New Delhi: On December 14, 1929, a news story in The New York Times surprised people not only in America but also in Hungary. The report said about 50 women were charged with poisoning and killing most of the men in a small Hungarian village.
Between 1911 and 1929, women in Nagyrev village, about 130 kilometres south of Budapest, used arsenic to kill over 50 men. People called the women “angel makers”.
The case would later be described by some as the largest mass murder by women in modern history.
The main suspect was Zsozsana Fazkas, the village midwife. There were no doctors in the village (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), so she gave medicines to the people. Women trusted her because she helped with their personal problems.
A 2004 BBC radio documentary cited Maria Gunya, a longtime resident of the village, who explained that Fazkas was labelled the main accused because the village women confided in her about their personal troubles.
She told these women she could offer a simple solution to problems they faced with their husbands or other men. Though she was considered the prime suspect, court documents and women’s testimonies revealed widespread stories of abuse by the men. These included physical violence, rape and neglect.
Despite these painful accounts, the matter stayed quiet for years. Police records showed that the initial killings began in 1911, but a proper investigation only began in 1929.
How did the killings come to light?
Fazkas arrived in Nagyrev in 1911. Besides midwifery, she had knowledge of medicines, including chemical compounds. It was a quality that was rare for that region. Her husband was nowhere to be found.
Nagyrev had no priest or doctor. Fazkas’s medical knowledge drew people to trust her. She became a witness to many troubling incidents inside homes, men abusing, raping and betraying their wives.
She began performing abortions, a banned practice at the time, which led to her being brought before the court, though she never received a sentence.
Gunya highlighted that most marriages then were arranged by families, often forcing young girls to marry much older men. Divorce was impossible. Women endured abuse and exploitation with no legal escape.
Early reports also indicated these arranged marriages involved exchanges of land, inheritance and responsibilities, creating binding agreements between families.
Fazkas began winning the women’s trust by assuring them she could resolve their hardships. The first known poisoning happened soon after she arrived in 1911. Over the years, especially during World War I and after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the incidents increased.
Within 18 years, between 45 and 50 men had died. The victims included husbands, fathers and relatives. All were buried in the village cemetery. Many began calling Nagyrev the “town of killers”.
Authorities took notice, and in early 1929, exhumations began. Arsenic was found in the bodies. Fazkas lived in a single-story house facing the street where she prepared many of the poisonous solutions that were used in the executions.
On July 19, 1929, the police came to arrest her. Realizing her time was up, she took her own life by drinking poison she had made.
She was not the only one responsible. Further investigations led to the arrest of 26 women from nearby Sozonok. Of these, eight received death sentences, while seven were given life imprisonment. Because few admitted guilt, the true motives behind the killings still remain unclear.
Dr. Geza Csekh, a historian from Sozonok who reviewed court archives, told BBC that many questions are still unanswered. The theories about why the women acted include poverty, greed and frustration.
Some reports suggested that many women had relationships with Russian prisoners of war who worked in the fields. When these men returned home, the women felt they had lost newfound freedoms, which may have contributed to their actions.
In the 1950s, historian Ferenc Gerogev met an elderly villager who claimed that Nagyrev women had been killing their men since ancient times. Graves dug up in the nearby town of Tiszakürt also revealed arsenic poisonings, but no one was punished for those deaths. Some estimates say the total arsenic-related deaths in the region could have reached as high as 300.