The Hungarian village where dozens of women killed their husbands

On December 14, 1929, the American newspaper The New York Times reported news that was causing astonishment not in the USA, but in a place much further away, in Hungary: the beginning of a trial of about 50 women who had been accused of poisoning the vast majority of men who lived in a remote village in the European country.

Although the note was short, the account was full of details: between 1911 and 1929, several women from the town of Nagyrev, located about 130 kilometers south of Budapest, had poisoned more than 50 men.

The women were called "angel makers" and allegedly murdered the men with an arsenic solution.

Some have called the episode the largest mass murder of men by women in modern history.

The women faced a public trial in which one name kept coming up: Zsuzsanna Fazekas, the village midwife.

At that time, when the village was still under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and there were no local doctors, the midwife had a monopoly on medical care in the village.

In a 2004 BBC radio documentary, a villager reported that the reason Fazekas was singled out as the instigator of the poisonings was because all the women told her their problems.

"She told women that if they had problems with their men, she had a simple solution," Maria Gunya explained.

And although Fazekas was primarily responsible for the murders, in the court records, the testimonies of the village women reveal deep and painful stories of abuse, mistreatment, and rape by the men.

But the story remained hidden for many years. According to police reports, the first murders were recorded in 1911, but investigations only began in 1929.

What was the clue that led to the culprits?

A cemetery that suddenly started to get full.

In 1911, Zsuzsanna Fazekas arrived in the village of Nagyrev.

She, according to Gunya and the trial witnesses, attracted attention for two reasons: first, because, in addition to her skill as a midwife, she was knowledgeable about medicinal remedies, some even using chemicals, something unusual in the region.

The second thing was that there was no trace of her husband.

"Nagyrev didn't have a priest, much less a doctor. So her knowledge made people approach her and trust her," Gunya recounted.

"Women began to see many things happening inside homes: men who beat women, who raped them, many of them were unfaithful. A lot of mistreatment," she added.

Fazekas then began performing a practice that was prohibited at the time: clinical abortions of unwanted pregnancies. For this reason, she was brought to trial, but was never convicted.

The big problem, according to Gunya, is that many marriages were arranged by families and very young women married men, in some cases, much older.

"Divorce didn't exist back then. You couldn't separate even if you were mistreated or abused," she said.

But reports from the time also pointed to another fact: arranged marriages were accompanied by a type of contractual agreement that included land, inheritances, and legal obligations.

"Fazekas started convincing women that she could solve their problems," Gunya explained to the BBC.

The first poisoning occurred in 1911. In the following years, more and more men continued to die, as World War I raged and the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled.

In 18 years, there were between 45 and 50 deaths of husbands and fathers who were buried in the village cemetery.

Many began to call Nagyrev "the district of murderers."

These details caught the attention of the police. In early 1929, they began exhuming the bodies for examination, finding an incriminating element: arsenic.

The trial

Fazekas lived in a typical single-story house in the village, overlooking the street. It was there that she created many of the poisons used in the murders.

There, on July 19, 1929, she saw that the police were coming to get her.

"When she saw the gendarmes approaching, she understood that it was all over for her. When they arrived at the house, she was already dead; she had taken some of her own poison."

But the midwife was far from the only one to blame.

In the nearby county capital of Szolnok, from 1929 onwards, 26 women were tried.

Eight were sentenced to death and the rest were sent to prison, seven of them to life imprisonment.

Few admitted their guilt, and their motives were never entirely clear.

Based on court records, physician and historian Geza Cseh told the BBC that there are still many mysteries to be solved.

"As for the reasons, there are many theories: poverty, greed and boredom are some of them," the academic points out.

"Some reports say that some women had lovers among Russian prisoners of war conscripted to work on farms in the absence of their men at the front," the historian explained.

And when the husbands returned, the women lamented the sudden loss of their freedom and, one after another, decided to act.

In the 1950s, historian Ferenc Gyorgyev met an elderly villager during his imprisonment under the communist regime.

The peasant claimed that the women of Nagyrev "had been murdering their men since time immemorial."

Besides, they might not have been the only ones.

In the nearby town of Tiszakurt, other exhumed bodies also contained arsenic, but no one was convicted for those deaths.

According to some estimates, the total death toll in the area could have reached 300.

Gunya points out that after the poisonings, the men's behavior toward their wives "improved noticeably."