Defendants in the arsenic poisoning case of the Tiszazug area, Wikimedia Commons

Madame Julius Fazekas was stewing arsenic fly-paper on the stove.

She stood stirring at the stove as the water simmered in the pot. Fazekas pulled at the threadbare shawl around her shoulders. It was cold and very late at night. But she was the only midwife and healing woman in the village. She was used to being woken up at night for help.

Behind her, Mrs. Takacs sat hunched on a stool, rocking silently with her arms wrapped around herself. Her husband had been drinking again and he had railed at her in a drunken rage in their home. She fled to Fazekas’ house when he started using his fists on her.

The water in the pot rose to a furious boil.

Fazekas removed the pot from the stove and skimmed off the top of the water. She turned around and placed a small vial of liquid onto the kitchen table. The candlelight flickered on Mrs. Takacs’ stony face. She stared unblinkingly at the corked bottle in front of her.

Fazekas turned away to attend to her stove. After a moment, there was a rustle of cloth and a light breeze. When Fazekas turned back to look, both Mrs. Takacs and the bottle were gone from the house.

“They died from poison and this was a pleasant death for them!”

Two days later, there was a funeral at Mrs. Takacs’ house.

Word was that Mr. Takacs had died of a heart attack.

Fazekas watched the funeral procession from the porch of her home. As the funeral procession passed out of the village, a faint barrage of curses emanated from one of the worn-looking houses on the street. It was soon followed by muffled shouting and crying.

No one paid the outburst any attention.

It was so commonplace in the village that everyone ignored it.

Fazekas went back into her house and put a pot of water to simmer on the stove. The word will spread, she knew. And soon, there will be another distraught woman knocking on her door. It was the quiet beginning of the hundreds of murders that would tear apart the village for the next 15 years.

Madame Julius Fazekas was the first angel maker of Nagyrév.

Julius Fazekas

Julius Fazekas arrived in the village of Nagyrév in 1911.

She was a middle-aged midwife with a murky background. No one knew where she came from. She was married, but her husband apparently went missing under mysterious circumstances. She came with several strong references from doctors praising her nursing abilities.

Nagyrév was a farming village in Hungary, around 60 miles southeast of Budapest. The nearest town was Tiszakurt, on the banks of the Tiszaltiver river. Like many other villages dotting the Danubian plain, Nagyrév was small and obscure. There was a pub, a large and empty church and a few muddy streets lined with single storey cottages.

“I gave him some more poison. Suddenly I remembered how splendidly my boy used to sing in church, so I said to him, ‘Sing, my boy! Sing my favourite song!’ “

There was no resident doctor or hospital in Nagyrév.

Fazekas, with her basic medical skills and midwifery expertise, became the only source of medical help in the village. Fazekas took on the task of caring for the sick and the infirm in this remote area. The women came to Fazekas first with their health problems and then their domestic issues. As time went by, they grew to rely on her advice.

Fazekas was only in the village for three years, but in that period of time, she had gained a reputation of administrating abortions.

The Women Of Nagyrév

In early 1900s in Hungarian society, marriages were arranged. Parents selected husbands for their teenage daughters. Sometimes, the men were much older than the women. Women had no say in whom they married, even if the man was alcoholic or abusive towards her. Divorce was taboo.

In many of these marriages, there were few feelings between man and wife. Extreme poverty and hardship during World War I further eroded whatever emotional attachment couples might have towards each other in these shackled relationships.

“It’s terrible the way men have all the power,” she said.

Life was hard in the poor village of Nagyrév. Poverty was so rampant that newborns were seen as burdens. Families simply could not afford to feed another mouth. As World War I raged on, life became more difficult. Able-bodied men were sent off to fight at the front for Austria-Hungary. Only the women were left to work the fields.

Nagyrév become a holding camp for the Allied prisoners of war because of its remote location. The Russian prisoners of war were drafted to work the farms. In the absence of local men, the women in the village began to have romantic affairs with these young men. Women took on three to four lovers at a time.

