War is usually told as the backdrop to a killer’s biography. In these eight cases it is closer to the mechanism. It emptied the streets after dark, removed the men who might have noticed, sent record-keepers to the front, filled cities with people carrying everything they owned, and trained police to look somewhere else. Each case below turns on one of those conditions, and each shows a police force or a court working inside it.
Two of the eight began in the First World War, five in the Second, and one, Christie’s, ran from the first war to the second and past it. None of them was a soldier’s crime in the sense of combat. They were crimes committed by civilians, and in several cases by men whom the war had spared, in cities where the usual checks had been suspended.
Béla Kiss was a tinsmith in Cinkota, then a village just outside Budapest. In July 1914 he was called up. In May 1916, while the war was still being fought, the deaths of seven women came to light at Cinkota, in property he had left behind. Police in Budapest quickly concluded that he had met the women through marriage advertisements and taken their savings. The case pushed war news off Hungarian front pages for a time, according to the weekly HVG’s later account.
He was never arrested and never tried. The seven deaths are attributed to him by the police and press of 1916, not proved against him by any court. What the war did was to make him unfindable. A military report, as HVG described it in 2007, recorded that he had been taken prisoner and had died of typhus at Valjevo, in Serbia, on February 5, 1915. A police summary printed in 1933 offered another version, that he had been released when Austro-Hungarian forces retook the town, and had then vanished. Witnesses contradicted one another. A soldier told the Nagyvárad newspaper *Tiszántúl* in May 1916 that he had watched Kiss die at Valjevo. A waiter who had served there said Kiss slipped away when the town was evacuated. A woman who kept a food stall told Budapest police that a soldier who matched his description had eaten there, said he had just come out of Serbian captivity and wanted to marry, and asked her to answer his replies to advertisements. She refused.
The Pest district court offered a reward of 3,000 crowns for Kiss alive, and Vienna received letters, mostly from around that city, claiming he was living there under another name. Police never closed the file. Over the years the sightings multiplied: Vienna, Győr, the French Foreign Legion, New York, Kansas City. None was ever confirmed. A man arrested in May 1916 as his helper was acquitted in 1918, and with that, as the researcher Henrietta Trádler writes, nobody was ever punished for the seven deaths. Foreign newspapers later put the total at 9, 23 or 32, and HVG notes that none of those figures rests on the 1916 record. Hungarian criminological writing counts Kiss as the country’s first serial killer, yet the evidence is that of a missing man’s papers, not a trial.
Henri Désiré Landru was 45 when war came in August 1914, too old to be called up. By then he was a Paris swindler with a string of fraud convictions going back to 1904 and a habit of living under false names, more than 90 by one count. The war gave him a clientele. With so many men away, Paris and the suburbs held a great number of women who were widowed, separated or alone and had to support themselves. Landru wrote the advertisement himself: a serious gentleman with a small capital wished to marry a widow or a misunderstood woman between 35 and 45.
Between early 1915 and January 1919, at two rented houses west of Paris, at Vernouillet and then Gambais, ten women and the teenage son of one of them went missing after dealing with him. The historian Richard Tomlinson, interviewed in 2019, puts the number of women in contact with him who were never traced at 72, and stresses that this does not show he killed them. He was arrested in Paris on April 12, 1919, after the sister of a missing woman recognized him. Most of what the prosecution had was paper: a small notebook in his hand, which recorded rail fares to Gambais for himself and a woman traveling with him, the belongings of the missing women in his possession, and the evidence of their families. No body was ever recovered. He never confessed.
The trial at Versailles ran from November 7 to 30, 1921, and became one of the great public events of the postwar years; the singer Maurice Chevalier and the actress Mistinguett were among the spectators, Actu-Juridique reports, and the Belgian broadcaster RTBF calls it the first major criminal trial since 1914. The historians Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu and Amélie Chabrier have described a month of press coverage in which the newspapers built a character and a name for Landru as much as they reported facts. The Seine-et-Oise assize court convicted him of 11 murders on November 30, and he was guillotined outside the Saint-Pierre prison at Versailles on February 25, 1922. Tomlinson accepts that he killed the women. How, where, and what became of the bodies, he says, have never been established.
