I didn’t yet realize it, but I had just begun a quest that would come to absorb me for years – leading me to the village where these women were born and raised, to the courthouse where they stood trial and to the very home of a poison-maker.

The question of why now possessed me. What had it taken for these women to kill?

To any woman who has ever searched for a way out

A Note on Terms

On names

There are dozens of characters in this story, and to say that the names can get confusing is a gross understatement. Not only do many of the women’s first names repeat – among our primary suspects are multiple Rozálias, Márias and Juliannas – but the last names do as well. Some of the male victims have the entirely same full name; three of them are called Lajos Takács, for instance.

Some of the suspects and victims share exactly the same names too. Mária Kardos is both the elderly employer who was poisoned in 1911 and the woman on trial for poisoning her son and husband in the 1920s.

To further confuse things, the women have both married names and maiden names. Some of the women’s maiden names are the same as other women’s married names – Rozália Kiss, for example. And, since some of the women were married more than once, they may have had multiple married names.

In this book, I have decided to refer to the women by their married names. They may not have approved of this choice – they balked at hearing these married names in court – but these are the names that were used in the official investigations and in the trials. These are the names that most often come up in archival research, too, though their use is not always consistent.

To help clarify things, I have provided a character tree overleaf, on pages xii–xiii.

On the term ‘angelmakers’

The term ‘angelmakers’ has been applied to many female serial killers.¹ But in the Hungarian language it means ‘one who turns babies into “angels”’, according to historian Judith Szapor. It dates to at least 1884, as seen in the painting Angel-Maker² by Ottó Baditz.

Szapor told me that when she first heard ‘angelmaker’ being used in reference to these women who had poisoned their husbands, she felt ‘cognitive dissonance’. Another historian, Béla Bodó, suggests that ‘angelmaker’ should refer only to the midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas.

Nevertheless, ‘angelmakers’ is widely used to refer to the group of women from Nagyrév who poisoned their husbands. Multiple articles (and the Wikipedia page) call them the ‘Angelmakers of Nagyrév’. Dutch filmmaker Astrid Bussink’s 2005 short documentary on the subject is called The Angelmakers.³ Jessica Gregson’s 2007 novel The Angel Makers is loosely based on this true story. Patti McCracken’s recent non-fiction book on this subject has the same title. There are a couple of theories about why the so-called ‘Angelmakers of Nagyrév’ became known as such. One is that the midwife was deemed an ‘angelmaker’, because she was involved in abortions before she began the poisonings.⁴ Another possibility is that the men who were poisoned were later considered ‘angels’.⁵ Either way, the term ‘angelmakers’ was used in the context of the Tiszazug poisonings for the first time in August 1929, in the local newspaper,⁶ and continued to be used in the media thereafter.

However, because the term ‘angelmakers’ has a double meaning, I have chosen to use ‘women of Nagyrév’ to broadly refer to these women in the Tiszazug region who killed their husbands.

Description

The chart shows that Auntie Zsuzsi provided poison to Julianna Lipka, who was married to Pál Lipka, with whom she worked as a live-in caretaker for the Kardoses, a well-to-do elderly couple in Nagyrév. Julianna gave this poison to and assisted Mária Pápai, who was married to Lajos Pápai. Julianna also provided poison to and assisted Mária Köteles, who was married to László Kókai, a war veteran.

Auntie Zsuzsi also provided poison to Rozália Takács, a healer in Nagyrév who was married to Lajos V Takács. Rozália Takács in turn provided poison to and assisted five other women: Rozália Murányi, who started a relationship with Zsigmond Murányi in Nagyrév while her then husband, Sándor, was away at war; Zsuzsanna Pápa, who lived with her husband Ferenc in the house of her father-in-law, János Pápai; Mária Balogh, a friend of Rozália Takács in Nagyrév; Sára Beke, who was married to Mihály Beke; and Eszter Nagy, who was married to Lajos K Takács, a heavy drinker.

Rozália Takács also provided poison to Anna Cser, who was married to Lajos Cser, whose sick parents she looked after in Nagyrév. Anna Cser was also assisted by Auntie Zsuzsi and Mária Fazekas, Auntie Zsuzsi’s daughter, a midwife in Nagyrév who was married to Lajos Boros, the village coroner.

