Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The Blood Bathing

  Elizabeth Báthory would have remained merely an anonymous monster had not a Jesuit scholar, Father Laszlo Turoczy, discovered the trial records in 1720, about one hundred years after her death. Turoczy restored the legendary female vampire to human form with a name, identity, history, and detailed description of her crimes in a book published only in Latin.110

  It 1796, Michael Wagener, in a book entitled Articles on Philosophical Anthropology, was the first to publicize the story of Elizabeth’s alleged bathing in blood skin-care motive, stating that after a chambermaid noted some hair out of place in Elizabeth’s coiffure, the countess struck her so hard that the girl’s nose spurted blood into Elizabeth’s face. When Elizabeth wiped the blood, according to Wagener, she discovered that her skin seemed rejuvenated. From then on she would bathe her entire body in fresh blood.111

  These details, however, often differed depending on the source. The most common version states that Elizabeth’s handmaiden’s blood spurted onto the countess’s hand. Moreover, the girls had to be virgins or of aristocratic origins before Elizabeth would believe in the renewing power of bathing in their blood. What was the true story?

  It was not until the 1970s that Boston College professor and Fulbright scholar Raymond T. McNally, along with his colleague Radu Florescu, established rare access to Hungarian and Romanian archives (then still behind the Iron Curtain) that led to their hugely popular book, In Search of Dracula, a history of the Transylvanian Prince Vlad Tepes, nicknamed Dracul (“Devil” or “Dragon”)—the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker’s decision to name his fictional vampire “Dracula” and situate him in a Transylvanian castle.

  In the wake of the success of In Search of Dracula, McNally returned to the archives in Transylvania and discovered an abundance of original documents from the trial of Elizabeth Báthory.112 It was not until 1983 that we began to get a more accurate glimpse of what crimes the Blood Countess was actually charged with, and the blood bathing became the first myth to fall. Nowhere in the trial record was there any mention of bathing in blood. It was local gossip and folklore picked up by writers in the eighteenth century. But still, the likely explanation for how this myth took root bodes darkly for what Elizabeth was really into: She was thought to have bathed in blood because she was so covered in it after torturing her victims, it appeared as if she had bathed in it.

  Her Arrest

  The events that precipitated Elizabeth’s arrest in 1610 began when a Lutheran reverend named Janos Ponikenusz was assigned to take charge of a church in the Slovakian village of Cachtice (Cséjthe), where the widowed Elizabeth lorded in a castle overlooking the village below. Reverend Janos was sent to replace the previous pastor who had recently died. On his journey, just like in a horror movie, the closer he came to Cachtice, the more Janos began to hear peasants’ mutterings of vampires and mutilations of young women in the town and guarded warnings of evil deeds in the castle.

  On his approach into the village, Janos could see the gloomy castle perched on a steep crag overlooking the town below. Janos could feel the tension as he entered the town. The populace seemed sullen and frightened and very few young women were visible on the streets or the fields. Climbing up the steep deserted road to the castle, Janos reported to the Countess Báthory. The countess was fifty years old and recovering from an illness but her legendary beauty was still evident. She was courteous but Janos detected an unusual cowed tension among her servants and saw very little movement or life in the courtyard—parts of the castle appeared to be deserted and locked-down in silence.

  As Janos began to put in order the church records and accounts left behind by his predecessor he uncovered cryptic notes about horrors in the castle on the hill. He found unusually long lists of names of young women who had died in the employ of the countess, women his predecessor would inter only at night while making strange references to the unexplained nature of their deaths and his reluctance to bury them. One note indicated that he had recently entombed nine women in a single night in an underground crypt near the castle walls. Armed with the keys to the crypt, Janos proceeded to explore the tomb. No sooner had he unlocked and thrown open the crypt doors than the fetid smell of death rose up to meet him. In the gloomy chamber Janos discovered nine boxes stacked haphazardly in a corner. The lids were not even nailed shut, according to the deposition Janos later gave. Opening one box after another, Janos was shocked by the condition of the young women’s corpses. They were all mutilated, some partly burned, and all caked in dry, dark, crusted blood. On several bodies Janos saw to his horror the clear impressions of human bite marks and deep jagged wounds where it looked like their flesh had been bitten away. Clearly these women did not die of natural causes, disease, or in the clutches of animals or inhuman monsters: The bite marks were clearly human. The victims had been brutally tortured.

