by Ray Black
I think what this case really points out though is society’s unwillingness to believe that mothers are truly capable of killing of their own babies.
Elizabeth Bathory
Here is the story of the most bloodthirsty vampiress of all time. She slaughtered six hundred innocent women so that she could improve her complexion and maintain her failing grasp on youth . . .
Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Bathory was born in Hungary in 1560, around a hundred years after the death of Vlad the Impaler. Her parents, George and Ann Bathory belonged to one of the oldest and possibly richest families in Hungary. Her cousin was the then Prime Minister of the country, while her uncle Stephan later became King of Poland. However, besides her rich and famous relatives, there was one very strange side to the family. One of her uncles was known to be a devil-worshipper, while other members of the family were mentally insane and perverted.
Elizabeth was raised as royalty and was a fit and active child. She was described as quite beautiful with delicate features, a slender build and she was quite tall for her age. However, her personality did match her beautiful image. She considered her most redeeming feature to be her glorious, creamy-white complexion and she was very vindictive to anyone who did not agree with her and pay her compliments.
At the age of fifteen, Elizabeth was ‘married off’ to twenty-six-year-old Count Ferencz Nasdasdy. The marriage was purely for political gain, and the Count added her surname to his, so that she did not lose her royal name. After the marriage, Elizabeth became the lady of the Castle of Czejthe, the Count’s home, which was situated deep in the mountains of Carpathia (now central Romania), an area known as Transylvania. The castle was surrounded by a village of simple peasants and rolling agricultural landscape, with a background of the snowy-topped Carpathians.
Her husband, the Count, was a brave and daring soldier and spent a lot of time away from his castle fighting. He later earned a reputation as the ‘Black Hero of Hungary. The castle was typical of its day, a cold, gloomy and damp place and life was too boring for a very active, bright teenager. While her husband was away, an old maid by the name of Dorothea Szentes, nicknamed Dorka, introduced her to the occult. Elizabeth started to invite people back to the castle – people that believed in rather peculiar and sinister arts. Among them were those who proclaimed to be witches, sorcerers, seers, wizards, alchemists and other devil-worshippers. She was thrilled by their stories and they taught her their sinister crafts in intimate detail. Elizabeth was fascinated when Dorka starting talking about inflicting pain on people, and, with Dorka as her assistant, Elizabeth began the task of disciplining her female servants.
Her husband used a horrid device of torture on prisoners that he captured, and this was a clever articulated claw-like pincer which was made of hardened silver. These pincers were attached to a stout whip which would tear and tip at the flesh of the victim to such a degree that even the Count, who was known to be a cruel man, abandoned the apparatus in disgust in the cellar of his castle.
Elizabeth discovered the apparatus in the cellar and made the underground room into a torture chamber. Soon she turned the Castle Czejthe into a pure place of evil. She always managed to find some sort of excuse to punish her poor servant girls. She would take them down to her chamber, strip them naked and then using her husband’s heinous silver claws, would indulge herself in the pleasures of flagellation. Another favourite pastime of hers was to stick pins in various sensitive parts on the victim’s body, such as under the fingernails. The more shrill the victim’s screams became and the more blood that flowed, the more exquisite and orgasmic her amusement became. She always like to whip her subjects on the front so that she could watch with glee as their faces contorted in agonizing pain.
THE DEATH OF THE COUNT
In the year 1600 Count Ferencz died and this is when Elizabeth’s real period of terror began. Elizabeth started to dream about taking a lover, but when she looked in the mirror at her once beautiful face, she saw that her once ‘angelic’ complexion had long since faded. She had now reached the age of forty-three. After her husband’s death, the first thing she did was to send her hated mother-in-law away from the Castle. She wanted peace to pursue the activities that gave her most pleasure, but the ultimate experience was still to come.
Maintaining her youth and vitality became her total driving force. She was driven by vanity, sexual desire, and the fact that if she lost her youth she would have nothing. Her mood became darker and darker as the days went by and then one day it happened. A young chambermaid accidentally pulled Elizabeth’s hair one day while she was grooming it. The Countess was infuriated and slapped the girl’s face so hard that blood spurted from her nose and splashed onto Elizabeth’s hand. Elizabeth noticed that where the servant’s blood had touched her skin, it had taken on a new fresh, youthful appearance. Immediately she called her two faithful servants, Ujvary and Dorka to undress the hapless girl and, holding her arms over a large vat, they proceeded to cut her arteries. When the young girl was dead, drained of all her blood, Elizabeth removed her own clothes and stepped into the vat. She now knew that she had found the secret of eternal youth and she would be beautiful and strong once more.
Over the period of ten years, Elizabeth’s trusted helpers provided her with young, beautiful virgins from the neighbouring villages, luring them with the promise of a job at the castle. The young girls would be mutilated and then killed and Elizabeth would then bathe luxuriously in their blood. If the victim was especially pretty, the countess would drink their blood believing that she would gain some sort of inner beauty.
