Case file 148Killers & Poisoners1900–1945

The Angel Makers: The Village That Poisoned Its Husbands

For nearly twenty years, the women of a Hungarian village bought poison from the midwife they trusted to deliver their babies.

May 2, 20261h 28m
00:00 / 1:27:56
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In this episode

  • Why the women of Nagyrév welcomed a midwife who wouldn't say a word about her own dead husband
  • A fly, a chicken, and the strip of flypaper that handed Auntie Susie her recipe
  • $8 to $40 — the going rate, and why murder in this village was a privilege not everyone could afford
  • The row of tiny tombstones in the churchyard, and the one thing every family who filled it had in common
  • A body twelve years in the ground, and what one attorney in Szolnok decided to do about an anonymous letter

“We are not assassins. We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang or drown them either. They died from poison. This was a pleasant death for them.”

The story

In a Hungarian village too poor to keep a doctor, the woman everyone trusted to bring babies into the world also ran a side business taking people out of it. Her name was Zsuzsanna Fazekas, and the village called her Auntie Susie. For nearly twenty years, wives and daughters and sisters in Nagyrév and the villages around it came to her for small glass bottles of a milky white fluid, then went home and stirred it into soup, coffee, brandy, and porridge. The poison was arsenic, boiled out of ordinary flypaper bought at the village shop. Nobody has ever settled on how many people died. Forty-five? Fifty? Three hundred?

The widow who arrived alone

Zsuzsanna Fazekas walked into Nagyrév in 1911 with references, a black dress, a corncob pipe, and almost nothing to say about her past. There were whispers of a husband, dead or simply gone. She wore widow's weeds, and only the cruelest people would have pressed her about it.

There had, in fact, been a Mr. Fazekas — prosperous for a peasant, with a few acres and a house. Two years into the marriage he contracted a mysterious ailment that answered to no treatment, and his grieving widow was left a small fortune. It's a detail the village never learned, and it explains a great deal about what came next. Auntie Susie owned property. She had no husband to dictate to her. In a place where women owned nothing and chose nothing, she was the most enviable person for miles.

What the war sent home

The Great War hollowed out the countryside. The Habsburg Empire marched more than nine million men into battle and hauled back 200,000 enemy prisoners, farming them out as forced labor to factories, minefields, and — for the lucky ones — small farms and sleepy villages. Nagyrév got Russians. The army, the neighbors, and the Church all forbade fraternization, and the women of Nagyrév did it anyway.

For many of them it was the first freedom they'd ever had. Theirs were arranged marriages, teenage girls handed to men old enough to be their grandfathers, in a country where a church wedding meant divorce was simply not permitted. Some women took two lovers, some took four. Auntie Susie, who could end a pregnancy as skillfully as she could deliver one, found her services in constant demand. She was arrested at least ten times between 1911 and 1921 for it, and acquitted every single time.

Then the men came home. Shell-shocked, blind, missing limbs, waking up screaming and drenched in cold sweat, self-medicating with the fermented fruit drink palinka, gambling, brawling, and bringing the violence home at night. There was no counseling, no VA, no word for what was wrong with them. Ghosts, expected to pass for the living. Their wives had spent four years running their own households and choosing when and how they were touched, and now they had another mouth to feed and a stranger's fists to survive. Women gathered at kitchen tables to complain, and there sat Auntie Susie with her pipe and her listening ear.

Boiled down to an inch

The recipe came, so the story goes, like this: after watching a fly die on a strip of sugared flypaper, Auntie Susie observed as a chicken ate the fly, convulsed, and then died too. Auntie Susie boiled the flypaper in water until an inch of liquid was left in the bottom of the cauldron, scooped the milky residue into bottles, and had a bottomless supply of a tasteless, odorless poison that cost her almost nothing.

The genius of it was the cover. Arsenic poisoning looks like cholera — discolored skin, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain — and in villages with no tested wells and no sanitation, cholera was the obvious suspect. A test for arsenic had existed since 1836, but nobody in a backwater without a hospital was going to order one. Postmortems in Nagyrév were performed by the village barber, who wasn't qualified to guess at a cause of death and, by most accounts, wasn't much of a barber either. He happened to be a cousin of Susie Ola, the village coroner, who filed the death certificates and took a cut. Susie Ola had poisoned her own husband at eighteen.

The midwives charged $8 to $40 to furnish the poison and assist at the death — roughly $150 to $750 today. In post-war rural Hungary, that made murder a luxury item.

The weird part

Killing your husband in Nagyrév wasn't a secret crime so much as a purchasable village service, with a price list, a midwife who delivered, a coroner who signed the death certificate for a cut, and an unbroken twenty-year run. Neighbors wrote letter after letter to the police, and the police decided it was gossip.

A whole row of small graves

The husbands are the part of this story people repeat. The other part almost nobody wanted to say out loud. Nagyrév families famously had one child, not wanting to divide their land among multiple heirs. Land was their most treasured possession — and the 18,000 acres around the village belonged to Countess Vojsa, who wouldn't sell an inch of it. There is a whole row of baby's graves in the churchyard, beautifully tended. All belonging to well-to-do families. All of the babies dead within three or four days of birth.

After ten arrests for abortion, Auntie Susie had found a less legally dangerous route to the same end. The milk intended for those newborns was dosed.

The letter to Szolnok

Anonymous letters had been trickling into the district police for years — a trickle that became a flood — and the authorities filed them under gossip and feuds. A district physician demanded an inquest for a bronchitis patient who died hours after his visit; the government declined to exhume, on the grounds of expense.

Then, in the spring of 1929, one more letter reached an attorney of the court in Szolnok, sixty miles southeast of Budapest, and he decided to settle the rumors by digging up a single body. It had been in the ground for twelve years. In it was found "sufficient poison to kill a half dozen horses."

Forty-one bodies came up. Every one carried arsenic — the stuff had preserved them, halting the bacteria that break a body down, a detail the poisoners never knew. Detectives followed Auntie Susie as she raced from widow to widow coaching their answers, then searched her attic and found the flypaper, the soaking strips, and rows of finished bottles waiting for the next customer. When they came back to arrest her a second time, she grabbed a bottle meant for somebody's husband and drank it, and died as agonizingly as her customers had.

Around a hundred women were arrested; thirty-four were tried in forty-two cases. Two were hanged simultaneously while unconscious, having fainted at the sight of the gallows. One defense attorney insisted the village had been Eden before the war and that the midwife had tempted them beyond endurance — "She alone is to blame." She wasn't. The women carried the bottles home themselves, and stood there with sympathy pasted on their faces while their tormentors writhed. One of them, convicted of a single murder, explained that they hadn't stabbed anyone or hanged anyone: "This was a pleasant death for them."

Every convicted woman was ordered to pay the cost of her own prosecution. The cottages and the little plots of land they had killed to own were sold off to cover it.

The transcript

Chapters & full transcript12,119 words
Chapters
  1. 01:03Auntie Susie's very special medicine
  2. 04:11A widow with references
  3. 10:12The prisoners in the fields
  4. 13:08Ghosts expected to pass for the living
  5. 23:04Boiled down to an inch
  6. 32:49The letter to Szolnok

This transcript was generated automatically from the episode audio and may contain errors. Times are approximate, since ad breaks can shift them by a minute or two.

00:01

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00:21

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00:44

Also, just go on whatever platform you listen to it and please rate and review it. It really helps us in getting discovered. And if you have a suggestion for anything, just reach out to us at our website, True Weird Stuff dot com. And thank you so much for listening. Once upon a time, there was a village. It was small and poor, so poor that the people didn't even have a doctor.

