He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric care and died in 1993 at the hospital in Ștei, in Bihor County, of a liver disease, according to Actual de Cluj.
People in Cluj called the attacker "Omul cu ciocanul," the Man with the Hammer. Augustin Nona, then a young militia officer on the case and later a colonel, told Actual de Cluj in 2015 that the name grew out of rumor and that no evidence ever showed a hammer had been used. The case was kept out of the press at the time to avoid panic, Adevărul reported in 2017, and its details became public only after the 1990s. Rumor in the city put the number of dead at about 200. The reported figures, drawn from the file and from the men who worked on it, are far lower.
Cornelia Vaida was found dead in Cluj on September 11, 1972, and her death began the investigation. Iuliu Andrei, then a criminal prosecutor in the city, told Actual de Cluj more than forty years later, at 92, that at first no one knew who she was.
Actual de Cluj gives her age as 28 and says she lived in a hostel for single workers; Adevărul, in a 2017 account drawn from the Revista Arhivei Maramureșene, the journal of the Maramureș County branch of the National Archives, describes the first victim as a 25-year-old woman. The file took the code name Someșul.
Suspicion first fell on a neighbor of hers who had a reputation as a womanizer. Andrei said he came under pressure to charge the man but refused, because there was no evidence against him beyond what witnesses had said. Adevărul reported that the pool of possible suspects was very large and that none of the early leads went anywhere.
On October 7, 1972, a 15-year-old girl was attacked in Cluj and survived, according to Actual de Cluj.
On October 16 a woman was attacked in Cluj and survived, according to Actual de Cluj. Adevărul's account, based on the archive journal, says that it was this attack that gave the case its popular name.
On December 5, 1972, a 9-year-old girl was attacked in Cluj and survived, according to Actual de Cluj. Adevărul noted that accounts of this attack disagree on whether she survived.
On December 12, a 48-year-old shop worker was attacked in Cluj and survived.
Also on December 12, a woman who worked as a switchboard operator at the city's radio relay center was attacked and survived. Her statements to investigators contradicted each other, Nona said later.
On December 16, 1972, Aurelia Ciule, 16, was killed in Cluj, according to Actual de Cluj. Adevărul describes the victim of that day as a pupil at the Liceul Economic, the city's economics high school. Investigators recovered physical traces, and Andrei said the team took great care to preserve them, because they believed the traces had come from the attacker.
The investigation grew to involve officers from across the county. Nona told Actual de Cluj that hundreds of people worked on the case, writing reports, interviewing witnesses and keeping watch at night. Investigators marked each attack on a map and found that they clustered in the area around the railway station and the river. More than a thousand files on people with psychiatric illnesses were compiled. Patients in occupational therapy at the city's psychiatric hospital, which was nearby, were checked first.
Former convicts, vagrants and men previously charged with violent crimes were also checked, without result, and the militia added patrols and brought in civilian volunteers and officers from other counties. The attacks then stopped for several weeks.
Fear in the city ran high, and women were advised to stay at home, Adevărul reported. Andrei remembered being called to a block of flats in Mănăștur, a district of Cluj, where a woman refused to let her own husband in because she was convinced he was the attacker. When Andrei identified himself as a chief criminal prosecutor, she insulted him too.
On February 13, 1973, a man was detained in Cluj after a civilian reported him to the militia for putting up posters, according to Actual de Cluj. Laboratory results in his case were lost, and he was released. Nona blamed the workload and carelessness.
Adevărul reported, from the archive journal, that Vereș first came to the attention of investigators in February 1973, when he handed out written material about a woman neighbor whom he accused of coming into his flat at night through the keyhole or the walls. The records showed that he had been treated at the psychiatric clinic in Cluj in 1970 and again in 1973. Officers visited him at home posing as doctors, and he talked to them about a plan to kill the neighbor. He was not arrested.
Ovidiu Bojan, a lawyer who as a student read the case file during an internship at the county prosecutor's office, recalled in Evenimentul Istoric in 2021 that a notice warning about the attacker had been posted on Piața Mihai Viteazul, a square in Cluj, with its words made from cut rubber letters so that no handwriting could be traced.
More than a year after the first attack, a delegation from Bucharest arrived in Cluj, led by Colonel Dumitru Ceacanica. Actual de Cluj called him the greatest criminal investigator Romania had produced; he had worked on the case of Ion Rîmaru, who had killed in Bucharest. Gazeta de Cluj described him as head of the murder section of the General Inspectorate of the Militia, a man who had started as an ordinary militia officer and was known for his instinct.
Ceacanica went through the files and told the local officers that they were looking for a mentally ill man. He made Nona his right hand. Nona remembered that Ceacanica berated the officers but imposed professional standards on them, and that the team took every witness statement again from the beginning. Andrei described him as very intelligent, sharp-minded, extremely harsh and a skilled actor.
