Countess Dracula

by Tony Thorne

  In answer to the fourth question Helena Jó supplied a list of those who had assisted in procuring girls, including three women from Sárvár, the wife of John Bársony, John Liptay’s wife, and the wives of Stephen Szabó and Balthazar Horváth; she herself had accompanied Daniel Vas in the search for victims and had brought two girls, one of whom was dead and the other, ‘the little Csegleí’, was still alive. The latest victims from the Čachtice surrounds had been recruited to serve the Lady’s daughter during her wedding celebrations. Helena explained that her mistress threatened some women who brought her serving-girls and rewarded others with gifts of clothing. For whatever reason, women continued to supply girls even though they knew that they were going to their deaths.

  Helena Jó admitted assisting the Countess in torturing victims, but said she was forced to do so. She named Dorothy Szentes and Katherine Benecká as others who had tormented the maidservants, the former sometimes cutting the girls’ swollen flesh with pincers (in another version they are scissors); Ficzkó would also slap the girls’ faces whenever he was told to, but the cruellest was Anna Darvulia, who beat the girls when she had the strength to do so, but also forced them to stand in freezing water and poured more cold water over them. Darvulia had later become paralysed and, later still, blind, whereupon the other assistants had had to take over the tasks of punishment. The Countess had learned the techniques of torture from Darvulia, who was her intimate companion. Often the mistress herself would torture the girls unassisted, heating up keys and pressing them on to the girls’ flesh, a technique which she repeated with coins if girls stole or concealed money they had found. Years before in the summer at Sárvár the Lady’s husband had come upon a young girl bound and naked in the open air; she had been smeared with honey and left for a day and a night in the palace grounds to be bitten by ants, wasps, bees and flies. This girl who was a relation, she said (presumably of the Nádasdys), had fainted away in her agony. When that happened, said Jó, there was a method of revival that Lord Francis Nádasdy had taught his wife, which was to place coils of paper dipped in oil between the fingers or toes of the unconscious person and light them: the shock of the burning would jerk the victim back to their senses.

  Helena told of the great volume of blood that was spilt around the Countess – so much that the Lady was forced frequently to change her saturated clothes and have the walls and floors of her rooms washed down. When the naked female servants were beaten by Dorkó in the Lady’s presence (presumably en masse in their sleeping quarters), the blood around their beds was so thick that ashes or cinders had to be spread about to soak it up. At other times the Lady had used candles to burn the genitals of the maidens and needles (or knives) and even her own teeth to lacerate them. In a much quoted sequence, this witness gave evidence that when Elisabeth Báthory was in residence in her townhouse in the centre of Vienna, the cries of her victims were so loud and incessant that the monks living next door (the houses adjoined, probably on the corner of the Lobkowitz Square and Augustinerstrasse) used to throw their clay pots against her walls in protest.

  When others were beating the girls, Helena stated, the Lady (or it might be ‘the woman’) would urge them on, shouting ‘Üsd, üsd, jobban!’ (‘Beat, beat, harder!’)

  Dorothy Szentes, known as Dorkó, the widow of Benedict Szöcs, was the third member of Elisabeth’s entourage to be questioned. She said that Helena Jó had recruited her into the service of Countess Báthory and that she had been employed for only five years. She did not know when her mistress had begun to practise her cruel crimes; she was aware of about thirty-six maidens’ deaths, but did not know the victims’ names or their families or where their homes were located, only that they had been engaged as seamstresses and servants and had come from many different places. Szentes told her interrogators that she had helped her mistress to torture girls because she had been ordered to do it. If she did not beat the girls, the Lady would do it herself, and would also pierce the girls’ lips with needles, burn them with spoons and with irons on the soles of their feet and pinch their flesh with tongs. Once when the Lady was too sick to punish the girls, she was ordered to take them to her bedside, whereupon the Lady bit lumps of flesh from her victim’s face or shoulders. On one occasion at Čachtice five girls died in the space of ten days as a result of torture. Szentes also implicated Katherine (Benecká), referring to her concealing corpses in Lesětice.