  Reverend Janos immediately sent a messenger with a report to his ecclesiastical superior in the provincial capital, but his messenger returned shortly afterward with the news that the countess’s guards on the road out of the town had read and confiscated his message. Horrified at the news that the countess knew of his report, Janos attempted to flee the village. He was apprehended by her guard on the road leading from the town and ordered to return and remain in his church. Two hundred fifty years later, Bram Stoker introduced in Dracula the character of Jonathan Harker, the English realtor who journeys to Transylvania on business and finds himself imprisoned by the vampire in his castle. Reverend Janos was the real Jonathan Harker, held in a church beneath a horror castle wall by a female monster.

  As the situation began unraveling and Janos waited for what would happen next, he gathered details from the villagers about what had been transpiring. His predecessor had been secretly burying bodies of young women who were dying of unexplained circumstances for years, until so many deaths had accumulated that he refused to bury any more. Dumped bodies were being found in the region—four mutilated corpses were found in a grain silo, several in a canal behind the castle, others in the cornfields, and woodcutters discovered freshly dug mass graves in the forest. All the bodies were horribly tortured and mutilated. To his dismay, Janos realized that he was not the first to discover the horror unfolding in Elizabeth’s castle.

  Denunciations and complaints had been filing in to the Royal authorities for several years. Numerous parents who had sent their daughters to work at Elizabeth’s castles lodged official complaints that the countess unsatisfactorily explained their daughters’ disappearances. While reports of the cruel torture deaths of peasant girls in Elizabeth’s employ circulated for decades, nobody was overly concerned. Disciplining one’s servants to death was, in the 1600s, perceived as excessively cruel and impolite but nonetheless it remained an aristocrat’s prerogative. But reports began to filter in from other aristocratic families about their daughters’ disappearances while in the care of Elizabeth Báthory. These could not be ignored.

  The year before her arrest, some twenty-five young women from declining minor noble families were invited to stay at Elizabeth’s castle. Some of these minor aristocratic families were happy to send their daughters to Elizabeth, hoping somehow to raise the prestige of their family through an association with the countess. But during their stay, several of the girls vanished. When concerned parents began to inquire into the fates of their daughters, the countess reported that one of the other girls had murdered the girls for their jewels before committing suicide. When her family demanded that the body of their daughter be returned, Elizabeth refused, stating a suicide fatality had to be immediately buried unmarked on unconsecrated ground. She explained other multiple deaths as being caused by outbreaks of disease, and cited the fear of an epidemic panic as the reason for secretly burying those victims.

  By the time Reverend Janos finally managed to successfully smuggle out a letter to authorities, he was in the depths of traumatic paranoia. In the 1970s, Professor McNally discovered a letter in the Hungarian arch
ives from Janos to his superior describing how Elizabeth had sent six invisible black cats and dogs to attack him in his home in the middle of the night. As he beat back the attack, screaming, “You devils go to hell,” none of his servants could observe any of the animals. “As you can see,” Janos wrote, “this was the doing of the devil.”113

  While complaints from peasant families were largely ignored, the reports of missing girls of noble birth were investigated by the Hungarian parliament, situated in Bratislava at that time (the capital, Budapest, was under Turkish occupation). Throughout 1610 the parliament’s investigators gathered depositions against the countess from numerous witnesses of both noble and common rank. On December 27, 1610, spurred forward by urgent reports smuggled from Reverend Janos and news that four corpses of young women had been dumped over the castle wall in full view of the village, the parliament ordered Elizabeth’s superior (and relative through marriage) Prince George Thurzo to ride to Cachtice, raid Elizabeth’s castle and manor house, and arrest the countess.