Auntie Zsuzsi also provided poison to and instructed Rozália Holyba, who was married to Károly Holyba, a war veteran. Auntie Zsuzsi’s sister, Lídia Sebestyén, also encouraged Rozália Holyba.

Auntie Zsuzsi also provided poison to and assisted Mária Kardos, a well-to-do woman who married three times and had a son who caused her a lot of problems. In turn, Mária Kardos provided poison to and assisted Julianna Földvári, who was married to Károly Földvári, a war veteran.

Auntie Zsuzsi also provided poison to and assisted Mária Varga, who was married to István Jóljárt, a blind war veteran.

Auntie Zsuzsi also provided poison to two midwives in the nearby village of Tiszakürt, Krisztina Csordás and Eszter Szabó, whose husband László acted as an accomplice. The poison was to be given to Mária Madarász and József Madarász Jr., a young married couple in Tiszakürt. Krisztina Csordás encouraged the Szabós, and all three of them assisted the Madarász couple.

Auntie Zsuzsi’s Connections

Auntie Zsuzsi, a midwife in the village of Nagyrév in rural Hungary, was a key figure in the greatest female-led mass poisoning in modern history, which led to the deaths of up to 300 people. This chart shows some of her connections in Nagyrév and the neighbouring village of Tiszakürt, which feature in this book. There were likely many more, but they cannot be confirmed.

‘When one feels desperate, one can do many things.’

—Mária Kardos, speaking to Judge Fuchs

Introduction

The women of Nagyrév were desperate.

In this small Hungarian village, under the shadow of World War I, many women were struggling to survive. They were suffering silently at the hands of their husbands – some of whom were veterans, some of them with PTSD, some of them addicted to alcohol and many of them violent. These were poor women, from poor farming families. They saw no way out.

But then, over time, a new idea began to take hold among the women – one that seemingly offered them a chance to change their fates. It started with whisperings, rumours of a few terrible deeds, but eventually it spread among an entire network of women who realized they did possess some power after all. They rose into this power, forever changing their lives and the trajectory of history.

In the spring of 2018, I ended up in Budapest, mostly on a whim. I had been working as a freelance writer in Louisville, Kentucky and was drawn by the idea of spending hours reading and writing in Budapest’s glamorous cafés, soaking in its ancient Turkish baths and traipsing through beautiful old neighbourhoods. I booked a flight to Budapest, a six-week trip with no agenda. With no real plan, and knowing no one, I wandered. The city’s blend of charm and grit captivated me.

A year later, I returned to Hungary – this time planning to spend three months, the maximum for a tourist visa. On one of my first evenings back, I stumbled upon an open-mic night. These Monday-evening gatherings, a staple for the international community, began with amateur acoustic performances and ended at a pub, where groups of newcomers and veterans kept the party going. Here, in one of these dirty ruin bars, I struck up a conversation with a guy I’ll call Zoltán. Born in New Zealand to a mother from Greece and a father from Hungary, he was compact, sturdy and animated, with a long, unruly mane of brown hair. In the dim light of this Budapestian dive, he started talking about his family – and told me a wild story.

In the 1960s, Zoltán said, his grandmother had poisoned her husband in a Hungarian village. His grandfather survived the poisoning episode, but his wife wound up with a 25-year prison sentence. Consequently, Zoltán’s father, and his father’s siblings, had grown up in a household without their mother, who was locked behind bars.

Zoltán then told me he believed his grandmother’s actions were inspired by an earlier generation of poisoners in Hungary. ‘Look up the Angelmakers,’ he urged me.

I did, and here’s what I found: a midwife; a group of women – most of them wives, most of them mothers – in the village of Nagyrév at the dawn of the 20th century; and the deadliest female-led poisoning epidemic in history.

For days after my chance meeting with Zoltán, the women of Nagyrév were on my mind. Why did they do what they did? How did these murders spin out of control? How did these women get away with their crimes for two decades?

I began asking around, bringing up the subject with Hungarians I met in Budapest. While the story had garnered international attention at the time – it even featured in the pages of The New York Times – most of the people I encountered didn’t know about it. Perhaps it had been overshadowed by the losses of World War I. Or maybe it had not registered as a significant event in Hungary’s long, often war-torn history. For whatever reason, the women of Nagyrév and what they did had not stuck in the country’s collective memory. Many of the Hungarians I asked were not only unaware of the scandal but also didn’t find it especially noteworthy when I told them. This response only fascinated me further.

