Lady Killers Read online

  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 Ti
mes, “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.”

  QUEEN OF POISONERS

  Marie-Madeleine, the Marquise de Brinvilliers

  Poison: forever the women’s weapon. It fits easily into the home. It’s subtle, secretive, tidy. Poison doesn’t leave blood on the floor or holes in the wall. Dropping a bit of colorless liquid into broth or wine is the simplest thing in the world. And who, historically, stays at home, boils the broth, and serves the wine? Women, of course.

  Paris in the second half of the seventeenth century oozed with poison and the fear of poison and, by extension, the fear of women: the divineresses who dabbled in arsenic, spells, and abortions, and the rich young wives who frequented them. The court of the Sun King grew so paranoid that anyone with a stomachache panicked, sure that someone, somewhere, was trying to do them in. Major advancements in pharmacology, coupled with a very real fear of black magic, created the perfect atmosphere for a witch hunt, known today as the Affair of the Poisons. And many of those accused were female.

  “How can . . . those who are so sensitive to the misfortunes of others . . . commit such a great crime?” wrote one bemused commentator, shocked at the number of lady poisoners who were swelling the city’s jails. “They are monsters. One must not suppose them like others, and they are sooner compared to the most evil men.”

  Sure, it was soothing in a weird way to imagine that these poisoners were more like men than girls, but it simply wasn’t true. These “monsters” were French noblewomen: they spent hours getting their hair done; they went dancing; they drank the iced champagne that was favored by the king. And the whole fatal affair was kicked off by a reckless little marquise named Marie-Madeleine.

  La Brinvilliers

  Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, born in 1630, was the daughter of the civil lieutenant of Paris, a plum job that was both highly influential and very well paid. She had two younger brothers and a little sister who was probably not as cool as she was, given that the sister ended up in a convent and Marie—well, Marie was just one of those bold, lovely, spirited girls, you know? Proud, sensitive, quick-tempered. She had big blue eyes, chestnut hair, and a figure that was “not tall, but exceedingly well formed.” She was also smart. One historian who studied her letters reported that her spelling was flawless, “a rare thing with the ladies of her time,” and her handwriting was “remarkable—bold, firm, like a man’s.”

  Handwriting wasn’t the only precocious thing about Marie. Decades later, she would claim to have lost her virginity at the age of seven to her five-year-old brother—a statement she subsequently denied. But when Parisian gossips caught wind of the rumor, it only increased the atmo
sphere of taboo eroticism that swirled around Marie for most of her life.

  As a young woman, Marie entered the fantastically libertine circles of high Parisian society that centered around Louis XIV’s amoral court. It was a dizzying world characterized by “utter heartlessness and a complete lack of moral fibre,” filled with scheming, bored nobles who liked to gamble for days without sleeping, spread malicious gossip about each other, engage in very public affairs, toss back glass after glass of iced champagne, and plot the downfall of their enemies.

  Despite the corruption that ran through the court like a pulsing vein, there was definitely a sense in Parisian society that being a noble meant you were just better than other people. Nobles were convinced that being wealthy and powerful was positively correlated with being good—that being a noble lent their very character a certain nobility. Decades later, Marie’s lawyer would argue that she couldn’t possibly have committed any crimes because of her “advantages of quality, birth and fortune.” A noble could be a little bit naughty—late nights! lovers! too much gambling!—but aristocrats didn’t do anything that was actually criminal. That was simply unthinkable.

  At twenty-one, Marie moved a little deeper into high society when she married the wealthy Antoine Gobelin, whose fortune came from the glamorous field of dye manufacturing. Gobelin’s income plus Marie’s dowry meant they were now a prosperous couple with considerable social cachet that they could fling around Paris. Even better, Gobelin’s land, called Brunvilliers, was eventually elevated to the status of a “marquisate,” which, along with a tweak in spelling, turned Marie into the marquise de Brinvilliers—or “La Brinvilliers,” if you were writing a gossipy letter about her.