Angel Makers of Nagyrév

Angel Makers of Nagyrév
Hungarian	Tiszazugi méregkeverők
class=notpageimage| Location of Nagyrév in Hungary
Nationality	Hungarian
Years active	1914–1929
Criminal charge	Murder
Penalty	6 death sentences, only 3 of which were carried out; 8 others sentenced to life in prison
Details
Target(s)	abusive or unwanted relatives
Killed	40–300 men
Weapons	Arsenic
Date apprehended	1929

The Angel Makers of Nagyrév (Hungarian: Tiszazugi méregkeverők, "Tiszazug poison-mixers") were a group of women who lived in villages in the Tiszántúl region of Hungary and poisoned about 300 people between 1911 and 1929 (the exact number is disputed; the historian Béla Bodó, for example, estimates the number of victims at only around 45–50). They were supplied arsenic and encouraged to use it by a local midwife named Zsuzsanna Fazekas, née Oláh (Fazekas Gyuláné Oláh Zsuzsanna), wife of Gyula Fazekas. Their story is the subject of the documentary film The Angelmakers and the feature film Hukkle.

While most of the poisoning cases were reported in the village of Nagyrév (hence the collective name for the women involved), several similar poisonings occurred in Tiszakürt, Ókécske, Tiszaföldvár, Kunszentmárton, Mesterszállás, and Öcsöd, and there were cases in Békés, Csongrád, and Zala counties.

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 ten 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 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 POWs having limited freedom within the village, the women living there often had one or more foreign lovers while their husbands were away. When the men returned, despite their wives' affairs, many decided 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 murdering their husbands, some of the women went on to poison their parents, who had become a burden to them, or to get hold of their inheritance. Others poisoned their lovers, some even their sons. The midwife allegedly asked 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 poisonings 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.

Capture

Defendants in the arsenic poisoning case of the Tiszazug area walking in the Szolnok prison yard

Three conflicting accounts have been cited to explain how the Angel Makers were eventually detected. In one, Szabó, one of the Angel Makers, was caught in the act by two visitors who survived her poisoning attempts. She pointed a finger at a woman with the surname Bukenoveski, who in turn named Fazekas. In another account, a medical student in a neighbouring 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.

Authorities exhumed dozens of corpses from the local cemetery. 28 suspects were brought to trial (all but two were women), and they were convicted of 162 murders. While the case was investigated in detail, with 12 trials held between 1929 and 1931, no precise figures for the number of victims are available, as other sources estimated them at around 300. The authorities tried the cases separately in order to avoid publicity. The trials eventually ended with six death sentences (three were hanged, and the sentences of the other three were commuted: one was acquitted and two received life imprisonment), eight cases of life imprisonment, and two shorter prison sentences.

Bibliography

• Gregson, Jessica. The Angel Makers. PaperBooks Ltd. 2007. ISBN 0-9551094-6-9.
• Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. 2nd edition. Checkmark Books. 2006. ISBN 0-8160-6196-3. pp. 1–2.
• Bodó, Béla. Tiszazug: A Social History of a Murder Epidemic. Columbia University Press East European Monographs, 2003. ISBN 0-88033-487-8.
• McCracken, Patti. The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History's Most Astonishing Murder Ring. William Morrow. 2023. ISBN 978-0063275034.
• Gómez, Fernando. Veneno, drama en cuatro actos. Editorial Los Libros del Mississippi, 2024. ISBN 978-84-128242-0-9.

External links

• Crime Library
• CLEWS: The Historic True Crime Blog
• Angelmakers film website
• BBC News: "Unearthing Hungary husband murders"
• Evidence Locker True Crime Podcast: "The Angel Makers of Nagyrév" | Hungary