  Szentes is said at times to ‘declare as the others said’ or ‘agree with the previous witness’, which might be a device by the scribes to avoid the tiresome transcribing of similar statements, or may demonstrate that the accused were giving evidence in each other’s presence. Whatever the case, there was a consensus that local women had conspired with Elisabeth and her accomplices to supply the court with girls, that torture and murder had taken place over many years wherever the Countess was in residence, and that other members of the estate households, including the steward Benedict Deseő, the stablemaster Daniel Vas, the estate manager Jacob Szilvássy and others named as Balthasar Poky, Stephen Vágy (both of whom had testified at the earlier secret hearings in April 1610) and a certain Kozma had been aware of what was happening. All the confessions named the late Anna Darvulia, who had served Elisabeth and her husband at his court of Sárvár, as the instigator of the earliest and worst cruelties.

  The last of the inner circle to be interrogated was Katherine Benecká or Beniczky, a woman whose name suggests a rank in the lesser gentry and whose husband, John Boda, and two daughters were still living at the time. She said that the wife of Bálint Varga, the mother of the present priest of Sárvár, had invited her to Elisabeth Báthory’s court, where she had worked as a laundrywoman. She did not know how many young women had been killed, but thought that the number was around fifty. She herself had not recruited girls for the court, so she could not say where they had come from. She said that Dorothy Szentes had supplied the largest number of girls, including those who had died in the recent past. Helena Jó had also assisted the Countess on many occasions and joined her in her cruelty as she was an especially close confidante of the Lady, but Helena was no longer able to use her own hands in the beating (perhaps due to rheumatism or arthritis); nevertheless she was the most ruthless in supervising punishments. When Katherine Benecká had refused to help she had herself been beaten and had to stay in bed for a month to recover. Dorkó had deprived the girls imprisoned at Čachtice of food and drink and she and Elisabeth Báthory had tortured girls together, on one occasion killing five by beating them. The five corpses were stuffed under a bed and she (Benecká, or it may have been Dorkó or even the Lady) had continued to bring them food (another version has ‘talk about them’) as if they were still alive. The smell of decomposition had filled the manor-house so that everyone became aware of it. Then the Lady departed for Sárvár after ordering Katherine to scour the floor and conceal the bodies, but she had not been strong enough to move them and so, with the help of two women named Kate and Barbara, she dragged them to a grain pit, later burying them with Dorothy Szentes’ help in an orchard (or, in another version, in a ditch). The Mistress had killed eight maidens within a short space of time and had tortured the daughter of Helena Herz or Harczy in Vienna. Benecká had also taken bodies to be buried in the graveyard at Lešetice.

  Benecká also described how Anna Darvulia, originally the most adept at devising tortures, had been struck blind, after which the other women had learned to take her place. She also related how, when her mistress’s daughter Anna, the wife of Count Zrínyi, was visiting Čachtice, the Countess cleared her servants out of the manor-house to make way for her, dispatching them all to the castle on the hill under Dorothy Szentes’ supervision. Szentes kept the serving maids under lock and key without food or drink, doused them with cold water and made them stand stark naked overnight, deprived of sleep. She cursed and threatened anyone who thought of giving them food. When the Lady wanted to depart with her daughter to Piešt’any to take the waters, she sent Bene
cká to summon maidservants to accompany them, but Benecká found that the maids were in a pitiable state and not one of them was strong enough to travel. The Lady was furious with Dorkó, and the elderly Katherine had to accompany the group herself.

  There are discrepancies in the surviving versions of the evidence, different documents ascribing the same statement to different witnesses. Variant versions of proper names and the confusion over pronouns and verb forms makes it difficult to decide exactly who is acting and who is being acted upon. Nevertheless it is possible to reconstruct a general summary of the testimonies of the four defendants which contains themes and incidents echoed in the evidence given by others before and after their indictment. All the accused agreed on the methods of ill-treatment: beating, piercing, cutting, burning, biting and freezing with water and snow. All said that girls had been buried, some with and some without proper ceremony, in village cemeteries near the Báthory estates, sometimes with the help of local priests.

