فصل 13

THE ANGEL MAKERS OF NAGYRÉV

Once upon a time, an anonymous letter appeared in the June 1929 edition of a small Hungarian newspaper called Szolnoki Újság, or the Szolnok Gazette. The letter declared that something was rotten in the nearby town of Nagyrév: murder. Two decades of slow, deliberate, repetitive murder. “The authorities are doing nothing, and the poisoners are carrying on their work undisturbed,” ran the letter. “This is my last attempt. If this also fails then there is no justice.” Police swarmed Nagyrév and a few surrounding villages and quickly arrested dozens of suspects. The once-sleepy town dissolved into chaos. Neighbors began accusing each other of homicide as the police dug up grave after grave in the local cemetery, making sure the residents had a clear view of the decomposing bodies.

Two weeks after the anonymous letter was published, the story spread across Hungary; by the end of the summer, it had gone international. People couldn’t believe what they were reading: almost all the suspects were women over the age of fifty-five. What was this wholesale murder plot? Some coven of Hungarian witches, still stuck in the dark ages? Proof, once and for all, that women were intrinsically evil? Nobody could understand how decades of murder could happen, unimpeded, in a little town. Nobody could understand how women could pull this off.

Trapped

Life in Nagyrév was rough and violent. In stereotypical small-town fashion, there was an oppressive sense of inescapability to the place, which was “ringed round as by an iron girdle with huge estates.” The residents of Nagyrév had no room to grow: there was no extra land to promise the young, no opportunity for people to move up in the world.

The early twentieth century was a time of enormous worldwide conflict and change, to put it mildly, and Nagyrév felt the strain of the shifting social climate. Village men were returning from the first World War scarred, angry, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The agricultural crisis of the Great Depression meant peasant farmers could barely sell their goods anymore. Nagyrév had little contact with the outside world due to its poor roads and lack of any train or bus stop. There was no doctor in town. Tensions ran high between the peasants and the town’s tiny middle class, and the snobbish behavior of the local pastor, teachers, and other authorities created a climate in which the poor didn’t feel like they could share their fears and suspicions with those in power.

Marriage was no escape from any of this. Many of the local men were alcoholics who regularly abused their wives. “Brutish,” they were called. Newlyweds often lived with their in-laws, which put everyone on edge, and rigid gender roles meant relationships between men and women were frequently strained. Wives were expected to put up with spousal abuse; men were paranoid that their wives had cheated on them with visiting soldiers while they were away at war. Divorce wasn’t unheard of, but it was socially frowned upon, and many women chose to stay in abusive marriages—with the limited benefits of their husbands’ meager incomes—rather than striking out on their own.

In this impoverished and isolated world, children were often seen as a burden: another mouth to feed, a baby who would grow up to be just as hopeless as her mother. So peasant women frequently turned to primitive and dangerous forms of contraception like the facsiga, a wooden plug meant to be inserted into the cervix. Others might resort to dangerous home-brewed abortions that involved puncturing the womb with a knitting needle, inserting poisonous weeds into the cervix, or trying to stab the fetus itself with a goose feather. If neither wooden plugs nor goose feathers stopped the child from being born, the mother’s final option was foolproof: infanticide. The ways to kill an infant were myriad and cruel: starving, poisoning, feeding them to pigs, smothering them with pillows, bathing them in hot water and then letting them catch pneumonia in the cold air. This crime was so common that parents suspected of killing their babies weren’t even denounced to authorities. It was simply part of the harsh circle of life.

In 2001, a Hungarian sociologist named Ferenc Moksony studied six hundred rural communities in Hungary and found that suicide rates were higher in isolated, traditional villages. Scholar Bela Bodó took it one step further. “The more marginalized a community and the more frustrated its inhabitants feel about their isolation and poverty, the more likely it is that they will turn to deviant behavior.” This is exactly what happened in Nagyrév.

“They Sent Me into My Grave, They Whom I Loved Most”

For twenty years, the women of Nagyrév killed the men of Nagyrév, and nobody said anything about it.

It was hard to pinpoint the start of the murders. They seemed to spring, fully formed, out of the pastoral Hungarian air. We know that some of the first occurred in the early 1910s, when a woman named Julianna Lipka moved into the house of a sick, elderly, wealthy couple, ostensibly to nurse them. The husband died of old age, but the wife turned out to be a cantankerous burden with a disgusting habit of spitting on the floor. It was far more work than Julianna had signed up for.