Some of these indiscretions resulted in unwanted pregnancies. The women approached Fazekas for help. Soon, there was a growing line at Fazekas’ door for clandestine abortions.

Fazekas would eventually be arrested at least 10 times between 1911 to 1921 for performing illegal abortions. But each time, she would be acquitted and released by sympathetic judges. It was no doubt because she was the only medical caregiver in the village.

Return Of The Nagyrév Men

When the war-weary men returned to Nagyrév from the bloody battlefields, it was a less than joyous union for both husbands and wives.

The men trickled back to the village, wounded and crippled. They were estranged from their wives by the long years apart and the horrific things they’ve seen on the warfront.

The women, on the other hand, have learnt how to live without their husbands. Their romantic flings with the POWs reminded them that they were women with their own lives. They did not have to spend the rest of their lives bound to their drunken, violent or crippled husbands. They resented their loss of independence and sexual freedom.

One by one, they went to Fazekas to pour out their discontent with their husbands. “Why put up with them?” Fazekas allegedly told the women after listening to them. “I have a solution.”

The solution was arsenic, boiled off from flypaper soaked in water.

The Beginning Of The Murders

The first death began quietly.

Fazekas offered her first vial of arsenic to a village woman by the name of Mrs. Takacs.

Mrs. Takacs had enough of her brutish and alcoholic husband. She slipped the arsenic into her husband’s meal and waited. It worked as planned. Her husband passed away. Everyone thought it was a heart attack.

Word of the secret murder spread among other wives. Women began to come to Fazekas for the arsenic that would release them from their unhappy marriages. Fazekas started selling bottles of the poison for money.

“I was so sorry for the wretched woman. I gave her a bottle of poison and told her that if nothing else helped her marriage to try that.”

The price varied from person to person. Fazekas sold the arsenic at whatever price the buyers could afford to pay. She never told anyone where her home brewed poison came from. She assured her buyers that that the arsenic was untraceable in the body.

It would proved to be her Achilles’ heel in the future.

Soon, hale and healthy men around the village began to drop dead like flies. The death rate was so high that superstitious people began to whisper uneasily of witchcraft and evil spirits. At one point, there were as many as fifty women poisoning their husbands.

These women called themselves the “Angel Makers of Nagyrév”.

The Angel Makers Of Nagyrév

There were unspoken rules among the “Angel Makers of Nagyrév” during their early days.

Only married women may join their ranks. Angel makers cannot aid single women to poison off their lovers. Nor can they help a husband to get rid of an unwanted wife. It was forbidden to poison women or children. Spinsters and women in happy marriages, with no need of husband-killing services, were not to be told about the syndicate’s grim activities.

The number of deaths grew as more wives sought out Fazekas’ services. After a while, the number of marriages in the vicinity plummeted. Men became fearful of matrimony. Marriage was akin to a death sentence, it seemed.

By 1929, Nagyrév was known as “the murder district”.

To avoid suspicion from authorities, Fazekas roped in an accomplice, a woman called Susi Oláh. Oláh had poisoned her much older husband when she was 18 years old. (She would go on to finish off a second husband as well.)

Oláh’s son-in-law was the village’s only coroner. All the death certificates were signed by him. The mysterious deaths were written off as heart attacks, drownings (a poisoned body was tossed into the river), disease and alcoholism.

With no real medical doctors around, there was no one to challenge his conclusions. The few doctors that were staying around the region were underpaid and overworked. They paid little attention to what was happening in Nagyrév.

A History Of Husband Mass Murders

Mass husband-killings have occured throughout history.

In 17th century Italy, Giulia Tofana developed the Aqua Tofana, a poison made of arsenic and lead, that she sold openly as a cosmetic to unhappy wives who wish to be rid of their husbands. It was a colourless and tasteless slow-acting poison that was to be added in drops to the wine of the unfortunate man. Tofana was responsible for the deaths of 600 men in Rome. She was arrested and executed by the Papal authorities in 1651.

