by Ray Black
The subsequent autopsy was unable to find a clear cause of death so, as a precaution, Becky’s surviving twin, Katie, was admitted to Ward 4. As bad luck would have it, Allitt was working her shift that day. History repeated itself as the second Phillips twin endured a similar fate as her sister. Katie arrested twice in forty-eight hours, both times she responded positively to the resuscitation procedure. Following her transfer she was found to have broken five ribs, developed cerebral palsy, partial paralysis and sight and hearing difficulties, all owing to her oxygen deprivation. But she was alive.
Discovering Beverley was the nurse to have raised the alarm and due to her constant close attention paid to both daughters, Sue Phillips approached Allitt, asking her if she would be Katie’s godmother. Revelling in this false heroism, the nurse accepted, undeserving of such an honour having inflicted such permanent damage on the child.
HARSHEST VERDICT
One more life would be taken before Allitt’s destructive forces were brought to an end. On 22 April 1991, fifteen-month-old Claire Peck was admitted after an asthma attack. Two brief moments alone with the nurse from hell brought on two arrests, the last of which took her life. Her autopsy revealed she had died of natural causes, but this did not sit right with Dr Nelson Porter, a consultant at the hospital, who initiated an enquiry. Tests revealed high levels of Lignocaine in her system; a substance never prescribed to babies. The police were called, and they discovered twenty-four suspicious episodes over the previous two months all linked by one common factor: Beverley Allitt.
Suspended from duty while sufficient evidence was collected, she was formally charged in November 1991. While she awaited trial, psychiatrists attempted to understand her motivation behind the attacks. It soon became apparent she was suffering from a rare factitious disorder named Munchausen By Proxy, characterized by the causing of physical injury upon others to gain attention for oneself.
Attending just sixteen days of her two-month trial due to apparent illness, Beverley Allitt was convicted on 23 May 1993 and given thirteen life sentences for murder and attempted murder, the harshest verdict handed down to a woman. Behind bars, she reverted back to her past, self-harming by stabbing herself with paper clips and pouring boiling water over her hand – all in the name of attention.
Elizabeth Báthory
Luring an unending line of young girls to her creepy castle, this medieval menace delighted in the torture and mutilation of her slaves to satisfy an insatiable bloodlust; an obsession that became legendary and earned her the sickening sobriquet: the Blood Countess.
PURE EVIL
During the sixteenth century the Hungarian aristocracy enjoyed enormous power in Eastern Europe. As part of a great empire ruled by Austria to the west, each of these families possessed untold riches and vast lands. To protect these huge estates bloodlines were kept pure by the intermarrying of relatives. On the 7 August 1560 two branches of one such dynasty were fused together with the birth of Elizabeth Báthory.
Counting cardinals, princes and even a future king as family, the young noblewoman spent her childhood at Ecsed Castle, growing into a highly-intelligent, raven-haired beauty. She did, however, suffer from seizures, possibly a by-product of the inbreeding, and would often fly into a rage much to the alarm of her governesses.
In addition to her studies, Elizabeth became well-versed in violence. Hungarian nobles were renowned for their mistreatment of the lower classes and at Ecsed Castle servants were severely beaten on a daily basis. On one occasion the wild youngster witnessed a gypsy thief being sewn into the belly of a horse as punishment; his head protruding from the incision, the culprit was left to die. Elizabeth grew up believing such savagery was just the way of the world.
At eleven years of age, she was betrothed to Count Ferenc Nádasdy, an accomplished warrior known among the people as The Black Hero of Hungary. Her adolescent promiscuity almost scuppered the arrangement, however, when she fell pregnant to one of the peasants on the estate. Sent away to give birth and give up the child, Elizabeth returned and married the Count the following year. She moved in with her new husband at his castle in Sárvár, where he introduced her to a new level of perversion.