When the Second World War began in September 1939, a blackout ordinance took effect in Berlin. Streets, stations and trains ran dark at night to deny targets to enemy bombers. The online outlet t-online writes that the blacked-out streets made life easier for criminals. The blackout also changed who was on the trains late at night. With men called up to the Wehrmacht, many of the women riding the S-Bahn alone after dark were shift workers keeping the war economy going while their husbands were at the front.
Paul Ogorzow worked for the Deutsche Reichsbahn on the S-Bahn line that runs east from Rummelsburg. He was a member of the Nazi Party. The Canadian magazine Maclean’s, reviewing Scott Andrew Selby’s 2014 book on the case, adds that as a railway worker he was exempt from military service as an essential war worker. He drew no suspicion on the trains because he belonged there. And the darkened railway was dangerous in its own right: 28 people died on the S-Bahn in December 1940 alone, most of them in falls or struck by unlit trains. The review says that the blackout and the many night-time deaths on the railway helped him avoid detection.
Between October 4, 1940, and the night of July 3, 1941, eight women were killed and six more seriously injured in eastern Berlin, on the line between Rummelsburg and Erkner and in the allotment colonies beside it, according to the police archive files that t-online drew on in 2026. The historian Roger Moorhouse, who writes that he rediscovered the case in the Berlin archives in 2008, records that Ogorzow admitted eight murders and more than thirty assaults. The regime kept the killings out of the newspapers while the police searched. The search was large. Maulbeerblatt puts the number of railway workers screened at more than 5,000, Maclean’s, following Selby, at about 8,000. Berlin detectives dressed as women and rode the blacked-out trains as decoys.
He was arrested in the summer of 1941; the exact day has not been reported. He denied the accusations at first and then confessed. He was sentenced to death and executed by guillotine at Plötzensee on the day after sentencing; Maulbeerblatt gives the date as July 24, 1941. The case was little known for decades. Moorhouse wrote in 2013 that he came across it only through the archives.
Marcel Petiot was a qualified physician with a practice in the sixteenth arrondissement and a psychiatric record that his patients and neighbors knew nothing of. Born in Auxerre on January 17, 1897, he had been gassed and wounded in the First World War, discharged with a disability pension in 1920, and qualified in medicine on an accelerated program for former soldiers in 1921. After the German invasion of 1940, according to Infobae, he sold medical certificates declaring men unfit for service. He was caught and fined.
Under the occupation, Jews in Paris and others hunted by the German authorities looked desperately for a way out of France. From 1943, according to Le Quotidien du Médecin and Hérodote, Petiot let it be known under the name "Docteur Eugène" that he could get people wanted by the Gestapo to Argentina. The French Ministry of Justice’s own history of the case states the finding plainly: he drew in people who wished to flee occupied France, using a false resistance network as cover, killed them and took their belongings. No one who went to him reached South America. Most of those charged as his victims, the Ministry writes, were Jews.
The Germans themselves came near the truth. In 1943 the Gestapo arrested three men who had brought clients to Petiot, and under interrogation they named "Docteur Eugène." Petiot was arrested in 1943 on suspicion of helping Jews and the resistance. He was held for about eight months at Fresnes and released when the Germans could find no link to the resistance. He gave them no names.
The killings came to light in March 1944, and Petiot vanished for seven months, through the liberation of Paris. Slate.fr and Hérodote report that he joined the French Forces of the Interior as "Captain Valéry." David King, in a 2011 book, says he served in counterespionage under that identity and took part in the hunt for himself. In September 1944 a newspaper, *Résistance*, published an article headed "Petiot, soldat du Reich." He replied with a long handwritten letter demanding a right of reply, which told the police he was still in Paris, inside the resistance. He was arrested in Paris on October 31, 1944.
At the Seine Assize Court, from March 18, 1946, he claimed 63 killings, all of them, he said, of Germans, collaborators and enemies of France, and never admitted the murders he was charged with. The jury convicted him of 24 of the 27 charged, with theft, on April 4. He was guillotined at La Santé on May 25, 1946. The Ministry of Justice calls it the great media trial of the Second World War. The war had given him a pretext that fit his defense, and the liberation had given him a uniform.