In 1868 in France, a herbalist called Joye provided arsenic to at least three women to poison their husbands. He would first instruct the woman to procure a coffin nail from a cemetery and plant it in the ground while pronouncing her husband’s name. After that, he would pass her the poison powder to do the rest of the work. He was found out after a husband went undercover to expose Joye and his customers. Joye was found guilty and condemned to hard labour for life.

“May the Devil take Lydia! She had brewed us tea which has killed us!”

In 1882, two women in Hungary were put on trial in separate cases of mass murders.

In the first case, Lyukas Kathi baked little cakes with large amounts of arsenic in them. She sold them to women who wish to do away with their husbands or lovers. News reports described her as “a meek little woman of about 50 years of age, with a kind, motherly expression in her small face.”

Kathi murdered two of her husbands. She was arrested and accused of 26 other murders. She was hanged in the gallows, witnessed by a crowd of thousands. Her daughter who had pleaded to enter the gallows area, was nearly lynched by the unruly crowd.

In the second case, Thekla Popov, a 70-year-old Romany woman, was charged for helping a hundred women to poison their husbands over a period of two years. Her customers would pay her between 50 to 100 florins for a bottle of “red liquid poison”. She was exposed by her own daughter who had a quarrel with her.

“These villages, gentlemen, are utterly dominated by women. And the men are all afraid for their lives!”

In 1909, a Madame Popova was arrested in Russia for killing over 300 men. She was a prolific poisoner who ran a murder-for-hire service specifically for wives looking to free themselves from their tyrannical husbands.

She charged her customers a nominal fee for her services. She finished off the men with poison, her own hands, a weapon or through a hired assassin. Madame Popova was only caught when a remorseful customer of hers outed her to the authorities.

Madame Popova freely confessed that she had “liberated” 300 wives in the course of her work and that she “did excellent work in freeing unhappy wives from their tyrants.” An incensed mob wanted to burn her at the stake, but Czarist soldiers saved her and hustled her to prison instead. She went to her death before the firing squad, unrepentant to the last.

Spiralling Out Of Control

Back in Nagyrév, it wasn’t long before the deaths spiralled out of control.

Poisoning became a fad.

The widows began to kill indiscriminately out of greed, convenience and boredom, ignoring the original creed of the Angel Makers. Unwanted lovers, elderly parents in the way of inheritance, annoying relatives, children who were a burden to feed, the disabled. All were fair game for the poisoners.

Palinka only wanted to poison her husband at first. But it worked so well that she went on to send her parents, her two brothers, her sister-in-law and her aunt to their graves as well. She did it so that she could claim a house and two and a half acres of land all for herself.

Palinka committed the murders with a flair. She would feed her victim a small dose of poison just enough to give him cramps. To cure the ailment, Palinka would dash off to town and return with an expensive bottle of medicine. She would dole out generous spoonfuls of the medicine to the victim until he expired. Of course, the contents of the medicine bottle had been replaced much earlier with fly-paper water.

These women called themselves the “Angel Makers of Nagyrév”.

Marie Kardos killed her husband, her lover and her sickly 23-year-old son. As a last motherly gesture to her son, she moved his bed outside the house on one warm autumn day and fed him the poisoned soup herself.

“I gave him some more poison,” she recalled in court. “Suddenly I remembered how splendidly my boy used to sing in church, so I said to him, ‘Sing, my boy! Sing my favourite song!’ He sang it with his lovely clear voice, then suddenly he cried out, gripped his stomach, gasped and was dead.”

Maria Varga, 41, murdered her husband, a blind war hero, when he raged about her having sex with her young lover repeatedly at home. He died in agony within twenty-four hours of consuming the poison. She didn’t stop there. Five years later, when she grew tired of her young lover, she poisoned him off as well.