STAR-KICKING AND SCREAMING
The newlyweds immersed themselves in the dark world of the occult, casting spells, chanting incantations during satanic rituals until Nádasdy was called away to war. The Ottoman Empire was encroaching on the Christian kingdom seen as the last bulwark against the invading Muslims. Elizabeth was left to her own devices and travelled from castle to castle, visiting relatives including an aunt who opened her eyes to the pleasures of bisexuality and flagellation.
Once she had completed the tour of her estates, she settled at the thirteenth-century Cachtice Castle, a wedding gift from her husband, set in the remote Little Carpathian mountains. Here she busied herself with her many duties as a noble, assisting the poor and defending the land from Turkish attack. Yet such responsibilities were not enough to prevent Elizabeth from indulging in her favourite pastime.
The countess delighted in whipping her servants with a barbed lash or beating them with a stick. She would amuse herself by having her maidservants dragged naked into the snow to have cold water poured over them. The water would then freeze creating human ice sculptures for her perverse entertainment. A trick picked up from her husband called star-kicking also became common practice. Paper soaked in oil would be placed between the toes of a victim then lit. Elizabeth was assured the recipient saw stars due to the burning pain.
Not all her servants lived in constant fear of the cruel countess. She had a select few who agreed to help her bring suffering to the rest. Colluding with her was Ilona Jo, her wet-nurse from childhood, Dorothea Szentes or Dorka, a heavyset woman believed to be a witch, and Johannes Ulvary also known as Ficzko, a crippled dwarf. These collaborators assisted in bringing Elizabeth’s creative visions of violence to life.
BLACK WIDOW
In January 1604, Count Nádasdy died. A wound sustained in battle or, as many claim, received from a Bucharest whore whom he had refused to pay, had become infected making Elizabeth Báthory a widow. His death served only to allow her more freedom to indulge in her evil fantasies. She took a female lover called Anna Darvula, a kindred spirit who supported her reign of terror, and together they revelled in an escalating binge of brutal torments.
Handmaidens would be stripped, forced to lay on the floor and tortured so severely that buckets were needed to scoop up the blood. From burning hands to mutilating genitals, nothing was too loathsome for this evil countess. Not even illness could curb her inhumanity; asking Szentes to bring a maid to her sickbed, she leapt out like a rabid dog and sank her teeth into the girl’s flesh, biting her cheek, shoulder and breast.
While the countess played rough with the young girls in her employ rumours began to circulate within the surrounding villages. The poverty-stricken peasants living in the shadow of Cachtice Castle had always aspired to work inside its walls. Thrilled by the promise of high wages, families waved their virginal daughters off with a smile, but when their loved ones failed to return a growing consternation took over. However, fearing retribution from the potentate, the townsfolk mustered no more than guarded whispers and nervous gossip.
With the locals hamstrung by terror, Countess Báthory’s wickedness continued unimpeded. Bodies piled up inside the citadel causing an unimaginable stench, forcing her accomplices to dump the corpses in ditches and rivers outside. Then in 1609 a death occurred for which Elizabeth was not responsible: her lover Anna Darvula passed away. She immediately took another, a widow named Erszi Majorova, who would make a suggestion that would bring about her downfall.
FINISHING SCHOOL
As a younger woman Elizabeth’s beauty had always been beyond compare, but she was approaching fifty now and her best days were behind her. Gazing long into the mirror, as she was known to do, would now only disappoint. Then one day she struck a servant girl for accidentally pulling her hair while
brushing. Blood spattered on to her hand and the countess declared it had a rejuvenating effect.
Legend tells us that she instructed her cohorts to bring young virgins to the castle. The innocent girls would have their veins slit with knives allowing Elizabeth to shower in their blood. When this failed to restore her good looks she figured it was down to the victims’ breeding. It was then that Erszi Majorova, her lover, proposed a move that would finally bring this unending trail of death and disorder to an end.
Daughters of lesser noblemen from the surround-ing lands were invited to attend a finishing school at the Báthory residence. These etiquette classes lured as many as twenty-five girls at a time who, once inside the castle, found social grace distinctly lacking. Those chosen would allegedly provide the countess with high-born blood in which she would bathe to bring back her former allure.