Bojan recalled that Ceacanica reasoned that the attacker either worked shifts or was a pensioner, probably with a psychiatric illness, and that he mapped the attacks across the city from the railway station area to the Gheorgheni district. Thousands of people were questioned, Bojan said, among them many pensioners and the residents of the block where Vereș would later be found. Vereș was not at first on the list of psychiatric pensioners.
Ceacanica later described the case in his book Amintirile unui criminalist (Memories of a Criminal Investigator), Adevărul reported.
The statements were taken again, and one of the survivors was questioned a second time, which gave investigators new leads, according to Actual de Cluj.
Adevărul reported, from the archive journal, that several of the women attacked held back information about the attacker, and that this became a new obstacle for the investigators.
On February 14, 1974, after more than a year without a reported attack in the series, Ilona Szilagyi, 84, was killed in Cluj, according to Actual de Cluj. Her death came in a different part of the city from the earlier attacks. Ceacanica, Nona and Andrei worked on the case into the next day.
Ceacanica and Nona then went from door to door through the surrounding blocks, posing as officials of the county health department and checking the people on the register of psychiatric patients. At one block the man on their list insisted that he was well. A woman in the building told them about a neighbor on the fifth floor: a former locomotive driver who had moved in recently, said he talked with Satan, was aggressive and swore constantly. His name was Romulus Vereș.
Gazeta de Cluj, which interviewed Andrei in 2016, said the tip came from a woman cleaning a corridor on the seventh floor, who described her neighbor as "cam sucit," a bit odd. Bojan's account says Ceacanica learned through a cleaning woman in the block of a disturbed man who handed out obscene posters.
Vereș came to the door nearly undressed. At the door Ceacanica saw a large number of matchboxes and connected them with the crimes. Bojan recalled that Ceacanica put his foot in the doorframe and told his colleagues, "Ăsta e!" ("That's him!"). According to Gazeta de Cluj, Ceacanica held the door with his boot and called Andrei to search the flat. Psychiatric orderlies took Vereș to the psychiatric hospital in a straitjacket.
Bojan also gave a different version of how the suspect was drawn out: that Ceacanica let a rumor spread that the attacker had been caught and that a reconstruction would be staged, and that the real attacker came to watch and was questioned among the onlookers. Bojan said Vereș had moved from the railway station area to the Gheorgheni district.
Andrei led the search. In the flat, according to Actual de Cluj, investigators found dates and the word "Satana" scratched into the doors, notebooks recording his delusions, the matchboxes, and belongings that investigators said had been taken from victims. Adevărul's account, from the archive journal, says the search turned up annotated books and handwritten notebooks, and that Vereș claimed Satan had ordered the acts and that he had only watched them.
Bojan said a notebook found in the flat contained two dates that matched crimes. Vereș's handwritten statement ran to about 12 pages, Bojan said; he read that far and stopped.
Vereș had been a locomotive driver, and colleagues regarded him as one of the most skilled, Adevărul reported; drivers underwent regular psychological checks. Bojan recalled that he had run through the signals at the station in Huedin, or perhaps Aghireș, and had said that little devils told him not to stop. A former colleague, quoted by Adevărul, said Vereș refused to stop an express train at Huedin, was about to be dismissed, and gave a Fiat car as a bribe to be declared insane. That is the colleague's allegation. Vereș said Satan had told him not to stop the train. He was retired on medical grounds, Bojan said; Actual de Cluj says he was forcibly retired on health grounds a few years before the attacks began.
He bore a resemblance to the French singer Maurice Chevalier and knew it, according to Adevărul; investigators found an enlarged photograph of Chevalier in his home. Doctors said his illness affected him mainly between the fifth and twelfth days of each month, and that the rest of the time he behaved normally and pleasantly, which made the investigation harder.
Little is on record about his date of birth or his family life; he is remembered chiefly as a former locomotive driver.
Psychiatrists diagnosed Vereș with paraphrenia arising from a mystical and sexual delusion, according to Actual de Cluj. Gazeta de Cluj reported that the experts found him to be completely without criminal responsibility, suffering from systematized paraphrenia, and that he was therefore not tried for the killings. Adevărul's account says doctors pointed to symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.
Andrei told Actual de Cluj that he issued a "soluție de neîncepere a urmăririi penale," a decision not to begin criminal prosecution, and suggested that Vereș be committed to a psychiatric institution, because he had lacked discernment. Bojan gave the conclusion of the authorities in the same terms: that Vereș "nu are discernământ și nu răspunde penal," had no discernment and bore no criminal responsibility, and that he was committed rather than brought to a public trial. Adevărul reported that in 1976 he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and "scos de sub urmărire penală pe motiv că nu avea discernământ," removed from criminal prosecution because he lacked discernment.
