The Women Are Not Fine by Hope Reese: The husband SLAYERS

In late December 1929 four Hungarian women went on trial for murdering their husbands.

According to the prosecution, Rozalia, Lidia, Julianna and Maria had slipped arsenic into their cooking pots and then sat back and watched stonily as their menfolk writhed, gasped and choked to death in front of them.

The trial was a global sensation, attracting reporters from around the world.

A local journalist called the elderly women ‘simply bad, confused, hypnotised and sick’. Another claimed that these were ‘mass killings’, the product of ‘mass psychosis’.

The verdict was a foregone conclusion: Guilty. Although the quartet were spared the death sentence, they all got life imprisonment. In this they were luckier than some of their friends who went on trial a few months later.

On January 13, 1931, Maria Kardos, who had been found guilty of murdering both her husband and her son, was sentenced to death by ‘short-drop hanging’, a hideous, slow death by strangulation. Maria writhed for eight minutes, before the hangman took pity on her and yanked her body down to speed up the process. Seventy-five ticket-holding members of the public looked on impassively.

All these women came from the remote hamlet of Nagyrev in central Hungary. They had manufactured the poison themselves by buying flypapers from the village store, boiling them in water, and then distilling the liquid into a toxic but tasteless brew that could be dripped surreptitiously into a meal seconds before serving. The arsenic didn’t always take effect immediately but that, really, was an advantage. If there was a time lag of days or even weeks between administering the poison and the actual moment of death, it became harder to prove anything.

From these small beginnings, the Nagyrev poisoning crisis extended to neighbouring areas. In total, 28 people, mostly women, were accused of killing 101 local people, mostly men. The real figure could be closer to 300.

Hope Reese, an American journalist living in Budapest, sets about investigating why the womenfolk of central Hungary embarked on ‘the deadliest poisoning epidemic in history’. She explains that many of the male victims had recently returned from fighting in the First World War, physically and emotionally shattered. Some were missing limbs, while others were suffering from what today would be diagnosed as PTSD.

In a poor farming community like Nagyrev, a man’s worth was measured by his ability to work. Losing that status meant losing his place in the household and the community. Add in the fact that many resorted to drowning their sorrows in alcohol and you had a recipe for an explosion in domestic violence. Chillingly, a popular local saying was ‘A wife is good when beaten.’

Against this backdrop, argues Reese, ‘killing became a path to independence – a way for the women of Nagyrev to free themselves from all the other burdens they had been expected to carry, offering a new version of what life could be’.

In the summer of 1916, Maria Varga had reached breaking point with her husband, Istvan, who had returned from war blind and violent. Maria’s neighbour, the village midwife, Auntie Zsuzsi, kindly supplied some drops to ‘calm down’ Istvan and, five weeks later, he was dead.

Maria Koteles, who was eventually hanged, had to deal with her husband pointing a gun at her and calling her a whore.

Julianna Foldvari, meanwhile, endured her army veteran husband Karoly getting repeatedly drunk and beating her.

Yet another Maria, Maria Papai, had to endure her husband hitting her with a chain.

It wasn’t only husbands who were made to disappear. In 1912 Zsuzsanna Papai was so sick of her father-in-law pestering her

for sex that she turned to her neighbour, who brought round a pot of poisoned soup. Seven years later Maria Kardos, despairing of the criminal behaviour of her feckless son, finished him off at the age of 23, again with the help of Auntie Zsuzsi.

Wouldn’t divorce have been simpler and safer? Reese explains that, even though Nagyrev was a Protestant rather than a Catholic community, legal separation was unthinkable. Marriage was for life, and to leave your abusive husband would be earn yourself a reputation as a ‘whore’. What’s more, you would find yourself without any financial support.

Far simpler, really, to do away with the problem altogether. Rural Hungary had a tradition of using murder to solve domestic crises. Both married and single women who found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy had no qualms about bringing on a miscarriage by inserting goose feathers, bicycle spokes and poisonous weeds into their uterus.

If that didn’t work, they asked Auntie Zsuzsi for a concoction that would do the trick. If that failed then the unwanted baby might be fed to the household pig, scalded with boiling water, or left out in the cold to die of exposure. Compared with this, slipping a few drops of homemade poison into your husband’s soup was a walk in the park.

It is extraordinary that the women were able to get away with murder for so long. But Reese points out that Nagyrev was very isolated and had no resident doctor or policeman. What’s more, the national life expectancy was only 37, which meant that the deaths of middle-aged and elderly men were unlikely to attract suspicion. Still, by the late 1920s, rumours were spreading and the authorities started to exhume the bodies only to discover deadly levels of arsenic.

Inevitably, there are no happy endings in this tragic story. Many of the women ended up with long prison sentences and three were hanged. Auntie Zsuzsi, who was one of the main players in the poison murders, was determined not to suffer this fate. On July 19, 1929, she heard the town crier calling her name. She knew exactly what it meant. Just as the police rounded the corner to arrest her, she swallowed a draft of her own poison.