01:14

The village was called Nagyrév. When the people were sick, they went to a healer. They called her Auntie Susie. Auntie Susie had no formal medical training, but the people trusted her. When the men had pain from working all day in the fields, Auntie Susie helped them with special potions. And she was also a midwife. Auntie Susie knew just how to make a baby come into this world.

01:47

But that wasn't the only way she helped the women of the village. Auntie Susie was famous for her tinctures and salves. And there was something else that the village women trusted her with, a very special sort of medicine that offered a very permanent cure to a very particular ailment, the affliction of a troublesome husband.

02:13

Not just husbands, other people too, even parents, even children. All that was needed was a little water, some flypaper, and a cauldron. And just like magic, in the graveyard, the carved stones appeared. More and more, so many, sprouting like cold, gray flowers. Auntie Susie wasn't alone in this very dark, very special work.

02:44

She had help, lots of help. We called them the Angel Makers, but that was only later, after everyone learned our terrible secret. Angel Makers, how many angels did they make? Forty-five? Fifty? Three hundred? And how did this happen at all, much less for nearly twenty years? Drink this, my dear. And they got a small beam of light again.

03:24

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine... True weird stuff. Nagyrév, Tisza Court, Okecska, Tisza Fulvlad, Kunszentmárton, Mestrsales, Ocsid. Those are the villages in Hungary where most of the cases occurred. A little knowledge of chemistry unlocked the secret to one of the most atrocious and astounding wholesale murder plots of modern times.

04:11

It all began in 1911, three years before Hungary entered World War I. Zsuzsanna Fazekas arrived in Nagyrév. She was alone. There were whispers of a husband, dead now or gone at least. Susanna was tight-lipped about her past. What she did have were references, letters testifying to her talents as a midwife. There were no hospitals in Nagyrév in those days, and no doctors.

04:38

So Susanna was warmly welcomed by the women of the village, who very quickly began calling the midwife Auntie Susie. The women of Nagyrév had particular need of a woman with Auntie Susie skills. Life in the region had changed with the start of World War I. So many of the men had been marched off to fight. The Austro-Hungarian or Habsburg Empire sent more than nine million men into battle.

05:06

Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, gone. But other men soon came to take their place. Men who'd fought on the other side of the war, only to be captured and imprisoned. By the end of 1914, the Habsburg Empire had racked up a ghoulishly impressive 200,000 captured enemy soldiers. They had to put them somewhere. And that somewhere wound up being roughly 50 large POW camps scattered around the countryside.

05:39

Now, folks back then had only just really begun to apply germ theory in any sort of practical way. And these camps reflected the military's lack of understanding regarding basic hygiene and sanitation. Which is a polite way of saying that in these filthy, wretched places, men sickened and died by the thousands. Oops. Adjustments were made, but by then the camps were emptying for another reason.

06:07

The prisoners were farmed out as forced labor with gusto. By mid-summer 1915, fewer than 40% of the captured were left in the camps. By Christmas 1916, well over a million POWs had been pressed into forced labor. My idea of the perfect skincare routine? Minimum effort, maximum results. That's how I found OneSkin. At the core of OneSkin is their patented OS1 peptide.

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07:23

After your purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support your fellow true weirdos and tell them we sent you. Some of those POWs were shipped to the front lines, including combat zones. The fact that this was illegal didn't stop it from happening. The Habsburg Empire put prisoners to work in armament factories and sent them out as minesweepers.

07:46

They were poorly treated, poorly fed, and sometimes dropped dead of exhaustion. No worries. Spent prisoners would simply be replaced by fresh batches brought up from the rear. Other POWs were deployed to work projects far out in the countryside. Some found themselves assigned to small farms and sleepy little villages.

08:08

That was the gig to get for a prisoner of war. More and better food, better, more comfortable accommodations. None of these assignments were random. Military leadership factored nationality and cartoonish stereotypes into the decisions to send which prisoners where. And since they considered Russian POWs, for example, to be dull-witted peasants, they packed them off to do agricultural work.

08:34

Now, as has always been true in wartime, the welfare of the prisoners wasn't much of a concern. When has it ever been? But there was something the military brass was all in a dither over. Fraternization. They didn't want the civilian population getting too cozy with the POWs. But a couple of factors made that super tricky to enforce.

08:59

For one, the prisoners had to be supervised. But both officers and soldiers were needed to fight the war, not babysit the captured. At first, they tried sending out big contingents of prisoners, a couple hundred at a time. But that proved unworkable. What was needed were smaller units that could be managed by the employer, not the military.

09:22

Those POWs who found themselves assigned to small businesses or farms naturally found themselves brushing up against Austro-Hungarian civilians. There were rules about that, particularly when it came to the local women. Everyone from the army to the nosy neighbors to the Catholic Church was strongly opposed to any kind of mingling.

09:46

Love, romance, and sex between civilian women and the captured men was forbidden. Such things could only blur the lines between enemy and ally, between stranger and homeland. Because if there's one thing humanity is determined to prevent, it's unity. Can't be having that. There's no profit to be made from peace. The village of Nagyrév became home to a POW camp for Russian captives.

10:17

Nagyrév had many war widows, husbands gone, though not necessarily deceased. Many of those women had affairs with the Russian prisoners. Let's don't judge. These things happen, and they've always happened throughout the course of human history. Rape and pillage and whatnot, at least in this one instance, the women had some say in the matter.

10:41

Which was one of the few things they did get a say in. Theirs was a world where marriages were arranged. It was common for teenage girls to be married off to much older men chosen for them, not by them. Divorce wasn't legal, which meant that if the husband was abusive and cruel or drunk and shiftless, oh well. Nothing to be done but endure a loveless, unhappy and even violent marriage.

11:07

With all of Hungary experiencing crushing poverty and political unrest in the months and years leading to World War I, these wives suffered tremendously. And then their husbands were sent to war, leaving them with families to care for, but no money or support. And those POWs sent to work the farms? In time, many fell into the rhythms and routines of village life.

11:35

Cautious courtesies at first, and then friendships. And for some, those friendships deepened into love affairs. This was a new kind of freedom for the women of Nagyrév. Their own desires had never been considered, much less indulged. Some of the women took two, three, four or more lovers, juggling multiple captive Russian boyfriends.

11:58

And we all know what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much. Blah, blah, blah. Auntie Susie found her services a great demand. Her skills as a midwife extended to terminating unwanted pregnancies, too. When summoned, she would appear in the black dress and apron she always wore, carrying a pouch of tobacco, a box of matches and a little corncob pipe.

12:28

Auntie Susie was discreet and knew how to take care of a situation. Abortion was illegal in Hungary then, and Auntie Susie was arrested at least ten or more times between 1911 and 1921. But the charges just never stuck. Judges in her trials found her to be a sympathetic character. Or perhaps their sympathies were with her customers.

12:56

Either way, every time they hauled her in, she was acquitted and sent back to Nagreev to continue her work. The Great War ended, as wars eventually do, and the men who'd survived slowly returned home to Nagreev and the surrounding villages. It was a rough homecoming. The wives they found waiting had tasted independence, both financial and emotional.

13:27

The young brides had grown up and grown accustomed to their new freedoms. The older wives had lost whatever patience they'd once had for harsh words and stinging blows. They were now used to running their households as they saw fit, used to choosing when and how they would be touched. They had a new knowledge of just how capable they were.