Andrei said he spent about three years building the case, Gazeta de Cluj reported. In his 2015 interview he added that he was not sure a court today would have convicted Vereș, because no murder weapon was found, but that the killings stopped once Vereș was taken away. Bojan recalled asking the prosecutor, whom he named only as Iuliu, why he was so sure that Vereș was the only killer. The answer, as Bojan remembered it, was that no similar crimes were committed after Vereș was detained.
Physical traces gathered by investigators were analysed and found to be very similar, Andrei said, and that was as far as the methods of the time could go. Bojan recalled from the file that investigators had sent an inquiry through Interpol in Bucharest to Interpol in Wiesbaden about unusual fibers found in one case, and that the answer allowed only for exclusion, since genetic testing did not yet exist. No fingerprints were found, he said.
Vereș was committed to the psychiatric hospital in Bihor County known under communism as Dr. Petru Groza and now as the hospital at Ștei. Gazeta de Cluj reported, from its interview with Andrei, that Vereș later persuaded a doctor there that he posed no danger and was released, that he was caught again in Cluj and sent back, and that orders were then given that he never be released again.
In the spring of 1990 Bojan, later a lawyer and judge in Bihor, tracked Vereș down with the help of the Bihor police. He found him at the psychiatric hospital in Nucet, where he had been transferred from Ștei for a stomach illness, and interviewed him in the ward for aggressive patients for a report for Televiziunea Oradea. Bojan found the interview disappointing: Vereș told him he had invented the steam locomotive and had cured a doctor.
Vereș died in 1993. Actual de Cluj reported that he died at the hospital in Ștei of a liver disease.
The number of women attributed to Vereș has varied from one account to the next. The three deaths named in the detailed account of the investigators who worked the case, as given to Actual de Cluj in 2015, are those of Cornelia Vaida, Aurelia Ciule and Ilona Szilagyi.
Adevărul, drawing on the Revista Arhivei Maramureșene, reported that eight attacks were proven to be the work of the same man and that half of the victims died. In that account one victim came from Sighetu Marmației and others from Sălaj County, though most were from Cluj. It also says that about three months after the December 16 killing another woman was attacked and died. Gazeta de Cluj, reporting Andrei's account in 2016, gave nine victims, all women, of whom six were killed and three were wounded. Bojan remembered eight victims over two and a half years, but said he was not entirely sure of the number.
Bojan, writing in 2021 as the case of Gheorghe Dincă in Caracal was being debated in Romania, used the Cluj file as a warning against relying on a confession without supporting evidence. He said the case against Vereș lacked proof and raised the suspicion that more than one attacker had been involved, and that the finding that Vereș lacked discernment took the place of a public trial. Vereș never confessed, Bojan said, and Bojan believed he had been beaten during questioning.
Vereș himself blamed Satan. He told investigators, according to Adevărul's account, that Satan had ordered the acts and that he had only watched them.
Bojan also said his father, a lawyer, had defended in a case of multiple killings by a mentally ill man, and he claimed that the communist authorities sentenced such offenders to death regardless of their mental state. He did not give the name of that case.
Iuliu Andrei worked in the justice system for 36 years, as a lawyer, as a judge at Huedin and Crasna, and as a prosecutor from 1952 to 1982, Gazeta de Cluj reported; he was 93 when the paper interviewed him in 2016 and was described as the oldest criminal prosecutor in Romania. He told the paper that he had given the case data to the American writer John Balaban, who planned a book about it; the paper did not say whether it was written. Augustin Nona, Ceacanica's right hand in Cluj, later reached the rank of colonel.
1970: Vereș treated at the psychiatric clinic in Cluj (Adevărul, citing the archive journal).
September 11, 1972: Cornelia Vaida found dead in Cluj; the investigation is code-named Someșul.
October 7, 1972: a 15-year-old girl attacked in Cluj; she survives.
October 16, 1972: a woman attacked in Cluj; she survives.
December 5, 1972: a 9-year-old girl attacked in Cluj; she survives.
December 12, 1972: a shop worker and a switchboard operator attacked in Cluj; both survive.
December 16, 1972: Aurelia Ciule, 16, killed in Cluj.
February 13, 1973: a man putting up posters is detained, then released.
February 1973: Vereș comes to investigators' attention over material he distributed about a neighbor; treated again at the Cluj psychiatric clinic in 1973 (Adevărul).
1973, more than a year after the first attack: Colonel Dumitru Ceacanica arrives from Bucharest and has all witness statements retaken.
February 14, 1974: Ilona Szilagyi, 84, killed in Cluj.
February 1974: Ceacanica and Nona find Vereș while checking psychiatric patients; he is taken to the psychiatric hospital.
After the search: psychiatrists diagnose paraphrenia; prosecutor Iuliu Andrei issues a decision not to begin criminal prosecution and recommends committal.
1976: Vereș committed to the psychiatric hospital at Ștei (Adevărul).
Spring 1990: lawyer Ovidiu Bojan interviews Vereș at the psychiatric hospital in Nucet.
1993: Vereș dies at Ștei.