When she complained to a group of older women, they told her a secret: if she purchased flypaper and dissolved it in water, a film of poison would rise to the surface. She could then skim off the poison and mix it into food or drink, and the result would be fatal—and totally undetectable. Julianna took their advice and ran with it. First, she killed the elderly woman. Later, she poisoned her own disagreeable stepsister and then her irritating husband. Once she learned how easy it was to improve her life with something as humble as wet flypaper, it was hard to stop.

One of those older women was Zsuzsanna Fazekas, the town midwife, and nobody knew the ins and outs of life and death quite like Zsuzsanna. She could deliver a baby, soothe a farmer’s strained muscle, and poison a husband all in a day’s work. Since there was no doctor in the village, Zsuzsanna wielded a great deal of power, and the locals were in awe of both her mysterious knowledge and her scandalous exploits. She carried a vial of arsenic in her pocket. She was divorced. She smoked and drank at the local tavern, a place most women would never go. And she was good at her trade: by 1929, she lived in one of the village’s finest houses.

Zsuzsanna showed no hesitation when it came to prescribing murder to her desperate female clients, and she passed out poison as though it were a remedy for headaches. Sometimes she’d even commit the murders herself, like when she brought over medicine to “calm down” one woman’s difficult husband, a former prisoner of war who struggled with the fact that he had been blinded in battle. There was an unspoken understanding between the two women that the medicine was poisoned, and Zsuzsanna fed it to the husband as his wife stood by. Other times, the midwife suggested different ways of killing. Once, she explained to a very poor mother exactly how to starve her unwanted newborn to death.

Another older woman—Rozália Takács, a masseuse—was also heavily involved in many of the murders. She’d come to homicide in a very personal way, after poisoning her “alcoholic beast” of a husband with arsenic acid. She went on to train a young mother in the fine art of killing her oppressive father-in-law, whispering, “You do not have to torture yourself with him, I’ll bring the old man something that will destroy him.” In this way, both the idea of murder and the means for murder were disseminated through Nagyrév like an evil mist. No woman killed alone. Instead, she’d go to her friends for advice, and they would encourage her, condone her actions, and give her the knowledge—and the supplies—that she needed. It happened an estimated forty-two times in Nagyrév: forty-two murders committed by thirty-four people. This was sisterhood gone bad, and a real feather in the cap of those who believed that if one woman was naturally evil, a group of women were evil compounded.

The intertwined nature of the crimes is clear in the case of Mária Kardos, one of the town’s more colorful citizens. She was richer than the other women, she dressed better, and she had been divorced twice, which was unusual for Nagyrév. After her second divorce, she took a lover—the former village mayor. Meanwhile, her adult son, an ailing twenty-three-year-old from a previous marriage, was proving to be more than she could handle. Mária felt shackled by the constant caregiving and wanted to spend her energy on this new affair. Perhaps she was growing sick of motherhood, too, and thought that the role’s requirements would have ended by then. So she purchased arsenic from Zsuzsanna and began to slip it into her son’s food. He worsened quickly.

Shortly before her son’s death, Mária moved his sickbed outside so he could catch a few final rays of sun. As he lay there, looking up into the sky, Mária remembered something she’d always loved about her boy: he had a beautiful voice.

“I thought I would like to hear him once more,” she told the police, later. “So I said: ‘Sing, my boy. Sing me my favorite song.’ He sang it in his lovely clear voice.” She was sad to lose that voice—but once he was dead, she was free, and ready to get married again.

Unfortunately for Mária, the former mayor turned out to be a die-hard womanizer, and he was terribly unenthusiastic about becoming a husband. In 1920, Mária finally convinced him to wed her; local gossips said he “had to be dragged to the city hall like the cattle to the slaughterhouse.” Marriage didn’t bring romance, though; her new husband still drank and slept around, and before long, the two of them were sleeping in different rooms.

It just so happened Zsuzsanna also hated the former mayor for her own obscure reasons, though she explained away her hatred by saying that he owed her a few sacks of wheat. So once she got wind of Mária’s latest situation, the midwife was only too happy to help out. The two women poisoned the man slowly, over the course of a month, and he died in April 1922. Later, editorials would imagine the ghostly rage of the Nagyrév victims like this unfortunate third husband and this ailing son, emphasizing the utter shock, the betrayal of these murders: “They killed me, they sent me into my grave, they whom I loved most.” But for now, the murderesses were untroubled. As a thank-you gift, Maria gave Zsuzsanna enough money to buy a small calf.

Like many of the Nagyrév killings, these motives seem not just petty, but psychopathically callous: the debt of a few sacks of wheat, the inconveniently sick son. However, these were simply the reasons that the women gave each other for the poisonings: She spat on the floor. He complained about being blind. I was annoyed. I was overwhelmed. In truth, these minor inconveniences were only a stand-in for their dark, gaping needs.