  The estimates of the number of victims vary but there is some consistency: Ficzkó and Dorkó suggest thirty-six or seven, Helena Jó and Benecká around fifty. Naturally, accomplices to mass-murder are likely to minimise their involvement and knowledge, but if we consider that these figures are very roughly accurate, but were actually deaths from natural causes, the totals could be credible, given epidemics, accidents and violence. A figure of five to ten deaths a year among a female staff (in the Lady’s larger estates across the country) of a couple of hundred is not beyond possibility, but we will see these estimates change dramatically as other witnesses are called.

  The four accused were examined on New Year’s Day, and the court assembled on 2 January 1611. Unsurprisingly, given the venue, the proceedings were conducted almost entirely by persons in the pay of, or in some way dependent upon, George Thurzó. Theodore Syrmiensis, a representative of the royal assizes at Bratislava (and a personal friend of Thurzó), was presiding, with Eördögh from neighbouring Trenčín, and Caspar Bájaky and Caspar Kardoss, who were both employed by Thurzó at Bytča.8

  The full court convened on Monday, 7 January, with a jury of twenty including John David, sometimes known as Szent-Peter, and Caspar Ordódy, the assistant justices of the nearby Thurzó seats of Orava and Trenčín respectively, as well as the presiding dignitaries. The prosecutor, Thurzó’s secretary George Závodský, formally proclaimed to the court that the Lord Palatine had acted to protect the goodly and the innocent and to bring the Widow Nádasdy’s inhuman crimes to an end. He had gone, Závodský announced, with his retinue and in the company of lords Nicholas Zrínyi and George Drugeth, and Paul Nádasdy’s guardian, the knight Imre Megyery, to Čachtice where he had surprised Countess Báthory in flagrante delicto in the act of torturing her victims. One girl was already dead and two others were dying. The Palatine, in his anger at her bestial cruelty, there and then had the Lady confined as ‘a bloodthirsty female’ and pronounced upon her a sentence of life imprisonment in the castle of Čachtice. The woman’s accomplices had been tried there at the Bytča court and justice had been done. Závodský introduced the certified documents recording the accomplices’ confessions into evidence and these were read out to the assembly. The four accused, who were deemed to have pleaded guilty by their confessions, repeated that they had been forced to do what they had done; they added nothing further.9

  At this point thirteen other witnesses were heard. Nine of these were people of low rank brought from Čachtice, the other four had come from the Nádasdy estates south of the Danube in western Hungary, or at least had knowledge of events which had taken place in that region.

  The first to testify, George Kubanović, said that he had seen the body of the last girl to have been murdered. She had lived at the manor-house and her body had been removed after the Lady’s arrest. There had been signs of beating and burning on her body. (Kubanović did not name the girl but others did, calling her Doricza. The rumour was that she had angered the Countess by stealing a pear.) The next five witnesses, John Válko, Martin Janković, Martin Krsko, Andrew Uhrović and Ladislas Antalović, supported this evidence without adding anything significant. The seventh witness, Thomas Zima, said that he knew that two bodies had been buried in the cemetery in Čachtice and one in Lesetice. When the priest from Čachtice had criticised the Lady, bodies from Čachtice had been taken to Lesetice in secret.

  John Chrpman supported the previous testimony and said that he had once asked a girl who had escaped from the Countess who her accomplices were. This girl had said that Báthory had acted alone, but was sometimes assisted by a woman who was disguised as a man.10 Andrew Butora, the following witness, was recorded as giving similar evidence. The next to testify was a woman, identified only as Susannah, who said that Countess Báthory had been helped in her torturing by Helena, Dorothy and Anna, known as Darvulia (in some versions ‘nicknamed Delbora’). John Ficzkó had also been involved, although Katherine was kindlier and had brought food to the maidens who were awaiting their cruel fate. Susannah said that several of her own friends had been killed by the Countess. She also informed the court that Jacob Szilvássy (the administrator of Léka and Keresztúr castles) had found a list of the Lady’s victims in a casket (or chest) and that this list contained 650 names. The eleventh witness, Sarah Baranyai, agreed with Susannah and said that in the four years that she, Sarah, had been serving the Lady eighty people had died. She knew this from Bicsérdy, the castellan at Sárvár, but she had seen it also with her own eyes.

