This entry is a correction, not a biography. Vera Renczi appears in almost every encyclopedia of female serial killers, usually with a photograph, a victim count of thirty-five, and a set of vivid details: the beautiful Romanian heiress, two husbands, a lover after lover, a son who tried to blackmail her, and a cellar in Berkerekul lined with zinc coffins in which she sat of an evening with her dead.
There is no evidence that any of it happened. Romanian and Serbian researchers have looked for the trial, the arrest, the birth registration and the town, and produced nothing. Berkerekul does not correspond cleanly to a real place; the usual candidate, Zrenjanin in the Banat, has no such case in its records. There is no Romanian court file, no police record and no local press coverage of a mass exhumation of thirty-five men, which is not the kind of event a country's newspapers miss.
What can be traced is the story's arrival in English. It appears in the sensational American and British magazine press of the late 1920s and 1930s, in the genre of the exotic foreign murderess, and passes from there into true crime encyclopedias of the 1990s, which cite each other. The photograph usually printed with it has never been sourced to her. The name attached to her in that press, and repeated ever since, was the Black Widow.
She is carried here with a null victim count and marked as outside the definition, because the alternative is to keep repeating a number that nobody has ever been able to attach to a real person. If a document turns up, this entry should be rewritten. Until one does, the honest position is that Vera Renczi probably never existed.