This was a generation of women who were given nothing and could expect nothing. This was a generation of women whose husbands had been taken away by the war and returned to them scarred, disillusioned, violent, suspicious, and shell-shocked. Poison wasn’t perfect, but at least it brought change. Some of these women murdered out of desperation, like the one whose husband beat her with a double chain. She told the court, defiantly, “I do not feel guilty at all; my husband was a very bad man . . . since he died, I have found my peace.” Some killed to be with another man, like the woman who poisoned her husband and married his best friend. Others killed for revenge, such as the woman who poisoned the father-in-law who molested her. Still more used poison to gain material goods, like the woman who murdered her mother for an early inheritance.

The motives varied, but the methods did not. The idea that you could improve your life with poison spread like dark wildfire through the women’s circles of Nagyrév. And the fact that the poisoners were so reliant on each other for information and supplies created a dangerous web of guilt in the town. Any one of these women could condemn her friends, but she who opened her mouth would also condemn herself.

Panic in the Village

In the late 1920s, authorities in the nearby city of Szolnok began receiving anonymous letters claiming that something awful was going on in Nagyrév. At first, these rambling, panicked missives were ignored. They were easy to dismiss as village gossip, what with the long-winded name-dropping and the unpleasant subject matter: There are many . . . who had fed poison to others . . . Uncle Misi Beke [was killed by] Róza Kiss who [destroyed] her husband and the old Mrs. János Pápai and she also tried [to kill] the aged Sándor Szendi and Mrs. Pista Valki but she did not succeed and who knows how many more.

But as soon as the Szolnok Gazette ran one of the letters in 1929—“the authorities are doing nothing, and the poisoners are carrying on their work undisturbed”—the state bureaucracy was forced to step in, and everything began happening very quickly, as newspapers and tabloids whipped the Hungarian public into a scandalized frenzy. Suddenly, both the media and the government were pressuring local police to get answers, and fast.

So after twenty years of leisurely, undetected murder, Nagyrév was thrown into chaos. Suspects were arrested and interrogated harshly in the house of the local cemetery caretaker. Women were called multiple times during the night for interviews and, when they weren’t being cross-examined, forced to face the wall without speaking to each other. Julianna Lipka, by then one of the oldest and frailest suspects, was threatened with flogging. If the police couldn’t get a confession, they turned to bizarre scare tactics: one officer hid under a bed in a room where two female suspects were being held and frightened them half to death by grabbing their feet. The terrified, superstitious women—sure some supernatural force was at play—immediately confessed.

The exhumations provided yet another opportunity for intimidation. The bodies needed to be analyzed for poison, yes, but the police made sure to dig up the corpses as publicly as possible. They didn’t even bother hiding the nauseating results from the town’s children—not even the “glistening brown” brains covered in “short-winged brown corpse-bugs.” As the town descended into hysteria, everyone began pointing fingers at each other. The townspeople distanced themselves from the women who seemed guiltiest, and no one felt this hostility more than Zsuzsanna. Because of her connections to so many of the murders, the midwife was one of the first suspects to be questioned. She must have been terrified; she knew exactly how many villagers could incriminate her.

The police released her on bail for a single day, expecting that she would help them find the other poisoners. Instead, Zsuzsanna wandered around the village in a panic, asking her friends and former clients for enough money to hire a lawyer. But not even a prosperous midwife could afford salvation in Nagyrév. Though she begged and begged, the frightened villagers turned her away. Nobody could risk being connected to Zsuzsanna anymore, no matter how many favors she’d done for them in the past.

The midwife grew more and more unnerved as she stumbled through the town, and by the time she got home, she was swearing loudly that she’d revenge herself on each and every one of her ungrateful clients. She stayed up all night, pacing around her yard. The walls of her life seemed to be closing in around her. In the morning, when she saw the police officers coming down the street to rearrest her, she pulled a vial of poison from her dress and drank the whole thing down.

In some accounts of the Nagyrév poisonings, Zsuzsanna emerges as the driving force behind all the murders, a crazed midwife who thinks she has the power to determine who lives and who dies—a supernatural power, even. A journalist for the New York Times, writing from Budapest, compared her to “a figure eminently fit to flit around the bubbling caldron in ‘Macbeth,’ or to discharge the duties of an African witch doctor.” Another called her a “fatuous Eastern deity, perpetually devouring something with her bloody teeth.” Zsuzsanna did play a central role in the killings, but it was less witchy and more business-minded than the papers said. She was an entrepreneur, a kingpin. She distributed poison to women who wanted to kill. She brought over the poison herself, if the women were particularly reluctant. She suggested murder as a solution to tension, unhappiness, abuse, and impatience, subtly legitimizing the action in the minds of her fellow villagers.