After a few years Elizabeth began to realise that the blood of simple peasant girls was having very little effect on the quality of her complexion. She knew she needed better quality blood and she turned her attention to the virgin daughters of the aristocracy. In the early 17th century in Transylvania it was the tradition of the aristocracy to have their daughters educated into the appropriate social graces and etiquettes and Elizabeth saw her chance. She established an academy in the castle and offered to take twenty-five girls at a time to finish their education. But what the parents didn’t realise was quite how finished their education would be.
Assisted by her faithful servant Dorka these poor students were tortured and bled just as the poor peasant girls before them. However, Elizabeth was now becoming careless and, unlike the peasant girls from the village, girls of noble birth were not so easy to make disappear. During one particular frenzy of lust and excitement, four of the girls’ bodies were thrown from the walls of the castle. They realised their error too late, for the villagers had already collected the bodies and the girls had been identified. The rumours spread far and wide about the horrors that took place at Castle Czejthe, and the news soon reached the ears of the Hungarian Emperor. The Emperor ordered Elizabeth’s own cousin, Count Cuyorgy Thurzo, who was the Governor of the province, to go and raid the castle. On December 30, 1610, a band of soldiers led by Thurzo, raided the castle under the cover of night. They could not believe what they found and were horrified by the horrendous sights. As they entered the main hall a girl was lying dead on the floor, completely drained of blood. Another girl, who had had her body pierced, was still alive and writhing in pain. When they went down into the dungeon they found several girls in prison cells, some of whom had already been tortured, while below the castle they found the bodies of around fifty dead girls.
The extent of the horror was passed back to the Emperor, Matthias II, who immediately ordered that the Countess be placed on public trial. However, her aristocratic status did not allow her to be arrested and so, due to the fear of her slipping out of their hands, parliament passed a new Act to reverse this privileged status. Elizabeth was brought before a formal hearing in 1610.
During the trial, which took place in 1611, a register was found in the castle which contained the names of around 650 victims. A complete transcript was made of the trial and it can still be viewed today in Hungary. Throughout the hearing Eli
zabeth admitted to nothing. Dorka and Elizabeth’s other three accomplices were burned alive but the Countess, due to the reason of her noble birth, could not be executed.
Elizabeth Bathory did however receive her due punishment. She was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life imprisoned in her own castle. Stonemasons were sent to the castle to wall up the windows and doors to the bedchamber with the Countess still inside. Here she would spend her last days with only a small opening left for food to be passed through to her.
In the year 1614, four years after she was walled into her castle, one of the Countess’s gaolers found her food untouched. After peeking through the small aperture he found Elizabeth lying face down on the floor. The ‘Blood Countess’ or ‘Female Dracula’ was finally dead at the age of fifty-four.
POSTSCRIPT
Throughout the whole trial Elizabeth Bathory was never heard to utter even a single word of remorse or regret. One thing that was discovered about the Countess, though, that could possibly have attributed to her horrific behaviour, is that she suffered from very violent seizures when she was around four or five years old. They were not attributed to epilepsy but were more likely to have been some other kind of neurological disorder.
There are some connections between the Bathory family and the Dracula family. Prince Steven Bathory had helped Dracula regain his throne in 1476 and also a Dracula fief, Castle Fagaras, became a Bathory possession during Elizabeth’s life. Another connection was that both families had a dragon design on their family crests.
Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden took an axeAnd gave mother forty whacksWhen she saw what she had doneShe gave her father forty-one
It is a rhyme that many of us learned when we were at school but do you really know anything about the real Lizzie Borden?
Lizzie Borden was born on July 19, 1860 in an area of Massachusetts called Fall River. Her father, Andrew, at the age of seventy was one of the richest men in Fall River, but had a reputation for being thrifty. He was a white-haired man with rather a stern image. For the first two years of her life Lizzie had a happy, normal childhood, but then a series of life-altering events started to happen.
Lizzie’s mother, Sarah, suffered from a uterine congestion and died in March 1863. Andrew was then left on his own to bring up little Lizzie and her older sister, Emma. Two years after the death of his wife, Andrew remarried. Abby Durfee was a short, heavy-set and exceptionally shy woman. Gossip was rife around Fall River that he had only taken Abby as his wife to provide himself with a housekeeper and babysitter, but it does appear that he did genuinely care for her.
However, the relationship between Abby and her two stepchildren was quite different. The two girls began to resent the woman who they saw as a threat to their inheritance. As the girls grew older and more wilful, they refused to eat meals with their parents and started to call Abby ‘Mrs Bordon’ as opposed to ‘mother’. It has been alleged that Lizzie even resorted to decapitating Abby’s cat when it had been particularly annoying.
By the time Lizzie had reached adulthood her father was an extremely rich man and had an estate worth around $500,000. He had managed to amass this large amount as an investor and a commercial landlord, and he also sat on the board of many banks. Despite their immense wealth, the family lived frugally and the four of them were living in rather cramped conditions in a rather unfashionable part of town.
