Lady Killers Read online

  The West, despite all its tangible problems, was marked very heavily by the intangible ideal of, well, idealism. It was a “region of ideals, mistaken or not,” according to historian Frederick Jackson Turner (who came up with what we call the frontier thesis): discovery, innovation, democracy, and individualism. The very fact that the West seemed grand and huge and (incorrectly) uninhabited meant “that its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed able to throw off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast new spaces.” Just think of the glorified language we use when talking about all things frontier: the immense sky, the indomitable American spirit, the eternal cry of “Go West, young man!” It’s all so beautiful and naïve and idealistic you can practically hear the swelling of the string section in the background: “O beautiful for spacious skies!” (Those words, for what it’s worth, were written a mere twenty-two years after the Benders dropped off the face of the earth.)

  And in the midst of all this burgeoning optimism came the Benders, literally slashing the throats of American idealists. They were the destroyers of the dream. They snatched the life savings and the shiny new wagons from the men who’d hoped to inherit the earth.

  But they were also heirs of the dream, just like all their unfortunate victims. After all, if the West was about a bunch of eager immigrants claiming a land for themselves, plowing it into submission, and being fiercely entrepreneurial about the whole thing—well, that’s exactly what the Benders did. They went west to escape their sordid pasts. They opened a business. They raked in the profits. And then, when the tides turned against them, they vanished into a wild land that held promise in one hand and horror in the other.

  Of course this deeply offended the sorts of people who would form “vigilance committees.” Of course plenty of men wanted to claim the outlaw credit for mowing them down on the prairie with horses charging at breakneck speed and clouds obscuring the moon.

  “I Tell You, Man, She Was a Bad One”

  But these stories of Bender deaths aren’t just about reclaiming American idealism. They’re also about killing Kate—the main Bender, the worst Bender. And boy, do these stories have it out for Kate. In most of them, she is the one who fights hardest, suffers most, and dies last. “My grief, how she did fight,” said the man in the New York Times. “She fought tooth and nail like a tiger, and we had to handle her like a bucking bronco.” In another account, Kate snarls at her pursuers, “Shoot and be damned!”

  Kate’s violent, fictional deaths are the price she has to pay for being the wickedest one of all. To the residents of Cherryvale, Ma and Pa were hardened criminals who barely spoke the language, and John Jr. was a simpleminded schmuck, but Kate should have known better. She was young, pretty, seductive—a good dancer, for God’s sake. She was the one Bender who passed for normal. She went to social events, doled out headache cures, flirted with the husbands, waitressed at the hotel. By tricking her neighbors into thinking she was neighborly, too, she betrayed them the most. And so, in stories, she suffers for it.

  In a third account of the Benders’ alleged deaths, Ma, Pa, and John Jr. were lynched, but Kate fought so hard that the vigilantes couldn’t get the rope around her neck. “I tell you, man, she was a bad one,” said one of the men who claimed to be present. “She screamed and bit and cursed and kicked. . . . So someone cracked her skull for her with a stick, and another one put a bullet or two through her brain.”

  In a fourth account, another group of vigilantes chased the Benders into a cornfield near the Oklahoma-Kansas state line. Pa and John Jr. were killed quickly. The posse tried to capture Ma alive, but she pulled out a little pistol and so they immediately shot her down. Kate, the last one standing, darted behind a cluster of cornstalks, firing steadily at the man who approached her. She hit him in the leg; he staggered but managed to return fire, and Kate collapsed to the ground, wounded but alive. The man limped toward her, shooting steadily. Soon another man joined him, and the two of them riddled her body with bullets. As with other accounts, it took more than one man to kill her.

  The violence against Kate in these stories is unsettling, no matter how violent Kate was in real life. At points, these tales feel ominously erotic, as the men describe the ways Kate thrashed about (“like a bucking bronco”), the ways they had to restrain her. You get the sense that these storytellers are deriving pleasure from dreaming about the ways in which Kate might have died; they stretch it out, make it really hurt. It’s a socially sanctioned opportunity to indulge in a fantasy of violence against a woman. A man could never talk like this in polite society—in the New York Times!—unless the woman in question had been proven really, really bad. Kate, of course, had been proven badder than most.

  Thus, scarred by imaginary violence, Kate Bender vanished into myth. And in vanishing, she became stronger, and her legend only grew. She rose from the ashes of her real life to become lovelier and more dangerous than ever, a beautiful throat cutter—forever a symbol of the perils that awaited travelers who dared to flirt with a red-haired girl.

  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 in
comes—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 hi
s 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.