Several weeks later, I was lunching with a new friend – a Hungarian journalist named Róbert Kollár – who asked me if there were stories in Hungary I was interested in writing about. As soon as I relayed the story from Nagyrév, he offered to drive me to the TV headquarters at RTL, a leading national broadcast company, where he worked – his station had reported on the story several years ago and I could check out the old footage from the archive. As I sat down at one of the old desks in the office, a critical detail dawned on me: the film’s audio would be entirely in Hungarian and I wouldn’t understand a word. I scrambled for my iPhone and hit ‘record’ as the clip began to play, so I could play back the audio later.

Later that week, I sat down with Gábor Krupa, a Hungarian man I had recently begun teaching English in weekly one-to-one sessions. Before this week’s lesson, I had asked Gábor to translate the recording – now stored in an MP4 file labelled ‘poisoning’ – into English, as his homework. This would be a good opportunity for us to edit his grammar together, I’d said. Today, Gábor couldn’t wait to tell me something. ‘Hope, my grandmother lives in the village of Nagyrév,’ he said. ‘I can drive you there.’

I didn’t yet realize it, but I had just begun a quest that would come to absorb me for years – leading me to the village of Nagyrév, where these women were born and raised, to the courthouse where they stood trial and to the very home of a poison-maker.

The question of why now possessed me. What had it taken for these women to kill?

The story flipped the usual script on domestic homicide. Statistically, men make up 90 per cent of the perpetrators of intimate-partner violence. And the reasons that men and women kill are fundamentally different. As Margaret Atwood once said: men are afraid that women will laugh at them, but women are afraid that men will kill them.¹ This is true when it comes to intimate-partner homicide – broadly speaking, men kill to punish a partner, or to gain ‘control’ of a situation; and while women may kill in self-interest, or for financial gain, the greatest motivator for women to kill is an impulse to survive.

The Women Are Not Fine is the true story of these women in a Hungarian village. It is also a story about what happens when women are neglected, when women are abused, when women are living on the edge of poverty with little legal recourse for improving their lives. It is a story of what happens when women search for an escape. It is what happens when women come together.

The facts laid out in this book are violent. And, as this book will starkly illustrate, our society tends to hide stories of women’s violence. We simply don’t want to consider that women are capable of murder. The story of what happened in Nagyrév is a piece of history that still brings shame to the Hungarian village where it is set. It is a story many have tried to dismiss or deny.

But face this story we must – because in investigating the reverberations of these events through time, and their parallels to current events, we can come closer to understanding what ails our society today.

After all, the problems these women faced are not so far from our own. Beyond feeling stuck in difficult marriages, they had limited reproductive rights or control over their bodies. While there has been progress in women’s rights – like access to healthcare, economic equity and protection from violence—there have been setbacks as well. Reproductive choice, equal pay and legal protections against abuse are under threat. And marginalized groups, especially, still bear the brunt of inequality, reminding us that these hard-won rights must be defended, not taken for granted.

The story you will read here has limitations. I rely on Hungarian court documents, police reports, contemporary journalism and scholarly research; every quote you’ll see is from an official transcript and every fact has been checked against primary sources. Still, in many cases, important details are missing from the records, or the reports conflict with each other. In some cases, main suspects died before there was a chance to investigate. And in police reports and testimony from the suspects and witnesses, there is always the possibility that someone is not telling the truth. There is also the issue of memory – in a village ruled by seasons, where many people were illiterate, dates were hardly ever registered. One of the main figures in the trials could not remember the year of her own wedding, when questioned under oath.

Even with what we do have, we can never get into the minds of the women of Nagyrév. We cannot know, beyond a reasonable doubt, what their motivations were.

What we do know, however, are the circumstances they lived in. The common hardships they shared with their friends. The forces that culminated in the greatest poisoning scandal in modern history, which lasted nearly two decades and killed up to 300 people in rural Hungary.

The women of Nagyrév lived in another time, under different conditions. Yet their stories – of poverty, isolation, lack of autonomy, abuse – will resonate with many women today.

A typical home in rural Hungary, photographed in 1937 by Sándor Gönyey.

From left to right: Rozália Holyba, Lídia Sebestyén, Julianna Lipka and Mária Köteles at the courthouse in Szolnok, December 1929.