The Angel Makers of Nagyrév were a group of
women living in the village of Nagyrév, Hungary
who between 1914 and 1929 poisoned to death
an estimated 300 people (however, Béla Bodó
puts the number of victims at 45-50). They were
supplied arsenic and encouraged to use it for the
purpose by a midwife or "wise woman" named
Júlia Fazekas and her accomplice Susi Oláh
(Zsuzsanna Oláh). Their story is the subject of
the documentary film The Angelmakers and the
movie Hukkle .
Crimes
Fazekas was a middle-aged midwife who arrived
in Nagyrév in 1911, with her husband already
missing without explanation. Between 1911 and
1921 she was imprisoned 10 times for performing
illegal abortions , but was consistently acquitted
by judges supporting abortion.
In Hungarian society at that time, the future
husband of a teenage bride was selected by her
family and she was forced to accept her parents'
choice. Divorce was not allowed socially, even if
the husband was an alcoholic or abusive . During
World War I , when able-bodied men were sent to
fight for Austria-Hungary , rural Nagyrév was an
ideal location for holding Allied prisoners of war .
With the limited freedom of POWs about the
village, the women living there often had one or
more foreign lovers while their husbands were
away. When the men returned, many of them
rejected their wives' affairs and wished to return
to their previous way of life, creating a volatile
situation. At this time Fazekas began secretly
persuading women who wished to escape this
situation to poison their husbands using arsenic
made by boiling flypaper and skimming off the
lethal residue.
After the initial killing of their husbands, some of
the women went on to poison parents who had
become a burden to them, or to get hold of their
inheritance. Others poisoned their lovers, some
even their sons; as the midwife allegedly told the
poisoners, "Why put up with them?".
The first poisoning in Nagyrév took place in 1911;
it was not the work of Fazekas. The deaths of
other husbands, children, and family members
soon followed. The poisoning became a fad, and
by the mid-1920s, Nagyrév earned the nickname
"the murder district." There were an estimated
45-50 murders over the 18 years that Fazekas
lived in the district. She was the closest thing to
a doctor the village had and her cousin was the
clerk who filed all the death certificates, allowing
the murders to go undetected.
Three conflicting accounts have been cited to
explain how the Angel Makers were eventually
detected. In one, Mrs. Szabó, one of the Angel
Makers, was caught in the act by two visitors
who survived her poisoning attempts. She
fingered a Mrs. Bukenoveski, who named
Fazekas. In another account, a medical student in
a neighboring town found high arsenic levels in a
body that washed up on the riverbank, leading to
an investigation. However, according to Béla
Bodó, a Hungarian-American historian and author
of the first scholarly book on the subject, the
murders were finally made public in 1929 when
an anonymous letter to the editor of a small local
newspaper accused women from the Tiszazug
region of the country of poisoning family
members. The authorities exhumed dozens of
corpses from the local cemetery. 34 women and
one man were indicted.
Afterwards, 26 of the Angel Makers were tried,
among them Susi Oláh. Eight were sentenced to
death but only two were executed . Another 12
received prison sentences.
Rosalie Sebestyen and Rosa Hoyba poisoned their 'boring' husbands, as did Mrs Julius Csaba, though she was treated rather more leniently when it was learned she married a drunk. Maria Vargas was convicted of killing her blind war-hero husband and her lover.
Juliane Lipke described as 'squat and shapeless, was responsible for at least seven murders which includes her stepmother, aunt, sister in law, brother and her husband. having disposed of most of her own family Mrs Lipke then offered her wide experience to her neighbour Maria Koteles: ' I was sorry for the poor wretched woman so I gave her a bottle of poison and told her that if nothing else helped her marriage to try that'.
As for the ringleader she escaped earthly justice by taking poison just as the police arrived to arrest her. her room filled with pots of poison.
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