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.
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.