Calling Zsuzsanna a witch was an attempt to pin the murders onto a single source, a wellspring of evil. It was easier to do this than to recognize the murders for what they were in Nagyrév: a dreadful phenomenon birthed and encouraged by widespread social issues. The murders were far too communal and decentralized to be pinned to Zsuzsanna, or any other woman, for that matter. The source of these crimes was as imperceptible and pervasive as the poison itself. Economy, culture, and human unhappiness all wove a tangled web in Nagyrév, creating an atmosphere characterized not by one midwife’s madness, but by quiet, long-term female desperation.

The police found Zsuzsanna writhing on the ground. They tried to force her to swallow milk and vomit up the poison, but she kept her jaws clenched tight. Realizing their key witness was slipping away, the police searched desperately for a vehicle that could transport Zsuzsanna to the nearest hospital, located in another town. But there were very few ways to get out of Nagyrév, and the neighbors refused to help. They didn’t want anything to do with the witch anymore. By the time the police found a ride, Zsuzsanna was dead.

Rural Mystery

The lawyer János Kronberg, who was appointed investigating magistrate of the case, loathed the women of Nagyrév from the start. He arrested as many of them as he could and had them taken en masse to nearby Szolnok, where a crowd waited to gape at them. The tabloid Kis Újság noted the sad contrast between the accused—mostly poor, aging women dressed in black who kept their eyes downcast and covered their faces with kerchiefs—and the brightly dressed middle-class mob who hurled insults at them.

The trial was an exciting opportunity for the middle and upper classes to really revel in their social superiority. They were already biased against peasants, and journalists capitalized on this by infusing their coverage with as much prejudice as they could muster. Headlines emphasized the outdated, even primitive nature of the killers: WHERE FOR ONE AND A HALF DECADES NO ONE HAS HEARD THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE: VISIT NAGYRéV, THE VILLAGE OF DEATH ON THE TISA SHORE, or WITH MEDIEVAL METHODS CHILDREN DESTROYED THEIR PARENTS TO GET THEIR LAND.

In the prison at Szolnok, the peasant women struggled to adjust to the loneliness, the rat-infested cells, and the nonstop interrogations. It was completely different from the communal village life they used to lead. They were forced to take tests that used the signifiers of middle-class culture to determine their intellectual aptitude by quizzing them on things like taxation, national holidays, and the army. A psychiatrist who examined the women decided that their murders were all inherently linked to sex: they were either frigid or promiscuous, and their supposedly warped sexual drives “had [their] root in rural mystery and an abnormal lifestyle, which had distorted the defendants’ psyche and made their behavior unpredictable.” Two of the imprisoned women, humiliated and disoriented, tied their own head scarves to the bars of the prison windows and strangled themselves. The press saw it as an admission of guilt.

Nihilism

The women from Nagyrév never thought it would come to this.

Yes, they had killed people, but many of them didn’t even see what they’d done as murder. Murder, to them, meant blood and struggle and force. They had simply sent people off to sleep. “We are not murderesses,” they told the court. “We neither stabbed nor drowned our husbands. They have simply died from poison. It was an easy death for them and no murder.” Perhaps these women saw poisoning as “easy death” because they were desensitized to dying. They saw just how rough life could be: how people went to war and came back mentally and physically damaged, how food was scarce, how children died like flies whether you killed them or not. (By the 1930s, almost one-third of all peasant children in Hungary died before they were old enough to attend school.) Maybe these women told themselves they were simply speeding along a harsh process that would eventually claim their wounded husbands, belligerent in-laws, and squalling babies anyway.

The paper Pesti Napló speculated on the “strange combination of causes” that led to such familiarity with death, and such willingness to cause it. “Yes, it was money; yes, it was hunger for land and yes, it was love and hatred,” ran the editorial. “But it was also cultural nihilism, living at the animals’ level, the primitive nature of their souls.” Cultural nihilism, yes, certainly. But living at the animals’ level? Primitive souls? These murders were birthed from very human emotions—uncomfortable, ugly emotions, to be sure, like desperation and lust and anger and irritation, but human ones nonetheless. The women killed to lessen their despair and improve their lot in life. Sometimes that meant gaining something (money, land, a new lover); other times it meant ridding themselves of something (husband, son, parent). “If the men were brutish,” wrote the New York Times, “the women seem to have been remarkable for the strength and persistence of their passions. The average age of those so far tried is over 55, yet lust played an even greater part than greed in their crimes.” That last part wasn’t really true, but it made for good copy.