Leonarda Cianciulli was convicted in July 1946 of killing three women in Correggio, a farming town of about 19,000 people in the province of Reggio Emilia. Ermelinda Faustina Setti, 73, went missing shortly before Christmas 1939; Francesca Clementina Soavi, 55, on September 5, 1940; Virginia Cacioppo, 59, on November 30, 1940. All three knew her and lived alone, and each was persuaded to sell what she owned and tell people she was leaving town.
The war supplies her stated reason. As Italy moved toward the conflict, her two eldest sons were declared fit for military service. Augusto Balloni, the Bologna criminologist who led a 2010 study of the case, dates the start of her delusions to that moment. She told investigators, and later the court, that she had killed to protect her eldest son. Prosecutors argued that she killed for the women’s money and goods. She was held by May 1941 after a complaint by the sister-in-law of one of the women and a police trail of the missing woman’s state bonds, and confessed after her eldest son was detained. Her son was later tried as her accomplice and acquitted.
The war then delayed the case for years. Mother and son waited in the prisons of Reggio Emilia and Bologna; letters from May to October 1941 survive in the State Archive of Bologna. In 1944 a raid on the Bologna prison freed about 400 inmates, her son among them. According to the review in Doppiozero, he chose to give himself up rather than go into hiding. The trial opened in 1946 in a country still recovering, and the historian Barbara Bracco has described it as a record of Italy’s passage from Fascism to the Republic: one of the lawyers for the civil parties turned out to have been a collaborator, and the defense lawyer had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Fascists.
On July 20, 1946, the Corte d’Assise of Reggio Emilia convicted her of three murders, theft and desecration of corpses. It rejected the finding of total insanity and held her partly of unsound mind. The sentence was 30 years in prison with three in a criminal asylum; Il Fatto Quotidiano reports 33. Her son was acquitted the same day. She told the court, "I did not kill out of hatred but only out of a mother’s love." She died at the women’s judicial asylum in Pozzuoli on October 15, 1970.
Władysław Mazurkiewicz was a currency dealer, gambler and man about town in Kraków who, a court ruled in 1956, had robbed and killed six people over twelve years, beginning under the German occupation and ending in the Stalinist years. He also tried to kill two other men, both of whom lived. He dressed with care, drove his own car when few could, and played bridge well. Kraków called him "Piękny Władzio," handsome Władzio, and the press, once the case broke, the elegant murderer.
The occupation gave him his trade. Under the Germans he dealt in gold, currency and food, and the Kraków outlets Interia and RMF FM report that valuables taken from Jewish owners passed through his hands. Przemysław Słowiński, in a 2017 book on unexplained killings in communist Poland summarized by the Polish Press Agency, wrote that some of these deals, and the first killings linked to them, appear to have taken place with German tolerance. Stories that he worked for the Gestapo, and later for the communist security police, followed him to the gallows. Magazyn TVN24 judged a Gestapo connection probable but reported no proof that it protected him, and historians at the Institute of National Remembrance reported nothing in the files to support the second story; both remain claims, not findings of the court.
The first crime the court later tried came on March 16, 1943, when he tried to kill an army officer who was in hiding from the Germans and had brought him 200 dollars to exchange. The man survived but did not report it, because he was himself a fugitive, and the attempt came to light only twelve years later. On December 15, 1943, according to the indictment as summarized by Tygodnik Powszechny, he poisoned a card partner and business acquaintance, Wiktor Zarzecki, and took the 1,200 dollars the man had brought. Zarzecki’s wife reported him missing in 1946, and a court declared him dead that year.
The war’s end made things easier, not harder. In 1945 two more men were killed, Władysław Brylski in July and the currency dealer Józef Tomaszewski in October, and a neighbor, Jerzy de Laveaux, in May 1946. After the Tomaszewski case villagers wrote down the registration of a car they had seen, and it belonged to Mazurkiewicz. He was held briefly and cleared. Magazyn TVN24 reports that the prosecutor handling the case was a friend of Mazurkiewicz and of his lawyer; Tygodnik Powszechny writes that he escaped through contacts among Kraków militia officers and prosecutors. The writer Cezary Łazarewicz told Radio Kraków that a man able to walk free after evidence of that strength must have had wide connections. Histmag notes that in those years people often went missing without trace and few wished to ask questions.