  The penultimate witness was Helena, the widow of Stephen Kočiš (this may be the ‘bald Mrs Kočiš’ whom Ficzkó accused of joining in the torturing, but the name is a common one). She confirmed the stories of murder, but added that the Widow Nádasdy was also practising witchcraft and was adept at preparing poisons. She planned to kill the King and the Lord Palatine and Imre Megyery in this way. The last to be called, Anna, the widow of Stephen Gönczy, said that her own daughter aged ten years had been one of the victims and that she had not even been allowed to see her.

  This part of the trial documentation also seems to be constructed from a number of different copies, signed by different notaries. Some phrases are entered illogically, out of place. It is also conceivable that some of the alleged crimes relate to Dorothy Szentes and not to Elisabeth Báthory. The witnesses once again employ the causative structure in Hungarian, which blurs the distinction between ‘did’ (oneself) and ‘had done’ (by someone else), even when less ambivalent forms could have been used. Some of the archaic vocabulary is also ambiguous: ‘She used her teeth to tear the flesh of the girls’ could also be rendered ‘She used tongs to tear the flesh of the girls’.

  The statement from ‘Susannah’ was one of the most sensational of the whole investigation. She estimated that 650 girls had been killed – by far the highest number mentioned in connection with Elisabeth – and said that the court official Szilvássy had seen the proof in the form of entries in Countess Báthory’s journal. Those modern writers who have taken the depositions by witnesses at face value and who are convinced of Elisabeth’s guilt quote this as the ultimate proof of the scale of the woman’s serial sadism. The weavers of legend have included this strand, too; in their versions the notebook in its secret casket also contains, like a seducer’s diary, comments on the girls’ features and figures.

  In a modern courtroom drama such a devastating allegation would be followed by gasps of incredulity and indignation, then an impatient shuffling while Szilvássy himself is called to the stand to corroborate or deny. The bare written records from 1611 are silent; the witness said no more and a full year elapsed before the name of Szilvássy was heard again.11

  When the presentation of evidence was over, the court went on to pronounce its sentences immediately. The published judgement read as follows:

  The lady has committed a terrible crime against the female blood, and in this Dorothy, Helena and John Ficzkó were privy and purposeful accomplices and under interrogation the accusation proved to be well
-founded and to determine more of the matter, Dorothy, Helena and Ficzkó were submitted to torture on the same occasion of the questioning. The accused persons then confirmed their previous statements and added even worse details of the terrible crimes committed by her ladyship, the widow Nádasdy. All the accused before the court, in the confessions that they made voluntarily and also under torture, and in other confessions, prove beyond doubt the guilt of the accused which surpasses the imagination in the many murders and slaughter and specific tortures and cruelty of all kinds and evil. And as these most serious crimes should be matched by the severest punishments, we have determined and we hereby decree that regarding firstly Helena and secondly Dorothy as those most implicated in the bloody crime, and as murderers, the sentence is that all the fingers of their hands which they steeped in Christian blood and which were the instruments of murder shall be torn out by the executioner with iron tongs, after which they shall be placed alive on the fire. As concerns John Ficzkó, his guilt and punishment is alleviated by his youth and his lesser participation in the crimes. He is therefore sentenced to lose his head; only his dead body will be placed on the fire with the two other condemned persons. And Katherine, as her two female companions stated that she had not participated in these affairs [sic], on only the basis of John Ficzkó’s confession she cannot be condemned, therefore she shall be kept in close confinement until her guilt may be determined.12

  In fact the truth was the reverse: Ficzkó had spoken in Benecká’s defence, the two women had tried to implicate her.