In May 1925 a number of small American newspapers, the Danville Bee in Virginia among them, ran a story under the byline of O. B. Tolischus, described as a Universal Service correspondent writing from Paris. History, it began, made man the tyrant and woman the gentle victim, but investigation showed that some women had been more merciless than any man. Its example was Madame Vera Renczi of "Berkereckul," whose career had been exposed, the story said, when a young married woman complained that her husband, a leading banker, had disappeared after visiting her. Headline writers did the rest: one paper ran it as "Woman Held for Killing 35 Persons," another as "Another Lucretia Borgia Found."
The version that has come down since is fuller. Renczi was a beautiful, wealthy woman of Hungarian family, born in Bucharest around 1903, who poisoned two husbands, a long line of young lovers and finally her own son with arsenic, thirty-five people in all, and kept their bodies in zinc-lined coffins in the wine cellar of her house, where she sat among them in the evenings. Some accounts name a first husband, Karl Schick, a second, Joseph Renczi, and a son, Lorenzo. She is said to have been sentenced to life, or to death with the sentence commuted, and to have died in prison around 1960. The details arrived gradually, in magazines and later in encyclopedias of female killers that repeated one another.
None of it has been traced to a record. No date of birth, marriage, arrest, trial, imprisonment or death has ever been produced, and no newspaper in the Balkans has been found reporting the discovery of thirty-five bodies in a cellar, an event that would have been impossible to miss. The place does not exist under the name given; "Berkerekul" is usually taken to mean Nagybecskerek, or Veliki Bečkerek, a town in the Banat that was in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by 1925 and was renamed Zrenjanin in 1946, but the spelling matches no known form of it. In 1972 the Guinness Book of World Records reported that it had found no authoritative source for the claim of thirty-five killings.
The photographs usually printed with her name are not of her. They show Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a celebrated Russian stage actress who lived from 1864 to 1910.
The story's origin raises its own questions. If the byline belonged to Otto D. Tolischus, who went on to the New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence in 1940, it is an odd piece for him to have written without a named source; researchers who have looked at the 1925 clippings have wondered whether the initials were a misprint, or whether his name was attached to lend the item weight. One American writer who has collected the clippings reported in 2012 that a contact in Romania believed the case genuine and placed it in the Serbian Banat, but offered no document to show it.
Until a court file, a police record or a contemporary local report turns up, Vera Renczi is a newspaper story from 1925 with no known subject, and the thirty-five dead attributed to her have never been shown to have existed.