The fact that the women so blatantly—so humanly—wanted more than what they were given was uncomfortable for their more prosperous observers, who told themselves that the Nagyrév women were just—outdated. In other words, their social circles knew right from wrong, but the message simply hadn’t made its way to Nagyrév yet. Really, the climate in Nagyrév was nothing if not a by-product of the world around it—a fact the defense would latch onto soon enough. This fact did not excuse the murderers. But neither did it make them animals.

Funeral Lament

By the end of the year, hundreds of people had been questioned, over fifty graves had been opened, forty exhumed bodies were found to contain arsenic, and the authorities were ready to indict thirty-four women and one man. A rabid public crowded into the courtroom to see these deviants, and when they particularly disliked a defendant, they’d whistle, catcall, or yell demands for harsh sentences.

In the face of all this hatred, it was in the best interest of the women of Nagyrév to appear humble, simple, clean, and grandmotherly. Their only hope for pardon was to seem like good country folk who were either innocent or acted in self-defense.

But the trials splintered the sisterhood of poison apart. Accused women testified against each other; friends and relatives of the deceased men testified against the accused women; some townspeople even gave negative testimonies against their own family members. If the woman on trial had killed an abusive husband, the witnesses from Nagyrév tended to be more lenient, but they turned harshly against those they perceived as having character flaws.

János Kronberg believed every one of the women was guilty, and he wanted them all to hang. His argument was illogically circular but effective: if there was a reason for murder, then a murder happened, and only the accused could have done it. When Kronberg didn’t have hard facts, he resorted to smearing the women’s characters. He called their testimonies “fairy tales,” and believed that poisoning, since it involved cunning, secrecy, and long deliberation, was a quintessentially feminine crime.

The defense didn’t have much to go on. They tried to blame the murders entirely on Zsuzsanna, who made a convenient scapegoat now that she was dead. They also tried to argue that the crimes were the result of poverty, saying the Hungarian authorities could have done more to improve the standard of living in Nagyrév. This was certainly true, but it didn’t do a lot to prove the women’s innocence.

The divorcée Mária Kardos turned out to be one of the most hated figures in the courtroom. She drew great ire from observers by appearing conceited and unrepentant, and she alienated the entire room when she criticized her dead son and deceased third husband. She also wore an expensive head scarf, which irritated the wealthy women of the town, who thought she was trying to rise above her station. During police interrogations, she had confessed her own crimes in excruciating detail, seemingly proud of her actions. Now, she tried to incriminate as many of her townspeople as she could: “We, the women of Nagyrév, all knew what Zsuzsanna Fazekas had been doing. We were as used to her deeds as we were used to seeing the flocks of geese leaving the village for the meadows every morning . . . No one among the women who have been arrested for the poisonings is innocent.” In an effort to get Mária to show some remorse for her crimes, Kronberg harangued her for her lack of mothering skills, reminding her that birds feed their young, that cows lick their newborn calves, and that a dog will jump into the water to save its puppies, even if it dies in the process. Eventually, Mária broke down. “When one feels desperate, she can do many things,” she admitted. Once the interrogation was over, someone in the audience said loudly, “Rope.” Finally, the sentences were handed out. Seven women received the death penalty, including Mária and the masseuse Rozália Takács, who had helped with so many of the murders. Most of the others got life in prison or heavy prison sentences; a few went free because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them.

After the sentencing, the peasant women began a strange, high-pitched wail: “Jaj, Jaj, Istenem, Istenem.” This was the lament they used at funerals—“alas, alas, my God”—and it made the wealthy spectators highly uncomfortable. It was too raw, too tangible. They had signed up for a public spectacle, but they didn’t want to deal with the unbearable intensity of human despair. Especially not from peasants.

Soon enough, though, the Supreme Court swept in and reduced many of the sentences, embarrassing the local authorities. The court found irregularities in the ways the women had been sentenced, and thought most of the sentences were too harsh, anyway. They eventually took three of the seven women off death row, including Rozália Takács. Mária Kardos received no such leniency; the court reexamined her case and concluded that her premeditated, cold-blooded cruelty meant that she deserved to die. She was hanged early in the morning on January 13, 1931.

“They caused the greatest disappointment,” wrote the Szolnok Gazette while the trials were taking place. “Instead of witches, demons and crafty murderers we see only kind, poor, old and broken women on the benches . . . Life has brought them little joy. However, they did not deserve anything better.”