The Angel Makers of Nagyrév
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Angel Makers of Nagyrév" were a group of women living in the village of Nagyrév, Hungary who between 1914 and 1929 poisoned to death an estimated 300 people (however, Béla Bodó puts the number of victims at 45 - 50). They were supplied arsenic and encouraged to use it for the purpose by a midwife or "wise woman" named Julia Fazekas and her accomplice Susi Olah (Zsuzsanna Olah).
Fazekas was a middle-aged midwife who arrived in Nagyrév in 1911, with her husband already inexplicably missing. Between 1911 and 1921 she was imprisoned ten times for performing illegal abortions, but was acquitted consistently by judges supporting abortion.
Generally in Hungarian society at that time the future husband of a teenage bride was selected by her family and she was forced to accept her parents' choice. Even if the husband was an alcoholic and abused his wife divorce was not allowed socially. During World War I, when able-bodied men were sent to fight for the Austro-Hungarian empire, rural Nagyrév was an ideal location for holding Allied prisoners of war. With the limited freedom of POWs about the village, the women living there often had one or more foreign lovers while their husbands were away. When the men returned, many of them rejected their wives' affairs and wished to return to their previous way of life, creating a volatile situation. At this time Fazekas began secretly persuading women who wished to escape this situation to poison their husbands using arsenic made by boiling flypaper and skimming off the lethal residue.
The first victim of this was Peter Hegedus in 1914 and other husbands, children, and other family members started to follow. The poisoning became a fad, and by the mid 1920's Nagyrév earned the nickname "the murder district." There were an estimated 300 victims over the 15 years that the arsenic was sold by Fazekas. Julia was the closest thing to a doctor the village had and her cousin was the clerk who filed all the death certificates, allowing the murders to go undetected.
There are two conflicting accounts of how the Angel Makers were eventually detected. In one, László Szabó, one of the Angel Makers, was caught in the act by two visitors who survived her poisoning attempts. She fingered a Mrs. Bukenoveski, who named Fazekas. In another account, a medical student in a neighboring town found high arsenic levels in a body that washed up on the riverbank, leading to an investigation. In either case, eventually police made their way to the home of Fazekas and found her dead, having committed suicide by her own poison.
Afterwards, twenty-six of the Angel Makers were tried, among them Susi Olah, with eight put to death, seven imprisoned for life, and the rest imprisoned for a duration.
[edit] References
- Gregson, Jessica. The Angel Makers. PaperBooks Ltd. 2007. ISBN 0-9551094-6-9.
- Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. 2nd edition. Checkmark Books. 2006. ISBN 0-8160-6196-3. pp.1–2.
- Bodó, Béla. Tiszazug: A Social History of a Murder Epidemic. Columbia University Press East European Monographs, 2003. ISBN 0880334878.
- Bodó, Béla. The poisoning women of Tiszazug. Journal of Family History, 27:1, 2002, p. 40-59.