Lizzie’s life was fairly uncomplicated and she worked as a volunteer and a Sunday school teacher. However, all this was to change on the year of 1892. Lizzie had fallen out with her parents the year before over a break-in which pointed to her being the culprit, and the atmosphere had never been same. Later, the same year, the Bordon barn was broken into twice in one night. Once again believing the perpetrator to be his daughter, Andrew decided to teach her a lesson and decapitated all her pigeons which she kept in the barn. What he didn’t realise that almost a year later he and his wife would meet a similar fate.
August 4 started out as a normal day, but by early afternoon, events that happened would change Lizzie’s life for ever. At around 11.10 a.m. Lizzie discovered the body of her father, half sitting, half laying on the living room couch. His feet were still resting in his boots and there were blood spots on the floor, on the wall, on the sofa and on the picture hanging above the sofa. There was no other injury to his body apart from eleven blows to the head, which had probably been caused by a hatchet. His skull had been crushed, his nose severed and one eye was cut in half. It appeared as though he had been attacked from above while he was asleep.
Then the family maid, Bridget Sullivan, went and fetched Dr. Bowen who was a neighbour and also the family physician, followed by the arrival of the police. A little time later the body of Abby Bordon was found lying on the guestroom floor. Abby had been attacked from behind as she was cleaning and had received eighteen blows to the head, which had completely crushed her skull.
THE INVESTIGATION
Police investigators gathered all the information they could and gradually pieced together what had happened. Firstly they discovered that Lizzie and Bridget had been the only two people left in the house that were still alive. Abby Bordon was believed to have been killed at around 9.30 a.m. and Andrew around 11.00 the same morning. Bridget told the investigators that she had been cleaning windows most of the morning and then had gone up to her room to lie down. Her story never changed at any time.
Lizzie, on the other hand, kept on changing her statement as to where she was on that particular morning. She told the police that she had been in the barn loft for about half an hour before discovering her father’s body, but when they searched the loft they found the floor thick with dust, and it was complete undisturbed. They found four hatchets in the basement of the house, one of which had no handle and was covered in ashes. This particular hatchet would later be submitted as evidence. There were no footprints around the house on the grass, and the cellar door was locked, as was the front door. Meanwhile, Emma decided to employ the services of an attorney.
As investigators searched the premises Lizzie went to her room and would not let anyone come in, and only opened the door when she was ordered to. The officer noticed that she appeared very calm and worried that there might still be a maniac on the loose. She showed no sorrow or grief and he got the impression that she knew more about the murders than she was saying.
As they continued with their investigation of the premises, the officers were very concerned about several things they discovered. Firstly, Dr. Bowen was found in the kitchen holding some scraps of paper in his hand. When asked what the paper said, he replied that it was nothing, and took the lid off the stove and tossed the scraps inside. When the officer looked inside the stove he noticed a cylindrical object, which was about a foot long, in the ashes, and he thought it was probably a rolled up sheet of paper.
Next they noticed that a basin in the washstand had water in it that was stained with blood. He was told that perhaps some of the doctors who had examined the bodies had washed their hands there.
Another officer noticed a bucket of water in the cellar that had small towels that appeared to be soaked in blood. When he asked Lizzie about it, she told him that it was all right because they were menstrual rags, and no one bothered to check this for sure. Lizzie told the officer that the bucket had been there for several days, but Bridget said she felt she would have noticed it if it had went she went down to the cellar to do the washing.
So many things pointed to Lizzie being the murderer, and she was arrested five days later. She was charged with murder following an inquest that had been held in secret. She pleaded not guilty, and was taken to Taunton Jail to await her trial.
THE TRIAL
The Grand Jury trial started on November 7. A friend of Lizzie’s, Miss Alice Russell, testified to seeing Lizzie burn a dress in the oven just three days after the murder. Lizzie told the court that the dress had been covered in paint and it wasn’t worth keeping. On December 2, Lizzie was f
ormally charged with three counts of murder, one for the murder of Andrew, one for Abby, and one for the murder of both and the trial date was set for June 5, 1893.
The trial lasted for fourteen days in which time the prosecution called witnesses to testify that Andrew was about to make a new will leaving half of his estate to Abby and the remainder to his two daughters. Lizzie had also been seen trying to buy 10 cents worth of prussic acid from a local drugstore, with the possible assumption that had she been allowed to buy it she could have used it to poison her parents.
The defence only took two days to present their case, calling on witnesses to testify that they had seen a strange man in the vicinity of the Bordon’s house. They also used Lizzie’s sister, Emma, to confirm that there really was no motive.
On June 20, 1893, Lizzie was found not guilty on all three counts, but she would remain guilty in the eyes of the public for ever. Five weeks after the trial Emma, and the spurned Lizzie, bought a house in a fashionable area of Fall River. Lizzie decided to change her name and became known as Lizbeth, the name she used for the rest of her life.
Eight years later Lizzie met an actress named Nance O’Neill. She soon moved into their house and Lizzie started to throw wild parties for her new friends from the theatre. Emma, who was offended by her sister’s new lifestyle, moved out and the two girls never spoke again.