For nine years after that, no killing was charged against him. In 1955 he killed a widow, Jadwiga de Laveaux, and her sister Zofia Suchowa, and tried to kill a Warsaw trader, who survived. The investigation opened on October 3, 1955; he was arrested on November 1. RMF FM, drawing on Łazarewicz, reports that he confessed in March and April 1956, after his wife and half-sister were arrested and threatened with charges of complicity. Investigators first drew up just over 30 charges, most of them dropped for lack of evidence; the indictment that reached court held eight.
The trial before the Voivodeship Court in Kraków ran from August 6 to 30, 1956. Several accounts report that witnesses were afraid to speak. On August 27 he withdrew his earlier statements and declared himself innocent. On August 30 the court sentenced him to death, and he was hanged at Montelupich prison on January 29, 1957 (Focus gives January 27). Rumor had put the victims at about thirty. The court’s number was six.
Yoshio Kodaira was arrested in Tokyo on August 20, 1946, three days after the body of a 17-year-old girl was reported in the Shiba district. He was a laundry worker at a United States Army facility, a former navy petty officer, and a man who had already served eight years in prison for a killing in 1932, when an assault on his estranged wife’s family left her father dead. He was sentenced to 15 years in 1933 and paroled in September 1940. Over the weeks after his 1946 arrest he confessed to a run of killings of young women that went back to May 1945, before Japan’s surrender. Prosecutors indicted him on ten counts. At trial he denied three, and the court acquitted him of those and convicted him of the other seven, women and girls killed in Tokyo and Tochigi Prefecture between May 1945 and August 1946, the youngest of them 17.
The case is remembered in Japan for the way it fed on hunger. The 1945 harvest failed, partly because of typhoon damage, and the food shortage reached its worst point in 1946, according to a 2021 Bunshun Online series by Koike (小池新). A history of the postwar years quoted there records that on November 2 and 3, 1945 alone, a million Tokyo residents went out to the neighboring prefectures to buy food. An Asahi Shimbun reporter riding a so-called white rice train from Akita to Ueno in the summer of 1946 saw police with pistols order passengers off at Yamagata and confiscate rice, and reported that nine in ten passengers were breaking the rationing rules. Work was as scarce as food: the same series cites a Ministry of Health and Welfare figure of 4.13 million workers released from wartime conscripted labor in November 1945. Most of the women in Kodaira’s case were people traveling to buy food or looking for work in those months. The journalist Takaaki Yagisawa, in a 2020 series for the same publication, quotes Kodaira himself telling investigators that after the war food was what moved women most. A stranger’s promise of rice or a job carried great weight in 1945, the Bunshun writers argue, and he used that.
Detection failed in the ordinary way of a crowded, disrupted city. Kodaira’s first killing in the series, in May 1945, was investigated by the military police and charged to no one; the case stayed unsolved until after his arrest, when a professor of forensic medicine at Keio University told the investigation headquarters that he had once examined a similar case, and that tip led police to reexamine the earlier one. Two deaths of women from Oji Ward in northern Tokyo, in July and September 1945, went unsolved for a year. In his police statements Kodaira also described violence against civilians during his army service in China; these are his own statements, and no court tried him for anything done there.
The Tokyo District Court, in a trial that began on March 3, 1947, sentenced him to death on seven counts on June 18. The Tokyo High Court upheld the sentence on February 27, 1948, and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on November 16, making it final. He was hanged at Miyagi Prison in Sendai on October 5, 1949.
John Reginald Halliday Christie was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1899. He served in the First World War, and accounts agree that he was injured by gas. Between the wars he was in and out of trouble, mainly for theft, and by 1939 he had five convictions, the figure the Home Office accepted in a written answer to Parliament in July 1953. When war came again, the Metropolitan Police expanded quickly by enrolling men in its War Reserve. Christie became War Reserve Constable X 112, and no one discovered his convictions. Answering a member of the House of Commons in July 1953, the Home Secretary said he regretted that "in the conditions of rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Police War Reserve" Christie’s record had not come to light, and that the checks now made were adequate.