STORMING THE CASTLE
Moving on to such respectable prey was a mistake, bringing the considerable power of their families down on Elizabeth. Soon the Lord Palatine of Hungary, Count Thurzo, was told of the vast number of missing girls. As cousin to the countess he was keen to avoid a family scandal, but soon public pressure became too great to ignore and in March 1610 he sent two officials to investigate the claims.
By the onset of winter Thurzo had sufficient evidence to warrant action. On 30 December, the count and a band of soldiers ventured to the castle under cover of night. Beyond the heavy wooden doors lay a living nightmare. In the main hall they found a girl lying dead on the stone floor. Further on, another lay close to death from severe wounds to her body. Deep inside the dungeons more victims were discovered, awaiting their turn in the torch-lit torture chambers.
Elizabeth was placed under house arrest within her own castle, escaping the ignominy of a trial thanks to her noble birth. Her accomplices were not as lucky. Found guilty on eighty counts of murder, Szentes and Ilona Jo had their fingernails torn out by red-hot pincers before being burned at the stake. Ficzko the dwarf was beheaded for his crimes and his headless body tossed into the flames.
Despite keeping a diary listing over 650 victims of torture, and even with the Emperor Matthias II demanding her execution, Countess Báthory eluded the death penalty. The bloodthirsty noblewoman was, however, walled up in a single room in Cachtice Castle from which she did not escape. On 21 August 1614 she was found dead inside this makeshift cell and her body laid to rest in the family crypt at Ecsed. Her evil actions blackened her name throughout Hungary where any mention of Elizabeth Báthory was forbidden.
Ilse Koch
From humble beginnings this vicious redhead rose to become one of the Nazi elite during World War II, striking terror among the inhabitants of the concentration camp her husband commanded.
NAZI NOBILITY
Born Ilse Koehler on 22 September 1906 this daughter of a factory supervisor showed little sign of any sadistic tendencies during her childhood. In fact, she was a blithe spirit while growing up in the Saxony capital of Dresden, passing through her school years without incident. Keen on working with finances she attended accountancy college, acquiring the necessary qualifications to land her a job as a book-keeping clerk shortly after.
Throughout the 1920s, while Ilse worked in relative obscurity, Adolf Hitler was reorganizing the Nazi party in his quest to govern Germany. In April 1932 she became one of its early members and, through her new fascist friends, met Karl Otto Koch. Nine years her senior, Koch was a veteran of the Great War and, following the open oppression of the Jews, had begun to earn a reputation for himself as a strict camp commandant. This perfect Nazi couple were married in 1936.
In the summer of the following year, Koch was transferred to take command of the newly-created hard labour camp at Buchenwald near Weimar. In stark contrast to the prisoners’ short miserable existence, Ilse lived the high life in their luxury villa on Officers’ Row. Treated like Nazi nobility, her sadistic fantasies were given the freedom to become grim reality.
HEINOUS HOUSEWIFE
As the Camp Commandant’s wife, Ilse held no official rank at Buchenwald, yet over time she became a much-feared monster among the incarcerated. With her striking appearance, long red locks and tight clothes she flaunted her sexuality, teasing the inmates. Indeed, any prisoner caught looking at her ran the risk of being shot on the spot.
Wielding such power over those held captive, this simple housewife soon became known as The Commandeuse, using the compound as her own personal playground. Whipping prisoners on a whim and forcing captives to sexually abuse one another for her amusement, Ilse revelled in her unconstrained role at Buchenwald. With nobody to tell her no, her mind was given free rein, thinking up vile ways of making the most out of the inmates’ wretched lives.
Many have since told tales of how she would demand a line-up, order the men to strip then proceed to march down the rows searching for tattoos she liked. As if picking out curtains, the Commandeuse would point at those designs she found appealing and their owners were escorted away to the camp hospital. If the chosen were ever seen alive again, they would be missing their inked flesh.