  It was the Christmas season and the countess was celebrating the holiday in her manor house in the town when on the evening of December 29 one of her servants, a young girl named Doricza from the Croatian town of Rednek, was discovered stealing a pear. Enraged, Elizabeth ordered that the girl be taken to the laundry room, stripped naked, and tied. Elizabeth and her female servants took turns attempting to beat Doricza to death with a club. Elizabeth was reported to be so soaked in blood that she had to change her clothes. Doricza was a strong girl and did not die in the beating. It was getting late into the night when Elizabeth tired of beating the girl and had one of her female servants finally stab Doricza to death with a pair of scissors. The girl’s corpse was dragged out and left by a doorway in the courtyard for disposal the next morning. At almost exactly that same moment, after traveling two days from Bratislava, Prince Thurzo’s raiding party arrived at the house and ordered the servants to stand aside. As the party burst into the courtyard they came upon the bloody, battered, and still warm body of the murdered girl. A search of the premises revealed the bodies of two more brutally murdered girls in the manor house. Reportedly, a further search of the castle on the hill revealed numerous decaying bodies hidden at the bottom of the tower, the bodies that Reverend Janos had earlier refused to bury.

  Elizabeth Báthory was locked into her castle at Cachtice, but four of her servants—three elderly females and a young manservant—were taken away by Thurzo to his seat of power in the nearby larger Slovakian town of Bytca and there they were questioned and charged for their complicity in the murders. Here the story of Elizabeth Báthory’s trial becomes conspiratorial.

  Her Trial

  Prince Thurzo was related by marriage to Báthory’s powerful family, who were all aware of the deliberations taking place in parliament. (As was Elizabeth, who believed she was beyond the reach of the law.) Aside from their reputation, much was at stake for the family if Elizabeth ended up being convicted for murder or witchcraft—which the rumors of blood bathing warranted. Elizabeth’s wealth and properties would have been seized by the Hungarian crown if she were put to death under those circumstances.

  Moreover, the Hungarian king had borrowed money from Elizabeth’s husband when he was still living, and as his widow, the debt was still owed her. If executed, the crown debt would be cancelled instead of being paid out to her surviving family members. Prince Thurzo had the title of Lord Palatine—meaning that he had the king’s judicial powers in his regional principality—and Thurzo staged the trials in his own jurisdiction in such a way as to ensure that Elizabeth’s property and the debts to her remained payable to all the surviving relatives. There emerged a vast literature in Hungary, particularly in the heady nationalist periods of the twentieth century, suggesting that Elizabeth Báthory was entirely innocent and a victim of a family plot to seize her wealth. Thanks to the discovery of more court transcripts and witness statements, Thurzo’s correspondence, and other archival records in the 1970s, the real story of Elizabeth Báthory is now better known.

  The news of Elizabeth’s arrest and charges did not become widely known. A priest’s diary from the period, with detailed descriptions of events, only provides this short matter-of-fact notation: “1610. 29 December. Elizabeth Báthory was put in the tower behind four walls, because in her rage she killed some of her female servants.”

  The secret trial began within three days of Báthory’s arrest, at Thurzo’s courts of justice in Bytca on January 2, 1611. All the court officials and jury members owed their allegiance to Prince Thurzo. The plan, apparently, was to quickly sentence the countess to life imprisonment (in perpetuis carceribus—“perpetual incarceration”) in a fait accompli while the parliament was on holiday to ensure that her properties were not seized or debt to her cancelled.

  While the countess was locked away back in Cachtice, four of her servants were questioned at Bytca, including a session under torture to clear away any loose ends. Using the methodology developed by the Inquisition—which is said to be the first in history to use relational databases in investigative procedure—the same questions were put separately to each prisoner, and then their answers carefully cross-indexed and compared. At the end of the interrogations, the servants were charged as Báthory’s accomplices despite their pleas that they had no choice but to obey the countess’s orders.