13:52

To return to a life of subservience at best, violence at worst, it was unbearable to imagine. Yet, in staunchly Catholic Hungary, divorce was unthinkable. There was only one path to freedom for an unhappily married woman. And standing on that path, so ready to help, so willing, so able, was that small, black-clad figure puffing away on her little pipe, Auntie Susie.

14:22

Zsuzsanna Fazekas was indeed respected everywhere in the village by the dumb, red-cheeked peasants. She was a good doctor, an expert in the sick room. They spoke of her in that superstitious village as a wise woman. As it turned out, folks in Nagyrév had need of Auntie Susie even when there wasn't a war on or prisoners to tangle with.

14:46

It was the practice of many parents in the little village to have only one child, so that the land would not be divided by their death. Often, when an additional baby was born, Mrs. Fazekas would be called in. Now, there was no official one-child policy in Hungary. There wasn't even a suggestion that families ought to limit their size.

15:12

The truth was way more awful than that. In Nagyrév, the hunger for land was particularly keen. But the people had little chance to acquire land. The 18,000 acres surrounding the village were owned by Countess Vojsa, who would not sell any of it. One of the results of the greed for land among the Hungarian peasants was the widespread custom of having only one child.

15:42

They solved the problems of birth control in a very simple way for themselves. But of course, babies insisted on coming. And after being arrested and tried ten times as an abortionist, Auntie Susie found a less dangerous, equally effective way of getting rid of unwanted infants. Such was the way of things. Things we like to pretend didn't happen.

16:32

Not in the good old days, you know, when folks were decent, moral, God-fearing, and all that. We just want to overlook, maybe, that they were also human, and sometimes making choices we can't even imagine as to how many mouths they could feed, how much land could be shared, choices about what they would or would not tolerate.

16:53

Desperate people with little or no options will create their own. That's always been true. And the women of Nagyrév were poised to do just that. Women who chafed against the bond of the lives that had been chosen for them. There were so many women in the village who envied Fazekas. She owned her own property, had no husband to bother her or dictate to her.

17:20

There had been a Mr. Fazekas once upon a time. He was prosperous for a peasant, owning a few acres of land and a home. The couple had only been married for two years before the man contracted a mysterious disease, one that just didn't respond to any sort of treatment. Tragic, really, you know, the way he died. Sad. But at least the widow Fazekas could console herself with the small fortune left to her by her late husband.

17:49

No one in Nagyrév knew the man. Auntie Susie had come to the village alone, literally wearing her grief in the form of widow's weeds. It made sense that she wanted a fresh start, a place where she could dedicate the remainder of her life to healing the sick as a way of coping with her own sorrow. Only the cruelest people would question that.

18:15

Now, to be fair, while the women of Nagyrév and the nearby villages were dismayed to find themselves yanked back into subservience, the men who returned home from the war weren't the same men who'd left. Shell shocked was the term they used back then. Today, we call it PTSD. The term shell shock was born of the necessity for finding some designation thought to be suitable for the number of cases of functional nervous incapacity.

18:44

The wear and tear of a prolonged campaign of trench warfare with its terrible hardships and anxieties of attack produced the condition of mind and body properly falling under the term war neurosis. Imagine living in thick sodden mud in a trench gashed in the earth for up to four years. You're always wet, always afraid.

19:09

Trench foot was a constant threat. Imagine your flesh rotting, the skin peeling off as easily as a glove. Men lost toes, even their whole foot to it. Then there was the noise, the ear splitting, earth shaking, roar of bullets and bombs, sometimes as many as 10,000 shells an hour raking the skies overhead. That could be a mercy though, sometimes.

19:36

The bombs drowning out the moaning of the wounded, the weeping of the fearful, the choked last breaths of the dying. The men who flowed into this killing machine from the Hungarian countryside, they were mostly farmers. Who could have ever prepared them for the grim facts of trench warfare? There was more death in World War One than in all of the wars in the Western world from 1790 to 1914 combined.

20:08

Maybe the dead are the lucky ones. The men who survived it, a human being being exposed to shell blasts like they were, doesn't walk away unscathed. Many had crippling headaches, lapses in memory and nightmares so terrible that they'd wake screaming, drenched in their own cold sweat. Some developed tremors, paralysis, anxiety and blindness.

20:33

Not to mention the loss of limbs, the shattered bodies, the faces torn and shredded by shrapnel. Did you know that modern plastic surgery was born from the need to help repair these soldiers' ruined faces? It's impossible to overstate the horrors these men endured. They came home broken, some in body, some in spirit. There was no therapy, no counseling, no support groups.

21:04

There wasn't a way to talk about it. Those men were expected to put the war behind them and get on with the business of living. But how? Their children, if they had any, were either too young to remember them or old enough to be frightened of the strangers their fathers had become to shy away from contact. Their wives were now independent, the heads of their households.

21:29

In some ways, the men who returned in Nog Reve were ghosts. Ghosts expected to pass for the living. And for the unluckiest men, those with physical injuries, they suddenly found themselves in a whole new role. No longer providers, now they were dependents. Where they had been physically capable, now they were fragile, if not outright disabled by wounds that never properly healed.

21:59

Many of the wives, remember, had not married these men for love. They'd been forced. And now they were burdened by these hollow-eyed strangers. And resentful. Another mouth to feed at a time when all of Europe was devastated, crushed by debt and rampant inflation. And then there was the alcohol. Drinking was already a feature of daily life for the men of Nog Reve, but now they were self-medicating the trauma they'd brought home from the war.

22:30

Throwing back the traditional Hungarian brandy called Palinka, and gambling, and fighting, and too often, toting that violence home at the end of the night. Women gathered at kitchen tables to complain and commiserate. And look who was there, with a kind listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. It was Auntie Susie, whom they'd grown to trust.

22:57

She'd kept their secrets. She understood their struggles. And that's how it started. If there's a problem with him, I have a simple solution. Arsenic. The poison of choice for millennia. Oh, sure, there was a test for it in Auntie Susie's day. One developed in 1836 by a chemist named James Marsh. But in a place like Nog Reve?

23:24

Too small to even have a trained doctor? An impoverished backwater in a country shattered by war? The chances of anyone even thinking to test for arsenic were pretty close to zero. And as it turned out, Auntie Susie didn't need to buy arsenic. She'd figured out how to source her own near-bottomless supply. You could find arsenic in cosmetics and in medicines, but I found another way.

23:58

Fly paper. Cheap enough. And Coleman. Auntie Susie, according to the story told by the women under her dominance, saw a fly drop dead after having tasted the sugar that was strewn on a circle of fly paper. The common kind sold in every village shop. She saw a chicken eat the fly and, in its turn, drop dead after a few convulsions.

24:28

Her plan was complete. Auntie Susie would boil the fly paper in water until the liquid was reduced to about an inch or so in the bottom of the cauldron. Then she'd carefully scoop the milky white fluid into small glass bottles. It was that easy. The thing about arsenic poisoning is that it can occur naturally because arsenic is a highly toxic element that occurs naturally in the Earth's crust, which makes it easy for arsenic locked up in sediments to dissolve and contaminate water, for example.

25:04

In rural villages like Nagareve in those days, reliable safe sources of drinking water were scarce. Throw in poor sanitation and why not? There was almost no infrastructure in those post-war villages and no resources for the testing of wells or springs. Plus, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are similar to the symptoms of cholera, a vicious little bacterial contaminant hellbent on getting into your drinking water, which was very convenient.

