Ilona Szilágyi was eighty-four, and she lived on the far side of Cluj from where the attacks had been happening. On February 14, 1974, someone came into her home on Iugoslaviei Street in the Gheorgheni district, struck her on the head with a bottle, smothered her with a pillow and tried to set the place on fire. The neighborhood was wrong, but the method was familiar, and the men who reached the scene that night, Colonel Dumitru Ceacanica, Augustin Nona and the prosecutor Iuliu Andrei, had spent seventeen months chasing the man the city called Omul cu ciocanul, the Man with the Hammer.
The series had begun on September 11, 1972, with a telephone call about a dead woman in the Someș River. Andrei found her by the Hingherilor bridge, naked, half in the water and half on the bank, with several blows to the skull. She was Cornelia Vaida, who lived in a hostel for single workers on Oașului Street; Andrei gave her age as twenty-eight, and other accounts say twenty-five. The investigation took its name from the river, Operation Someșul. Early suspicion fell on a neighbor of hers with a reputation as a womanizer, and Andrei, pressed to charge him, refused for lack of evidence.
Then the attacks moved indoors. On October 7 a fifteen-year-old girl on Vasile Lucaciu Street surprised an intruder at half past six in the morning; he beat her about the head, undressed her, took her underwear and a watch, and left her bleeding until her mother came home from work. She survived after neurosurgery. On October 16 Maria Mărgineanu was struck from behind in her kitchen on Traian Street and also lived; some later accounts describe a victim that month as eight months pregnant. On December 5 a nine-year-old girl alone at home on Mașiniștilor Street before school was struck, raped and left in the house after the attacker set a wardrobe on fire; neighbors carried her out alive. On December 12 he hit Ana Biro, forty-eight, in the bread shop where she worked on Piața 1848, fled when she screamed, and outran a butcher from the shop across the street. Four hours later Ioana Oltean, a radio relay operator, was hit in an elevator on Horea Street and slightly hurt. On December 16 Aurelia Ciule, sixteen, alone in an apartment at 113 Karl Marx Street, not far from militia headquarters, was raped and stabbed seventeen times with a knife taken from a neighbor's kitchen, and the apartment was set alight. In her left hand investigators found two blond hairs.
The survivors could not agree on what he looked like: one described dark wavy hair, a later one blond wavy hair. Cluj decided that a man with a hammer was killing women and then raping them, though Nona said later there was never proof that the weapon was a hammer at all, and that the name grew out of rumor. Hundreds of officers took statements and walked the streets at night behind women used as decoys. A map of the attacks clustered them around the railway station and the river. More than a thousand files on people with psychiatric histories were pulled. Andrei was once called to a block in Mănăștur where a woman would not let her own husband in, convinced that he was the Man with the Hammer. By most accounts some four thousand people were questioned. A 2014 account says most of the victims came from railway workers' families, and that whole streets of the railwaymen's quarter, Mașiniștilor Street among them, were checked house by house.
They had him once. On February 13, 1973, a civilian saw a blond man pasting posters on the 23 August cinema on Horea Street, warning of someone who hypnotized people, struck at the brain and rode them sexually. He was detained in Piața Mihai Viteazul carrying a wooden-handled knife and small packets of human hair, and the shirt under his jacket was stained with blood. The shirt went to the laboratory, the results were lost among the files, and he was released; Nona remembered that he was sent to the psychiatric hospital the same day. Another account says the material he was handing out was about a woman neighbor who, he claimed, came into his apartment at night through the keyhole or the walls. He had been admitted to the psychiatric clinic in Cluj in 1970 and was admitted again in 1973.
More than a year into the case Ceacanica, Romania's best-known criminal investigator, arrived from Bucharest, told the local officers that they were looking for a mentally ill man, and started the files over. Reinterviewing Ioana Oltean, whose story of the elevator attack had never held together, he learned that she was married to a locomotive driver and had six lovers by her own count, four of them locomotive drivers, and that an officer assigned to her had been telling her how the investigation was going. She was one of the attacker's mistresses. According to one account, which gives her name as Ileana Olteanu, she had suspected him and said nothing because she did not want to ruin him. Other women he attacked held back for the same reason, afraid their affairs would come out.
After the Szilágyi killing Ceacanica asked for the psychiatric register for the streets around Iugoslaviei and went door to door with Nona, the two posing as officials of the health department. At a block on Arieșului Street, number 102 in the investigators' later account and number 10 in Ceacanica's own, the man on their list insisted he was well, and on the way down Ceacanica snapped at a woman on the stairs and asked whether there was a madman in the building. There was one on the fifth floor, she said, a former locomotive driver named Romulus Vereș who had moved in recently, talked with Satan and swore a great deal. The door opened on a chain to a blond man, nearly naked, cursing God and Ceaușescu. Through the gap Ceacanica saw a great many matchboxes, and he said this was the man. Stretcher-bearers caught Vereș at the elevator as he tried to leave and took him to the psychiatric hospital in a straitjacket.
In the apartment Andrei found dates and references to Satan scratched into the doors, notebooks recording delusions, a forensic medicine textbook annotated at the passages on skull injuries and violent death, and wristwatches and underwear belonging to victims. Vereș had been born in Cluj on January 23, 1929, and was once regarded at the locomotive depot as one of its most capable drivers, until he was retired on medical grounds, narrowly escaping dismissal, according to older men at the depot. A story repeated in later accounts says he had driven trains through stations against the signals because little devils told him not to stop. Accounts of his marriage disagree; one has it ending after six years, another dates his divorce from Etelka Păcurar to 1968. They had a son, also named Romulus. In custody he said the Devil had stolen his appearance and done the killings, and he gave two devils names, Bere and Puiu. "If you can, defend me from the devil," he told investigators. "He possesses me, and in my name he did everything."
A 2021 account based on the reporting of the Cluj paper BZC says he had trained as a locomotive driver after the war and worked for the Timiș railway region, where his superiors thought well of him. It dates the Huedin episode to 1968: he took an express through the station at full speed against the signals, after repeated warnings that he could cause a disaster, and told his colleagues to keep quiet, because he was driving the train and Satan had ordered him not to stop. The same account says his notebooks described a wardrobe in the apartment that he had turned into a place of prayer, where he met Satan and took orders about the crimes. Colonel Ceacanica's own account, published in 1980, says instead that Vereș had not worked for the railway since the end of 1969, when he refused to stop his train at the station in Huedin because, he said, Satan had told him not to.
He was never tried. Doctors diagnosed paraphrenia arising from mystical and sexual delusions, a diagnosis other accounts give as schizophrenia, and described him as extremely dangerous and without discernment when he attacked. Andrei, under pressure from people who wanted Vereș sentenced to death, issued a decision not to open a criminal prosecution and recommended committal. That is his own account; later versions describe five murder charges and an insanity acquittal, or a sentence to life in an asylum, and the prosecutor's description does not support them. The hairs from the crime scenes, compared by the methods of the day, were found to be very similar to his. Andrei said decades later that he did not know whether a modern court would have convicted him, since no murder weapon was recovered in any of the cases, but that the killings stopped when Vereș was taken.
How many he killed has never been fixed. The number most often given is five. A lawyer who read the file as a student remembered eight victims in all, and rumor in Cluj put the dead at two hundred. The investigators' detailed account names three who died: Cornelia Vaida, Aurelia Ciule and Ilona Szilágyi. Vereș was held from 1976 at the psychiatric hospital at Ștei, and died there of liver disease on December 13, 1993. He was buried in the hospital cemetery under a cross that did not carry his name, and without a funeral service.