Lydia Csery poisoned both her elderly parents. Neighbours later testified that they heard her father cry out to his dying wife, “May the Devil take Lydia! She had brewed us tea which has killed us!”

Juliane Lipka killed seven people which included her family members — her stepmother, her aunt, her brother and her sister-in-law. She poisoned her husband’s rum and tea on Christmas Eve. In the spirit of neighbourliness, she also aided the woman living next door to her.

“I was so sorry for the wretched woman,” she said. “I gave her a bottle of poison and told her that if nothing else helped her marriage to try that.”

Balint Czordas, the second-in-command of the Angel Makers, fed a deadly dose to a few of her children when they proved to be one too many mouths to feed. Rosalie Sebestyen and Rose Hoyba murdered their husbands because the men “bored” them.

Maria Szendi, poisoned her husband because “he always had his way.”

“It’s terrible the way men have all the power,” she said.

The inexplicable deaths grew at an alarming rate, spreading to the neighbouring town of Tiszakurt. The total death toll in the region was estimated to be as high as 300.

By 1929, Nagyrév was known as “the murder district”.

Suspicion Of Foul Play

The murders in Nagyrév and nearby Tiszakurt continued unabated over a decade despite the occasional suspicion of the police.

Frightened villagers had sent anonymous letters to the authorities to accuse the women of poisoning their family members. But there was no evidence beyond rumours that foul play was involved. All the death certificates had listed natural causes for the deaths.

Visiting detectives found that the local populace were cowed by what they thought were sinister powers of Fazekas. An Oakland Tribune newspaper article in 1937 reported what a local clergyman had told the detectives:

“The superstitious peasants are terrified of her. They believe she has supernatural powers and as her official capacity as nurse and midwife gives her access to every family, she dominates the entire district. These villages, gentlemen, are utterly dominated by women. And the men are all afraid for their lives!”

An Investigation

The turning point came in 1929 when Hungary finished its ten-year census. Officials, studying the statistics, noticed that the death rate for the village of Nagyrév was unusually high. A major investigation ensued.

One woman, Mrs. Szabó, admitted to poisoning her husband and brother. She fingered Fazekas and Oláh, the leaders of the widow maker cabal.

Fazekas and Oláh were brought in for questioning, but they were both steadfast in their proclamations of innocence. Mrs. Szabó retracted her confession, claiming that she had been bullied by the police into making the statement.

The police released Fazekas and Oláh.

It was a triumph for Fazekas and Oláh. They now looked untouchable in the eyes of the frightened villagers.

But unknown to them, the police had both of them placed under surveillance.

The Game Was Up

Fazekas was secretly shaken by her arrest. She began to visit her former customers’ homes one by one to warn them that the game was up and that they shouldn’t talk. The detective shadowing her noted down the houses she had visited. The police would proceed to arrest the occupants of the houses later.

Meanwhile, Balint Czordas, one of the leaders of the syndicate, made a trip to the capital to visit a chemist. She wanted to know if traces of arsenic can be found in the body of a person who had died from consuming it. The chemist assured her that the chemical can still be found in such a corpse. Even if the flesh had decomposed over the years, traces of arsenic can be found in the fingernails and the hair.

Balint Czordas, faint and white from this shocking news, hurried back to the village to inform her circle. Fazekas and Oláh received this news like a bolt of lightning. The arsenic laden bodies lying in the village cemetery would be proof of their dirty deeds. The remains of their victims could undo them all.

They hastily decided on a plan of action to muddy the evidence.

The Nagyrév Cemetery

That night, thirteen widows of the murder syndicate gathered at the Nagyrév cemetery.

They planned to shuffle the tomb headstones around in a bid to fool the authorities. They were going to remove the headstones from the graves of the poisoned dead and replace them with headstones of those who weren’t poisoned. This way, when the bodies of the suspected poisoned are exhumed, the police would be unable to detect any trace of arsenic in the corpses.

However, their plan was foiled when the police arrived.