No one could have imagined the reason behind this tattoo selection. It soon came to light the patterned skin had been tanned then stitched to make a patchwork. With this macabre material a number of appalling artefacts were created, from lampshades to book covers to knife cases, many of which were given away as gifts to friends in the SS.
DELIVERANCE
Her crimes were not confined to the torture of prisoners. Whilst ordering the stripping of skin, Ilse and her husband were also ripping off the Reich, and it did not take long before the Gestapo came calling. In August 1943 the couple were arrested for embezzlement of SS funds totalling more than 700,000 Reichsmarks and put on trial the following winter. The special Nazi court found Karl Koch guilty and he was executed in the yard of his own camp on 5 April 1945. Ilse, on the other hand, was acquitted due to lack of evidence and, at the end of the war, endeavoured to return to normal life.
The court ordeals of the Commandeuse, however, were not complete. Following the liberation of Buchenwald by Allied troops in the spring of 1945, Ilse was tracked down and arrested by US authorities in June. Brought before an American military tribunal at Dachau, she was among thirty-one defendants charged with aiding and abetting in the murders at the death camp. Former inmates testified to the killing orders given by Ilse for tattooed skin helping those passing sentence to hand down a life term.
Later, the Bitch of Buchenwald, as she had become known, had this judgement commuted to four years. Having already served this period of time, she was freed from Landsberg prison much to the dismay of many Americans. In 1949, after pressure from the US Senate, Ilse was re-arrested and tried before a West German court.
On 15 January 1951, she was once again given a life sentence. After serving twenty years in prison, Ilse Koch committed suicide, hanging herself with twisted bedsheets in her cell at Aichbach prison. She left a note stating death was the only deliverance.
Irma Grese
Transformed by the Nazi uniform under the conditions of war this evil, whip-cracking woman became one of the cruellest guards in all of the death camps, taking great delight in causing undue suffering to her charges.
FROM BANAL TO BRUTAL
Few would argue, were it not for the outbreak of war and the Nazis’ fixation with the Final Solution, the life of Irma Grese would have been very different. Born on 7 October 1923 in the rural German town of Wrechen, this future brutal camp guard was raised by a dairy farmer and his wife along with four siblings in relative banality. Even when her mother committed suicide, following marital problems in 1936, she showed no sign of deviant trauma that might hint at the evil she would later display inside the concentration camps.
Two years after her mother’s death, Irma left school aged fifteen. Never the scholar, she had struggled with her studies, obtaining a basic education that essentially made her unfit for anything other than casual labour. Simple farm work seemed to be her
future. In an attempt to better herself, Irma tried twice to become a nurse, but on both occasions her application was rejected. The closest she could get was a two-year stint as an assistant at an SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen.
Little did she know her talents lay in terror. She had already developed a fascination with Nazism, much to the disapproval of her father, joining the League of German Maidens. Following her second failure to join the healthcare community in 1942, Irma was sent by the employment exchange to Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp where she received training to become a female guard or Helferin. Here she learned the malicious methods of abuse and punishment that would form the basis of her barbarity.
EAGLE-EYED IRMA
Showing the necessary aptitude for cruelty, Irma was despatched to Birkenau camp at Auschwitz in March 1943. She quickly rose through the ranks to become Oberaufseherin or Senior Supervisor; the second highest ranking position for a woman at the facility. In charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners, she revelled in the responsibility, suitably conditioned by Nazi doctrine to believe the inmates were nothing but subhuman scum.
Various reports of wanton brutality have been levelled at her. Whether it be shooting, whipping, raping or stabbing it appeared nothing was beyond the call for Irma Grese. In fact, she often broke camp rules, even crossing the line drawn by the Third Reich, in her desire to inflict pain and suffering. Her half-starved German Shepherds were let off their leash to attack bound prisoners on more than one occasion, and she often indulged her bisexual urges by raping the Jewish women.