25:35

Discolored skin, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain. The much feared and dreaded cholera would be suspected long before anyone thought to look at the beloved village midwife. An unhappy woman had only to whisper to Auntie Suzy that her husband was a tyrant or a drunk or too free with his fists and the little midwife would press a bottle of that milky white fluid into the woman's hand.

26:07

It was tasteless, odorless, easily slipped into a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. No one, my dear, will be the wiser. Now, Auntie Suzy was clever enough to know that as undetectable as she believed arsenic to be, tracks must still be covered. So she enlisted the services of a helper, the village coroner. She was another Suzy, Suzy Ola, who knew a thing or two about an unbearable husband having poisoned her own when she was just 18 years old.

26:45

In exchange for a cut of the action, Suzy Ola filed death certificates for each of the poisoning victims of Nagyrév. With those I's dotted and those T's crossed, there was never any reason to ask questions, much less investigate. The deaths of some farmers out in the middle of nowhere was nothing the beleaguered and busted Hungarian government had any interest in.

27:12

Bigger problems to solve, bigger losses to mourn. As sightings for mass murder go, it was close to perfect. That, it seems, is how it started. In the coils of a terrible war that turned the very continent upside down, empires dissolved and crumbled to dust. And the same thing happened to Nagyrév's ideas of morality. It started slowly, so the deaths of the men didn't seem at all suspicious.

27:42

It was very like the babies dosed with Auntie Suzy's deadly elixir. Hungary had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe in the years following World War I. Almost one in five babies died. Poor health and poor living conditions. As for the grown men who were suddenly stricken? Unfortunate shell-shock things.

28:05

Just delayed casualties of the so-called Great War. Like Ishvan Joljart, who returned from the trenches completely blind. His wife found that rather troublesome. And then there was Lajos Tkach. The war left him a complete invalid. He couldn't work. Who would keep a husband who didn't work? And what kind of person could be so cavalier with a human life?

28:32

A woman named Maria Sendy was an eager customer. She'd been one of Nagyrév's beauties. Much pursued in her youth. Now middle-aged, she was weary of her husband. Oh, his tiresome jealousy, his aches and pains. He was older than she was, and she feared his age made her seem old as well. Her grown son? Every bit as annoying.

28:56

He mocked her appearance and declared that he was disgusted by the way she carried on with her lovers. It only took a visit to Auntie Susie for Maria to silence them both. Business was booming. So much so that Auntie Susie hired an assistant, another midwife in the village, named Mrs. Chordosh. Soon dozens of other women would join the team.

29:23

And the death toll climbed. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Did no one ever demand an autopsy, an inquest, something? Not in Nagyrév, where there was neither a doctor nor a hospital. Postmortems were conducted by the village barber. Who was in no way qualified to even make a guess as the cause of death. Astonishing as it seems, these practices went on for years.

29:54

You know how it is. The first one is always the hardest. And then as the days fly by and no one ever comes to the door with questions, well, it starts to get easier. It starts to feel normal. The midwives and their helpers charged from $8 to $40 for furnishing the poison and assisting at the death. $8 to $40 back then was like spending $150 to $750 today.

30:28

A lot of money for a people as impoverished as those post-war Hungarians were. Not just anyone could afford to murder a bothersome husband. It was a privilege. The poison habit spread to neighboring villages. Villages where some deaths were thought to be suspicious. The district physician reports that patient whom he had treated for bronchitis died suddenly a few hours after his visit and had been buried before the doctor was notified of the death.

31:04

The district doctor was adamant that there was no medical cause whatsoever that might explain the man's sudden decline. He demanded an inquest. No witnesses and no proofs were forthcoming. The authorities refrained from exhuming the body as the doctor demanded. Without proof of any kind, the government refused to investigate any further on the grounds that exhuming and examining the body would be a considerable expense.

31:37

But the district physician wasn't the only person asking difficult questions. Anonymous letters had begun trickling in to the district police. A trickle that soon became a flood. And still no inquiries were made. The letters, it was believed, were nothing but idle gossip and personal feuds. Which is a crazy take given that there were apparently dozens of people suggesting that men were being murdered and that maybe the cops could swing by and take a look.

32:09

Nothing. Nothing was done. Auntie Susie kept boiling her flypaper, bottling the result, and selling it to an ever-growing cohort of co-conspirators. Until the spring of 1929. By that point, even the authorities couldn't deny that something peculiar was afoot in these rural communities. The sheer number of the dead was hard to overlook.

32:34

All of these men falling suddenly ill and then dying. Oh sure, it took a decade and a half and a few hundred corpses. But folks were finally starting to, you know, wonder about just what exactly was going on here. It took another anonymous letter to finally break the whole thing wide open. That letter had been sent to an attorney of the court in Szolnok, a city roughly 60 miles southeast of Budapest.

33:02

Weary of the endless rumors, this man decided that there was but one way to put this story to rest. Exhume and test one of the bodies. The body ordered to be exhumed had been buried for 12 years. In the body there was found sufficient poison to kill a half dozen horses. Here's a fun fact. Arsenic has a peculiar effect on the decomposition of a dead body.

33:34

Something known to science now for a couple hundred years. Arsenic inhibits the bacteria that break a body down after death. And it remains in the hair, nails and skin. Something the poisoners of Nagyrév didn't know. They just watched in dismay as more graves were opened. 41 bodies were exhumed and in each one there were traces of arsenic.

34:00

Then came the arrests. Woman after woman, each confessing her guilt. Though for some it took being confronted with the accusations made by family members and neighbors. They were all united in pointing the finger at Auntie Susie, who supplied, they said, not just poison, but persuasion. She had made it all seem so simple.

34:26

Now, please don't think, not even for a second, that admitting guilt is the same thing as remorse. Lydia Ola, guilty of only one murder said, We are not assassins. We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang or drown them either. They died from poison. This was a pleasant death for them. No remorse. 100 women were arrested.

34:57

34 women were tried for murder in 42 cases of arsenic poisoning. Police accused the 63-year-old widow of well-to-do farmer Peter Hegedes acting on an anonymous letter. The widow thereupon killed herself by poison. The trials were a sensation. By March 1930, three women had been sentenced to life in prison. Two women were sentenced to death.

35:25

The wife of Laszlo Szabo and the widow of Balint Kordash both fainted when they saw the gallows, and they were hanged simultaneously while unconscious. Horror heaped upon horror. Women charged and convicted of the unthinkable, like 66-year-old Julianne Lipka, who murdered her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law.

35:51

The magnitude of the crimes, the cunning attempts at covering it all up. For example, in the Nagyrév Cemetery, dozens of tombstones had been moved from their original location and placed at other graves in an attempt to confuse the authorities who were now hell-bent on exhuming bodies and convicting the killers. And where was Auntie Susie in all of this?

36:17

She wasn't implicated in every case. She'd done a first-rate job of building out her network of helpers, and the secret of boiling flypaper was no longer much of a secret at all. She was directly accused, in at least 20 cases, though. Auntie Zsuzsanna Fazekas was arrested. She denied knowing anything about the deaths of the husbands.

36:41

Then she was allowed to go home free, under the impression that she had outwitted the authorities. Meanwhile, her home was searched. A large supply of arsenic flypaper was found carefully tucked away in the attic. Row after row of small bottles were lined up neatly on shelves. Some of the bottles appeared to have strips of flypaper soaking in them.

37:07

Others were filled with a milky-looking substance. Those turned out to be the finished arsenic solution, just waiting for the next customer. What Auntie Susie didn't know was that she was being followed. Detectives watched and listened as she made hasty visits to widow after widow, warning them that questions were being asked and that they should be ready with answers that might deflect suspicion.