The widows scattered, having moved only a few headstones.

The police decided to exhume the bodies in the cemetery immediately. Overnight, the cemetery turned into a morgue as doctors tested parts of the bodies for traces of arsenic. A few widows, eager to prove their innocence, wholeheartedly supported the digging. They were fearful that their current husbands will abandon them. They wanted this chance to prove that they were not part of the murdering syndicate.

The results of the exhumation were somber.

Out of the 50 bodies, 46 were found to contain arsenic. The bodies that tested positive for arsenic included not only men, but women, children and even a baby as well. Bottles containing dried up sediment of arsenic, as well as bread and cakes laden with the poison, were also found in the coffins. It was Fazekas’ method of getting rid of the evidence in her house.

Capture

In light of the evidence, the police arrested around 100 widows, including Oláh.

Fazekas took her own life before the police could take her in. Like many of the villagers, she lived in a modest one-storey house near the street. Her home had a view of the full length of the road. When she saw the gendarmes coming down the street, she took her own poison. The police found her dead, surrounded by pots filled with water and fly-papers.

Balint Czordas confessed to helping poison some twenty husbands and a few of her own children. She committed suicide that night in prison. She hung herself with a rope made from the bedding. Three other widows who shared the same cell with her, watched her hang herself without interfering.

The Trial

Twenty-six of the women were put on trial. The defendants displayed open hostility at court. The presiding judge asked one of the widows, Rose Glyba, if she knew of the Ten Commandments.

“No!” she shouted.

The judge persisted. “Do you know the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ? ”

“I never heard of it!” Glyba yelled and sat down furiously.

Women who were called to testify against Oláh showed genuine fear of her in court. They told the jury that her eyes “glowed ruby red at night” and that she kept poisonous snakes and lizards that she trained to climb into the beds of those who might betray her.

Juliane Lipka, who had poisoned her entire family for the inheritance of the family land, appeared unconcerned about the trial.

“When can I go home?” she had asked her lawyer. “They will auction off all my property while I am here.” She apparently believed that she would be set free, and she would be able to live out the rest of her days with a young lover.

The widow murder cabal had gotten their stash of arsenic fly-papers from a supplier. A grocer from a nearby town testified that more fly-papers were sold in Nagyrév than in the rest of Hungary.

Eight of the angel makers were given the death penalty. Among the eight sentenced to death were Susi Oláh and her sister, Lydia Oláh.

Lydia Oláh was unrepentant at her trial. According to a Russian daily, she cried out, “We are not assassins! We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang them or drown them either! They died from poison and this was a pleasant death for them!”

Twelve of the women were sentenced to prison. Out of the twelve, seven of the women received life sentences.

Aftermath

With the arrests of the widows and the deaths of the syndicate ringleaders, the cloud of fear that laid over the village of Nagyrév for so long was lifted.

However, many mysteries still surround the strange case of the Angel Makers of Nagyrév. Exhumed bodies in the nearby town of Tiszakurt were found to contain traces of arsenic as well, but no one in the town was convicted. No one knew how many were involved in the syndicate and exactly how many widows were still at large. As for Fazekas, no one knew where she came from or what her original motives were.

Historians puzzled as to why the women of Nagyrév turned into mass-murderers. Poverty, hardship, boredom and greed were just a few of the reasons that were speculated upon. But we will never really know why.

Now nearly a century later, the fear that the Angel Makers of Nagyrév have evoked in the villagers have faded. Their stories have become part of the village’s historical lore for curious visitors.

Maria Gunya, an 83-year-old inhabitant of the Nagyrév village, was only a little girl when the widows were put on trial. In a 2004 interview with BBC, she remembered wryly that the men’s behaviour to their wives “improved markedly” after the spate of poisonings.

Dr. Geza Cseh, in charge of the Nagyrév village archives, was more enigmatic.

“I’m sure there are still secrets to be unearthed, here or elsewhere.”