  The Trial Testimony

  The four were put on trial three days later, on January 2, 1611. Their testimony was entered as evidence against Elizabeth. According to the defendants, the countess tortured her female servants for the slightest mistake. With her own hands, she tore apart the mouth of one servant girl who had made an error while sewing. Every day, young servant girls, who had committed some infraction, would be assembled in the basement of the castle for brutal torture. Elizabeth delighted in the torture of the young women and never missed a session. While torture of one’s servants in seventeenth-century Hungary was not a crime, it was by then considered “impolite.” Thus when traveling and visiting other aristocrats, the first thing the countess would do was to have a private room secured where she could torture her servants in privacy without offending her hosts. It was noted that the girls chosen for “punishment” seemed to be always those with the biggest breasts and they would be stripped naked prior to the torture.

  The four accomplices testified:

  The Countess stuck needles into the girls; she pinched the girls in the face and in other places, and pierced them under their fingernails. Then she dragged the tortured girls naked out into the snow and had the old women pour cold water over them. She helped them with that until the water froze on the victim, who then died as a result…Her Ladyship beat the girls and murdered them in such a way that her clothes were drenched in blood. She often had to change her shirt…she also had the bloodied stone pavement washed…She had the girls undress stark naked, thrown to the ground, and she began to beat them so hard that one could scoop up the blood from their beds by the handfuls…It also happened that she bit out individual pieces of flesh from the girls with her teeth. She also attacked the girls with knives, and she hit and tortured them generally in many ways…Her Ladyship singed the private parts of a girl with a burning candle. One time Her Ladyship lay sick and therefore could not beat anyone herself, so a servant was compelled to bring the victims to the Countess’ bed whereupon she would rise up from her pillow and bite pieces of flesh from the girls’ necks, shoulders and breasts.

  The girls would be beaten so long that the soles of their feet and the surfaces of their hands bristled. They were beaten so long that each one, without interruption, suffered over five hundred blows from the women accomplices. If the folds of the Countess’ clothing were not smoothed out, or if the fire had not been brought up, or if the outer garments of the Countess were not pressed, the girls responsible were at once tortured to death. It happened that the noses and lips of the girls were burned with a flat-iron by Her Ladyship herself or by the old women. The Countess al
so stuck her own fingers into the mouths of the girls and ripped their mouths and tortured them in this way. If the girls had not finished their obligatory sewing chores by ten o’clock at night, they were immediately tortured…Her Ladyship with her own hands had keys heated red-hot and then burned the hands of the girls with them.

  While at first it was believed that Elizabeth began her killing spree after her husband’s death, witnesses testified that the murders began while her husband was still alive and with his knowledge and participation.

  At Sarvar during summer His Lordship Count Ferenc Nadasdy had a young girl undressed until stark naked, while His Lordship looked on with his own eyes; the girl was then covered over with honey and made to stand throughout a day and a night. [So that she’d be covered in insect bites. She collapsed into unconsciousness.] His Lordship taught the Countess that in such a case one must place pieces of paper dipped in oil between the toes of the girl and set them on fire; even if she was already half dead, she would jump up.

  The accused servants who were in Elizabeth’s service for a period ranging from sixteen to five years, testified that they personally witnessed from a total of thirty-six to as many as “fifty-one, perhaps more” girls killed.

  The Downfall of the Countess

  In 1607 Elizabeth made the mistake of killing girls from privileged minor aristocratic families. It is unclear exactly why she took this path, but possibly because her reputation had spread by word-of-mouth among the peasants and few dared to go into her domestic service. Indeed, her last victims were girls recruited from distant Croatia where nobody had heard of Elizabeth. With aristocratic families she used a different approach, always selecting victims from minor and impoverished noble families, offering their daughters opportunities to raise the status of their families through Elizabeth’s superior status and contacts. But even this theory is cloudy as there was testimony stating that the servants sometimes washed, groomed, and tutored peasant girls to behave as noble ladies when presented to the countess. For some reason Báthory was specifically targeting nobles at that point. That, of course, led to speculation that she believed only the blood of noble girls would serve the purpose of restoring her skin. The problem with that theory is that the bathing in blood story does not appear in any of the affidavits or in the testimony at the trial. It might be entirely the stuff of peasant folklore picked up a hundred years later and reproduced in pamphlets and books dealing with Elizabeth.