The first woman Christie later admitted killing was Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian refugee who came to Britain in 1939 with the help of Quakers; by his account he killed her in 1943, while he was still a police reservist. The second, Muriel Eady, worked with him at a radio transmitter factory in Acton and went missing on October 7, 1944. Both belong to the war years. Beryl Evans, a young mother from the same house, was killed in 1949. In March 1953 the deaths of three more women and of his wife, Ethel, came to light at the house in North Kensington where he had lived since 1937. He was arrested in London on March 31 and confessed to killing six women and to killing Beryl Evans.
He was tried for one death only, that of his wife. A jury at the Central Criminal Court rejected his plea of insanity and convicted him on June 25, 1953; he was hanged at Pentonville on July 15.
The case is remembered as much for a man he helped to hang. In January 1950 Christie had been the chief prosecution witness against his neighbor Timothy Evans, who was convicted of murdering his 13-month-old daughter, Geraldine, and executed that March. The Home Secretary in 1965 told the Commons he had no power to declare Evans innocent. By November 1965 a High Court judge, Sir Daniel Brabin, was conducting a new inquiry; it concluded it more probable than not that Evans had not killed the child, and in October 1966 Evans received a posthumous free pardon. A pardon is not a quashed conviction, and the pardon remains the legal outcome. The war’s part in the Christie story is smaller than in the others, but it is specific: a reserve force built in a hurry, and a record nobody read.
Read together, the eight cases show the same four losses, in different proportions.
Light and movement. The Berlin blackout hid the S-Bahn killer and provided cover for his work; Tokyo’s hungry travelers, Budapest’s women answering advertisements, and London’s wartime refugees were all people who moved without being tracked.
Records. Kiss was declared dead by a military report in a war zone that the police could neither confirm nor disprove. Petiot’s wartime false identity as an FFI captain let him walk through the liberation. Mazurkiewicz and Christie both passed through institutions, a postwar prosecutor’s office and a police reserve, whose checks failed.
Men. With conscription the number of single, widowed and lonely women rose, which Landru’s notice was written for. With conscription also came the fear that moved Cianciulli. Ogorzow was exempt from the army because the railways could not spare him, and so remained on the trains.
Attention. The Reich kept the Berlin killings out of the press. A million Tokyo residents were buying rice. Hungary’s front pages gave way to Kiss and then back to the war. The police in every city had something larger to do.
The courts, once peace returned, did what courts do. They convicted for the deaths they could prove, set aside the rest, and in at least two cases, Kiss and Evans, left a question the record could not close.
• 1914, July: Béla Kiss is called up for the army.
• 1915, February 5: the date of Kiss’s reported death from typhus at Valjevo, Serbia, in a military report.
• 1915, early: the first of the killings for which Landru was convicted.
• 1916, May: the Cinkota deaths come to light; a reward is later offered for Kiss alive.
• 1919, April 12: Landru is arrested in Paris.
• 1921, November 30: Landru is convicted and sentenced to death; guillotined February 25, 1922.
• 1939, September: the Berlin blackout ordinance takes effect.
• 1939, December: first of the three killings for which Cianciulli was convicted.
• 1940, October 4: the first killing in the Ogorzow series.
• 1941, summer: Ogorzow is arrested; executed July 24, 1941 according to one source.
• 1943: Petiot is arrested by the Gestapo and later released; Mazurkiewicz’s first crime tried in court takes place.
• 1944, March: Petiot’s crimes come to light in Paris.
• 1945, May: Kodaira’s first killing in his series.
• 1946, May 25: Petiot is guillotined.
• 1946, July 20: Cianciulli is convicted at Reggio Emilia.
• 1946, August 20: Kodaira is arrested in Tokyo.
• 1953, March 31: Christie is arrested in London; hanged July 15.
• 1955, November 1: Mazurkiewicz is arrested in Kraków.
• 1956, August 30: Mazurkiewicz is sentenced to death.
• 1966, October: Timothy Evans receives a posthumous free pardon.