37:33

The widows were fearful and pressed Auntie Susie for reassurance that the police would find nothing to implicate them in the deaths of their husbands. Auntie Susie insisted that arsenic couldn't possibly be traced in a decaying body. She was wrong about that, as we now know. But the authorities, meanwhile, had learned about a telltale fingernail test.

37:59

They looked for dark splotches under the fingernails, which conclusively proved the presence of arsenic poisoning. Armed with this evidence, investigators returned to Auntie Susie's house to arrest her again. This time, they didn't knock. A bottle intended for yet another unwanted husband. She seized it and poured the contents down her own throat.

38:44

Then from her came a wild scream. Her death was as agonizing as those of her victims. It was rumored that Auntie Susie kept detailed records of her transactions hidden away in her room. Within a short time, nearly 100 widows were arrested and charged with murdering their husbands. Some of them were even accused of poisoning their fathers and brothers.

39:18

News of Auntie Susie's suicide spread rapidly throughout Nagyrév and the surrounding villages. It caused a panic among the other widows, four of whom managed to take their own lives while in jail awaiting trial. Justice, in this instance, came with a karmic twist. Whether sentenced to a term of 15 years for some, life in prison for others, death by hanging for the most unfortunate few, each defendant was ordered to pay the cost of prosecution, which meant that the little plots of land, the small cottages that they had been willing to commit murder to own, it all had to be sold.

40:03

So much suffering, so much death. Greed was called out as the motive, the insatiable hunger for ownership of land and property. In deeply Catholic Hungary, no one really spoke of the other motive, the desire to be freed from unhappy, often violent marriages. Divorce wasn't exactly illegal. It was permitted in cases where the marriage had been conducted before a civil official.

40:33

Very, very few people pursued it, though, since Catholic canon law forbade it. It was crazy business for the deadly widows of Nagyrév to choose murder over divorce, since the Catholic Church also most definitely frowned upon killing. It's like the Fifth Commandment out of, you know, ten. Divorce doesn't even make that list.

40:55

The fact is, sometimes people are lulled into acts of evil, even extreme evil, simply because everyone's doing it. That makes it feel acceptable. The fancier way to say that is herd mentality or groupthink, as in, you might shrink away in horror at the prospect of poisoning your husband, even if he is a drunken brute.

41:20

Then you see others, people you know and respect and maybe even love, doing just that. Your thinking adjusts to this new reality, and in time, it seems less and less awful and more and more reasonable. Your friends are encouraging you to join in, the more the better. It's a way of making the unthinkable thinkable. It's a pattern that plays out over and over in human history.

41:48

It's this tendency to react to the unspeakable, first with silence and then with complicity, that inspired the German pastor Martin Niemöller to write the poem, First They Came. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

42:21

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. For the women of Nagyrév and those other villages, first they came for the violent husbands, and then the drunken ones, and then the fathers with their high-handed authority, and then the brothers who stood to inherit the land, and so on.

42:55

After getting away with it for 20 years, the women had allowed themselves to believe that the day would never dawn when it was them they came for. One of the attorneys for the defense was a man named Dr. Viraj, who had a surprisingly generous take on the crimes. He described what life had been in the villages in the long-vanished pre-war days.

43:24

Nagyrév was Eden then. Then the war came. And when peace finally came, Viraj ruefully pointed out that poverty had followed right along with it. Instead of plenty, there was barrenness. Instead of joy, despair. No priest ever visited them. No doctor came to cure their sick. In Nagyrév, where most of the people could not read or write, desperation became a breeding ground.

43:58

And at just that moment, Auntie Susie appeared. An unlicensed village doctor, she tempted them. Tempted them as perhaps no woman has ever been tempted. She alone is to blame. Girl's girl that I am, even I don't agree with that. Auntie Susie may have been the pied piper of poison, but the women who took those bottles of arsenic home, they did that willingly.

44:28

They poured that deadly fluid into brandy, coffee, soup, porridge. Then they stood there, false sympathy pasted onto their faces, and coldly watched as their tormentors writhed in agony and died in excruciating pain. It's shocking and unsettling to think of so many women quietly conspiring to commit mass murder. Simple truth is, the angel makers of Nagyrév were far from the first women to dispatch an unpleasant spouse with poison, and they certainly wouldn't be the last.

45:05

That's facts. Men who campaign with fierce piety against such things as no-fault divorce would be wise to learn from the past. After all, a cornered animal is a dangerous animal. And humans are already the most dangerous animal of all. You may think she's forgiven you. You may hope she's forgotten the threats, the betrayals, the blows.

45:33

Of course she has. Look at her. She's so loving, so attentive, so cheerfully submissive. How she respects your headship. How well she's learned her place. Here she comes now, with a warm and loving smile, and a nice hot cup of tea to help soothe your jangled, weary nerves. Drink this, my dear. Next time on True Weird Stuff It's hard to imagine how chaotic the battlefield can be when you can't communicate with your soldiers.

46:25

That's what General John Pershing was staring down. And he knew that there was an answer. It was those professional, warm, friendly telephone operators at AT&T. So he put out a call for volunteers. Hundreds of women served their country in the trenches. And what their country did to them when they returned? Well, that's on the next True Weird Stuff.

46:49

Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Charly King, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Don Morgan, and Miss Evie. This is such a unsettling, fascinating story. And the fact that this went on for 20 years is absolutely astonishing. I mean, at 20 years, that's like a generation, right? Right, right. Entire generation of women, casually.

47:24

And it wasn't a secret. Like, everybody, the women all knew what the women all knew. And what the men suspected? I'm guessing that a lot of them, as they were doubled over and, you know, foaming at the mouth, suspected that their beverage had been adulterated. But it's hard to believe. That's the shocking thing. The shocking thing to me is not that people kill each other or that men are brutal and that, you know, women can snap.

47:53

That's just reality. What's shocking is how many men had to die before somebody went, you know, this seems weird to me. Like, there's something going on in Naugri. I'm going to say something that's going to sound a little bit weird. But have you ever been involved in a situation where somebody, and the thought did cross your mind, well, if they weren't here anymore, that certainly would solve the problem.

48:20

I think that... And, of course, I think that everybody... I think that good right-thinking people had that stuff cross their mind from time to time. I guess what I'm saying is I've admitted that before. But you never sort of take an action on that. But the idea that as a group, everybody's looking around going, well, this is a really difficult situation, and some of these are really bad guys.

48:47

You can't get divorced. That would look wrong. We can kill them? Oh, okay. Well, since other people are doing it, it seems like it's okay. And you can see that. I mean, the one woman who said, it wasn't like we stabbed them. I know. And she said it was a rather pleasant way to go. Well, as it turns out, it really was not a pleasant way to go.

49:13

I don't know much in this world, but I do know that arsenic poisoning is not a pleasant way to go. And I think that it's very interesting that Auntie Susie ended up dying that way. And by her own hand. And bloody was that. Because she knew. I mean, they did hang several of these women, and they hanged them. They fainted, and they hanged them before they even came to, which I can't even imagine what that whole scene looked like.

49:43

That's so barbaric and insane. We have to talk about groupthink here. There are a couple of factors. And you have to set aside. This is not an elitist perspective at all. These were very uneducated people. Everyone in all directions. The men, the women, everybody was an uneducated person. Unsophisticated, unworldly people.

50:12

And so, you only had to get away with murder a few times for it to seem like a completely reasonable and normal approach. And there are so many things that happened in Nagoriv and this part of rural Hungary that contributed to this. Without all of these factors, this event never takes place. Before the country plunged itself into World War I, you had arranged marriages, which sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.

50:49

But you did not necessarily have people that were happy to be partnered with each other. So there's that. You had a culture. You had a very heavy-handed, patriarchal culture where a husband was allowed to slap you around. That was just part of what marriage was. So you had that. And you had a culture of heavy drinking that was socially endorsed.

51:17

And so you had a lot of drunken men knocking women and kids around. And that was just life. So there's that. There's that whole piece of it. Then the men go off to war. And the ones that come home are destroyed. What World War I did to the people who served is just unthinkably brutal. So they were not okay when they returned home.

51:49

And the women, by this point, had been independent. They had starfished in their beds. They had lived in homes without violence. They had not been taken and used sexually by a man who made their skin crawl. They had taken lovers that they felt passion for and wanted to be with. You can see how the storm now is beginning to build and that it's going to lead to some horrific eruption.

52:21

And that's exactly what happened. And in Hungary, divorce was not illegal if you had a civil marriage. If you were married by a priest in a church, divorce was illegal. So it wasn't just that the Catholic Church would not let you get divorced. The country of Hungary would not allow you to be divorced if you'd been married in a church.

52:43

And most of these people were. So the only way out was death. That was it. That was the only way out of this that these women could see. And the trusted village healer made it so easy. You were talking about the men coming back from war with the PTSD. And I think that certainly in wars prior to this, that sort of thing happened.

53:14

But one of the things that happened with World War I, they were able to videotape movies of these men. And all of a sudden it was widespread being able to see certain examples of what had happened with this. And I think up until that time, I don't think that people accepted it as a condition based on what had happened in the war.

53:42

It was not something that was widespread. You have to believe that during like the Civil War in this country, that sort of thing happened all the time as well. But World War I was, they're all bad. But it was, you talked about it in the script. It was a particularly, that trench warfare was particularly awful. I mean, the conditions were just absolutely brutal.

54:07

Because not only were you dealing with things like trench foot and living with your feet in water, there was vermin. It was just, it's the kind of existence that you wouldn't wish on people. And so not only do you have those conditions, oh, by the way, there's people shooting at you as well. And there was no, there was nothing for these men.

54:39

Like there was no VA hospital. There was no, like this is in Hungary, but there was no equivalent of like the American Legion or the VFW where at least you could go and commiserate with your brothers. There was no wounded warrior project. These men were snatched out of the fields and sent to the trenches. And it was absolute, like if there was ever a time that hell existed on this earth, that might have been it.

55:11

That might have been inhumane and unspeakable. And nobody came back okay. No one came back okay. And there were things that we didn't know then that we know now about like the impact on the human body of proximity to an explosion. 10,000 shells an hour blowing up overhead while you're living in mud with trench foot and blood and urine and fecal matter and blown off limbs and hungry and cold and dysentery.

55:49

These men came home destroyed and the women they came home to had moved on for better or worse and a lot of the cases worse. They'd moved on and now in the defense of the women and children they came home to. Do you think that those people were in any way prepared for the impact that combat had had on these men? No, absolutely not.

56:14

I mean, we're just now. It's 2026 and we're just now really talking openly about PTSD. And I mean, we do have the Wounded Warrior Project and we are terrible with our veterans. We do not take care of our veterans. But at least we're now having conversations about post-traumatic stress disorder. These people came home from the trenches and they were self-medicating with alcohol.

56:49

Some of them were so disabled psychologically and physically that what came home was something no one recognized. And they could not resume their old lives. Their old lives no longer existed for them to resume. And these women just weren't having it. They just weren't going to be having it. It was hard pass. And thought because they weren't shooting and stabbing them that they were merciful euthanization, I guess.

57:26

And that just wasn't the case at all. You know, I wonder. You said that this spread to some surrounding communities. I wonder if the full scope of this ended up being underreported in the long run as to how many of these men were killed. I think it absolutely had to be just based on. OK, so it went on for 20 years. It's a long time.

57:55

It's a long time. 20 years. And it was Naghrib and the surrounding rural communities. There were multiple anonymous letters and complaints that weren't taken seriously at all, in part because of another factor, which was Hungary by all of your post-World War I and Hungary. The depression. Keep in mind when this happened.

58:22

The Great Depression. People were starving. Right. Europe was in a shambles. Hungary was in a shambles. They're trying desperately to rebuild post-war and some folks complaining that some random farmer died unexpectedly. That just didn't get it. Nobody cared. And the depression. Nobody cared. The depression they had over there happened immediately after the war.

58:49

There was here in the United States. It really didn't hit till the 1930s. But over there, you know, World War I ended in 1918. And so it was almost immediate that they were in some kind of a depression. And the huge number of young men who died in that war. The thing that is horrifying about it is the generals would have these massive charges and whatnot.

59:18

And all these men would be slaughtered. And they were poor decisions. They were tactically poor decisions. And you realize how many millions of these men died just because of poor tactical decisions by the leaders in this war. Not to mention, as you were saying, some of them that were coming back that you said in the script that not only they have the PTSD, but many of them missing limbs, blindness, all of those kinds of things that they're coming home to.

59:46

And there was nothing. There was no infrastructure. There was no way to catch these returning soldiers in any kind of meaningful, supportive way. They literally were just sent back to the farms. Figure it out. I'm just thinking that Josh Mankiewicz really would have been very busy. Can you imagine? It is painful that it went on for as long as it did.

1:00:23

But, again, this is one of those where you have to look at the whole picture because you can go, what do you mean this went on for 20 years? Well, the country was in ruins. The continent was in ruins. People were desperate and everything was devastated. And a bunch of farmers in the middle of nowhere dropping dead hardly seemed like news.

1:00:50

They had flypaper. Yeah. And Auntie Susie, she took cover in this. And I hope you realize I didn't come right out and say it because it hasn't been proven, but it sure does look like she killed the husband to get the money and the property. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure that she did. It's interesting. You were saying when they took the corpses to the barbers, the barbers were kind of the catch-all for everything.

1:01:18

They were the dentists back in the day. Yeah. If you had any problems, get a haircut. And, in fact, I believe the barber pole, they said they did bloodletting, too, the barber pole that has the red, the white, and the blue. The red is the blood. The blue is the vein you took it from. And the white must be what you were wearing.

1:01:43

I don't know. I can't remember. But those barber poles, they all meant something, you know, surprisingly enough. And the barber was apparently a cousin of Suzy Ola, who was writing up the death certificates. So the whole thing was like super mafia, right? And not only was – well, the judge was legit, but the barber, not only was he Suzy's cousin, but he wasn't that bright.

1:02:12

Like he wasn't even that good a barber. And so what the hell did he know what he was doing looking at a dead body conducting the postmortems? He's the barber. Do you think he at least cut hair well? I'm not sure that the standard of a haircut back then would – Am I thinking too much about that? I mean it was – he got it out of your eyes, and I think that was the job.

1:02:37

Oh, yeah. Okay. That was primarily the thing. So this was very corrupt, and it was – Auntie Suzy spun herself a very corrupt and cunning little web and gave herself a fair amount of plausible deniability because eventually she was like one of those MLM people that you see on Facebook. She sold the poison to people who then made and sold the poison.

1:03:02

Right. Like she had a pyramid scheme going. And so she was not implicated in all of these deaths but enough of them, and she knew she'd be hanged. And that's why she slammed the poison down and took herself out when the police showed back up a second time. So there were – all of the like real long-term vision and planning belonged to her.

1:03:29

Everybody else was just in the moment trying to survive. And we really do have that one lawyer in Szolnok to thank for getting this anonymous letter and going, you know what? Where there's smoke, there's got to be some kind of fire. Let's dig one of these bodies up, and if it tests clean, then we'll know it's just a bunch of village superstition.

1:03:50

I was thinking about him because it seems like every time we have a story where some horrific thing is happening, there's always a hero that was able to bring it to light who stood up and went, something's wrong here. Can anybody not see this? And that was him for sure. Yeah. He was that guy. So thanks to him, there were some prosecutions, but there – it was sort of like – I feel kind of bad for the first wave of women that were prosecuted and tried because the public appetite sort of seemed to die down after we hanged a few and sent some more to prison.

1:04:34

And I think a lot of people got away with murder in rural Hungary post-World War I. I have no doubt of that. I think that wherever they found, they didn't find it all. Yeah. Oh, they didn't get everybody. And it's – look, there are things – there are bigger pictures. Let's pull on some of the big picture threads here because we're currently living in a moment where people are yammering to get rid of no-fault divorce, for example, the sanctity of the family and all that.

1:05:07

I'm just going to tell you. Unhappy people will find a way out. They will. Before no-fault divorce was made legal in the United States of America, we did have people die of stomach upset and poison. But we had a bigger problem, and you really see this in like the early 20th century, the Great Depression, Prohibition, right up through World War II, bigamy.

1:05:34

Oh, yes. Bigamy. And people were like, well, you can't get a divorce. I'm out of here. Now, I'm with you. I'm going to reinvent myself somewhere else, another part of the country. People's family trees are probably – there's probably a lot more bigamy in the average family tree than we have any way of knowing because you would say, well, I was married.

1:05:58

Well, are you divorced? Oh, yeah. I'm divorced. Then you just get married again. People – you can impose laws and restrictions on human behavior, but you can't – you will never eliminate certain human things. You just can't. People will find a way. Miserable people will find a way to be free. They always, always have.

1:06:24

And like, okay, you don't like divorce. All right. Yeah, I hear you. It's miserable. Do you prefer murder because – It seems like if it's illegal, if you are married in the church and hungry at this time and you just simply can't get divorced and you are in an intolerable situation, you can see where somebody who has no means whatsoever to go somewhere else would say, this is it.

1:06:55

This is what I've got to do. I'm not trying to say that it's okay. It's murder. But you can see where somebody could get – wind themselves into a situation where they felt so cornered and so trapped that they didn't have any other option. Well, and one of the things that you see, especially if you're a Dateline watcher, a true crime person, the killer will have a justification.

1:07:22

Now, it sounds real weak and pathetic and shabby in the light of the courtroom, but they always have a story for why it seemed like this was the only way out. I often think about the Chris Watts case. Chris Watts is a family annihilator. He murdered his wife, Shanann, and their two daughters, and she was pregnant. Shanann was pregnant, and he dumped their bodies in an oil tank.

1:07:49

He was an oil field worker. He was having an affair. He had a mistress who had no idea that he was married and was horrified when she found out, and he really felt like that was his option. Murdering his whole family was the only way that he could be happy and free, and divorce was perfectly legal. It was an option on the table that he chose not to take.

1:08:14

Anytime you think you can legislate morality or legislate behavior that fits into your religious scope or your idea of how people should conduct themselves, you run across human nature, and human nature will always find a way. Unfortunately, often, it's this. Men used to die of upset tummies a lot more often than they do now, in part because we do have that test for arsenic, and we've had it since forever, a couple hundred years almost.

1:08:56

But also now, we've got criminal forensics, and it's harder to just tell folks, oh, my husband, he had this weird upset stomach, and now he's dead. It's harder to just say that without being questioned. Do you wonder, in looking at this situation, whether some of these women individually, yes, there's the group mentality, but do you wonder if some of them individually had second thoughts about doing this, felt guilt about doing this?

1:09:23

Oh, sure. That's the thing that I've sort of wondered as you were talking about it. Yes, you can make the decision to do it, but then later you go, well, he was blind. He came back from the war. It really wasn't his fault. I suspect there are women who suffered until their last breath with guilt and remorse. They don't tend to make the news.

1:09:51

They don't tend to get remembered by history. Because statistically, all of these women were not sociopaths. Now, maybe Auntie Susie was, or a psychopath, but all of these women aren't. And so that's just the one thing that I was thinking about when you were telling the story. It was like, there has to be somebody that went, boy, you know, I did do this, and I feel really bad about it now.

1:10:17

Well, there was a culture, there was a mindset that made murder more comfortable in this part of the world at this time. So something that we haven't really talked about because it's so distasteful and heart-wrenching, they killed a lot of babies. They did. They killed a lot of babies. Auntie Susie was an abortionist, but it became easier to poison the babies after they were born.

1:10:49

Well, that was the thing that I was going to ask you about because it seemed like that was a pretty common thing as well. So this one-child situation, the people of rural Hungary, when the Angel Makers of Nagyrév story broke on the world stage, they were absolutely condemned as greedy peasants. And you could see that, you could hear that in some of the press coverage of the day, right?

1:11:21

There was no birth control, in part because this was a Catholic population and no contraception, and also it hadn't been invented yet, really. So there were the old methods, tried and true, but it wasn't like anybody could take the pill or get an IUD or whatever. And yet, heavily Catholic country, rural Hungary, and it's weird how the families are so small.

1:11:49

It's weird that we have all these single-child families. Statistically, that doesn't add up, right? And in the families where there was land to be inherited, those were the people whose babies died shortly after birth. The churchyards were filled with little tombstones of babies that had lived two, three, four, five days in families that had land resources and wealth.

1:12:18

So when we talk about, it's so fun to talk about, oh, the drunken, obnoxious husband, here's some soup. Oh, he's gone. But there's a dark, absolutely horrific layer to this story that never got the same attention that the husbands did, and that's all the dead babies. Now why do you think it is that – do you think that it was just so much more sensational to talk about the dead husbands and so devastating and evil to talk about the dead babies that we kick that to the side?

1:12:59

What do you think? Yeah, I think that it's just the fact that people become adults. I mean it's murder is murder. I understand that, but maybe there's a feeling because these were not humans that we could see had personalities and talked and everything else that in killing them it wasn't as bad, that they were not fully – They're not humans.

1:13:30

That's not what I'm saying. Their personalities are not fully formed. Let's put it that way. Well, here's what I think. I think that it's easier for us as humans to talk about adults killing adults. It's wrong, and we condemn it. And we can say – and I have tried to be very generous to the husbands in this story who came back from World War I just destroyed, right?

1:14:02

But there's a certain amount of – it's sensational and it's lurid, and it's socially acceptable to talk about murder when you're talking about a drunken, brutalizing, loud of a man, right? But people back then when this story broke, people back then shied away so hard from acknowledging how many babies they had murdered.

1:14:28

Is it just because it's too horrific to think about? I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think it didn't get the kind of press coverage that the husband-father-brother murders did for a couple of reasons, starting with what kind of woman poisons her own baby? That's monstrous. And I think that – and you have to remember where we are in time.

1:14:56

I think we're at a point in time when collectively that was so difficult to talk about that we just didn't. Yeah. But we could talk about your drunken husband who's too free with his fists. Let's kill him. We're doing him a favor. So that was my – because the baby thing, like I went – every time I encountered it, it was this brief – like, whoa, whoa, back that up.

1:15:24

Whoa, whoa, back that up. What do you mean? What do you mean these families only had one child and multiple pregnancies over and over again? What do you mean there are so many of these infant tombstones? Well, they were getting their milk dosed. And once again, is anybody feeling bad about this? That's my question. I know that it's a rhetorical question, but, you know, I mean – even when this came to light that it was – there was just – well, and there were some babies too.

1:16:08

Like, people just couldn't talk about it. So we know for a fact that a lot of people got away with murder post-World War I in that part of the world. A lot of people got away with murder and a handful of people were brought to justice. And I think even today the true count is not known or knowable. What do you think? I think this is going to haunt me.

1:16:36

I think that's the case. But I think you're right. I think the true number of people that died from this I don't think we'll ever know. I only think that they hit a certain number. I'm not going to say that they just scratched the surface, but I think there were more. I really do. For 20 years? For 20 years. Come on. And, you know, if you zoom out a little bit further – and this is, you know, people – nothing good comes of denying human beings their inherent dignity and their rights and their freedom.

1:17:11

Nothing good comes of that. It never ends well. And so when you had a culture, when you had a world where no one was free to choose who they married, you're not a woman. Like, I've got to tell you, when you're 16, having some drunken guy old enough to be your pawpaw, you know, rutting on top of you is not the life you want for yourself.

1:17:35

It is horrifying. It wouldn't take much. I can understand where you would feel so backed into a corner. And there were others around you doing it, and the thinking would be, this will draw less attention to myself. I can see where you say, I have no choice. And it just was easy. You know, it was just an easy thing to do.

1:17:57

And some of these men were so broken by the war that I think that their poisoners convinced themselves they were doing a favor. And you know how easy it is to talk yourself into something terrible if it's what you want. Yeah. That's what makes human beings such a handful. Sherry, I've done that with cheesecake before and rationalized, and I've done that before myself.

1:18:23

So I can certainly understand where that could escalate to murder. You know, easily, easily. Like, that's the thing about the story of the Angel Makers of Nagreev. There are so many different roles that you can slide into and understand how these things happened. Including the part on the part of the police and the courts ignoring it for 20 years.

1:18:53

You can understand that. Now, I totally get like, oh, you asshole. I've had enough of you. Drink this. Like, I get that. The part that I don't get is killing a baby so that I can get a few hectares of grass. That part I don't understand. That's a pretty high level of selfishness. I can't. Like, I can put myself into the shoes of a lot of these women and be like, oh, my God, if this man touches me one more time, go get the poison.

1:19:24

You know, I can see that. But the children? And they were also, you know, they were knocking off fathers and brothers, too. Because you have to think about it again. It's like super, super, you know, like old school Catholic patriarchal culture. Your brother could be a drunken halfwit and he's going to inherit everything.

1:19:51

You're not getting anything. Now, if something were to happen, God forbid, your brother's no longer here. That's another conversation. But you see how easily these women slid into this. That is. It's OK, because it seems like there's a lot of this going on. This seems like it's become an acceptable solution to this problem.

1:20:24

So you have to just say to yourself, because you can. We see this on Dateline. We see this on 2020 all the time, even now, when it seems impossible that you're going to get away with anything based on, you know, forensics and DNA and all that. We see how people go from I'm unhappy and I feel trapped to. I'm unhappy and I feel trapped and this is the only way.

1:20:53

And a lot of times they have a partner in crime who they talk about it with. And as long as they both agree, you go, well, this person's agreeing with this, too. And this this does make sense. This is the right thing to do. Yeah. And, you know, and if the first one is always the hardest. Some of these women, they killed a husband.

1:21:18

They killed another husband. They killed their father. They killed their brother. They killed a baby. Like some of these women were what you would call serial killers today. Yeah. The only thing is serial killers usually don't know their victims. But these women certainly certainly did. They knew their victims. They certainly did.

1:21:40

But if you think about it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's a serial killing. Yeah, I agree. But but the first one was the hard one. The first one was terrible. Oh, it was so hard that first time you were a nervous wreck. You were a nervous wreck buying the poison. You were shaking like a leaf. Maybe you brought it home and you put it in the cupboard and and, you know, just thought about it for a while.

1:22:05

Maybe it took maybe it took hours. Maybe it took weeks for you to pour it into the soup. And then it was too late. There was no like on there was no undoing it. Once you poured it into the soup and watched him drink it, his death is brutal. Death was inevitable. And by that point, now you've done it's done. It's done.

1:22:29

Now, what are you going to do? You have these children to deal with. You have a fire to build or whatever. You've got to get him in the ground. Yeah. So I would just say, guys, some of y'all have some very, very anachronistic ideas about how life should work. And and trust me, you don't want to go back to those days. You don't want that.

1:22:57

You think you do. You think that, oh, somehow you're everything will be better for you if if people have fewer choices or fewer options. Nothing will be better for you if people have fewer choices, especially if you were in Hungary from 1919 to 1929. Dude, I've seen Dateline episodes where you didn't want to be in Peoria six months ago when someone is desperate.

1:23:27

And like I said in the episode, there's nothing more dangerous than an animal that's been backed into a corner. Yeah. Especially if that's a human animal. Yeah. With opposable thumbs and, you know, a brain. Well, buddy, that's bad. So do you have any last? I want to thank our incredible cast, including my niece, Evie, making her voice acting debut.

1:23:52

She was as cute as a button. Was she not? She was so excited doing this episode and she did such a great job. And thank you for allowing me to be the voice of Susie. No one. No one plays a better Eastern European crone than you do. My friend. So any last thoughts on the angel makers of Nagri? No, no. It's just. No, I don't really.

1:24:19

I mean, it is if you stand away from it and you sort of stand away from the horror of it. It's a fascinating story. And I really I am fascinated by it. You know what I wonder? They got caught. They got caught because that attorney finally responded to an anonymous letter. Something I was going to say earlier, and that is it makes you wonder if this has happened somewhere else and they didn't get caught.

1:24:48

And whoever the person was that was the ringleader just died or something. I'm pretty sure it's happened more than once. I have a feeling that it happened during the great days of Manifest Destiny. I have a feeling that some of those, you know, hard, hard formed Western widows made the choice to be Western. I think this has happened.

1:25:14

Has it happened on this scale? Because that's what's really shocking about this story is that it was so many people in such a large area for so long. Maybe it's never happened quite on this scale, but it's happened. And there's a really strong chance that somewhere in your family tree, gentle listener, is an uncle or a grandfather who died young and suddenly.

1:25:39

And nobody's really sure why. Was it appendicitis? Was it food poisoning? Did he have stomach cancer? What happened? One day he was fine and the next day he was gone. My grandmother was from Austria. So join us next time on True Weird Stuff. Since we're in the World War Two state of mind, we're going to World War One state of mind.

1:26:04

We're going to stay there and we're going to meet the Hello Girls and their story is absolutely incredible and shocking. And it just shows you that we've come a long way, but we've got a long way to go. So thank you so much for listening to True Weird Stuff. Our website is trueweirdstuff.com and we're on Instagram and we'd love to hear from you.

1:26:31

We do take requests for episodes. You can shoot us a message at trueweirdstuff.com or DM us on our True Weird Stuff Instagram. We've done episodes by request and we'd love to hear from you because you're the person we're making it for and we appreciate you. We'll see you next time. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

1:26:53

And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production.

1:27:16

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash.

1:27:38

Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2026 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

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