The corpses piled up everywhere – in kitchens, beds, and even baby cribs. People dropped quietly over their breakfast bowls and wine glasses.
This small Hungarian village, little more than a bunch of single-storey homes and farmland, became the heart of one of the deadliest, strangest murder rings in history.
From 1911 to 1929, women across Nagyrev and the Tiszazug region turned to homemade arsenic poison to get rid of husbands, parents, lovers, and children. While some sought freedom and revenge, for others it was a bitter necessity.
What started as whispers over kitchen tables spiralled into a killing network so big that it caught 43 suspects in its web. At least 28 were hauled into court over the deaths of more than 100 people.
The real number was likely three times that, with police saying as many as 300 may have been poisoned. What’s certain is that Nagyrev wasn’t just a village – it became a graveyard built by women who had learned to survive by killing.
At the turn of the 20th century, Nagyrev was a hard, rough place with more livestock than people. Fewer than 1,500 lived there, and the numbers were already shrinking before the First World War ripped Europe apart.
Families scraped by on farming. Women ran the homes, worked the land and raised the kids. The men mostly drank, fought and sometimes vanished until their hangovers went away.
In Nagyrev, booze wasn’t a treat – it had become a necessity. Nearly every house had its own vineyard, and palinka, a strong fruit brandy, flowed like water.
From 1911 to 1929, dozens of women across Nagyrev and the Tiszazug region turned to homemade arsenic poison to get rid of husbands, parents, children and lovers
Women accused of poisoning being taken to prison in 1929
Men gambled away wages, smashed up furniture, and beat their wives bloody. The war only made it worse.
Some men came back blind, broken or raging with what we’d now call PTSD. Home turned into a prison for the women, and marriage became a life sentence of suffering.
Violence in the home was normalised. For many women, marriage had become a burden and was increasingly seen as a lifelong sentence to suffering.
But Nagyrev had a woman who offered a different kind of solution. Her name was Zsuzsanna Fazekas, but everyone called her Auntie Zsuzsi.
Born in 1862, she was the village’s certified midwife – a tough misfit who, unlike most women, wore her hair in a tight bun and had a strong disdain for tradition and conforming.
Pipe-smoking, sharp-tongued and blunt, she didn’t care much for men’s rules. She’d trained in the city of Nagyvarad, which was rare for women back then, and returned around 1890 with three kids and no husband. She had been estranged from him.
The village council gave her a home which was modest by modern standards, but grand in Nagyre at the time. That’s where she delivered babies, treated illnesses and ultimately became a quiet dealer of death.
Her certificate hung above a cupboard in the kitchen. On top of that cupboard were rows of glass jars – some held herbs while others contained deadly poison.
Auntie Szuszie was aware of what the women were going through, and was willing to help them solve their problems
A newspaper headline covering the trials featuring Zsuzsie’s picture in the inset as the ring leader. There were rumours that she had killed her half-brother and sister in law
Zsuzsi’s recipe was simple – she took strips of flypaper, soaked them in water or vinegar and left them to steep. The flypaper, known as Millios Legypapir, was soaked in arsenic. Once dissolved, the liquid was clear, odourless and almost impossible to detect.
She handed it out to women who needed it – some paid her back in eggs, while others gave her chicken fat. Many of them were in no position to pay at all.
The first known murder came in 1911. Rozalia Takacs had been married for more than 30 years to Lajos, a violent drunk. She’d put up with his fists and foul mouth for decades. By late 1910, when Lajos fell sick, neighbours nudged Rozalia to take the next step.
Rozalia visited Zsuzsi, who taught her how to prepare the poison. She tried seven times to kill her husband with flypaper arsenic, which did not work.
Finally, in desperation, she purchased arsenic acid, used to kill rats and stirred it into her unsuspecting husband’s porridge. On January 11, 1911, Lajos Takacs died – Rozalia had finally been successful in her mission.
It would take two decades before Rozalia stood in court and admitted her crime. During her trial, she is said to have taken ‘perverted pride’ in the murder. Rozalia went on to assist other women in doing the same.
In the years that followed, the deaths increased, and so did the cruelty that led up to them. Husbands maimed by war became tyrants at home, with some raping their wives. Some pregnant women were also attacked. Their kids were also beaten mercilessly.
One woman, Maria Papai, later told police that her husband attacked her constantly and even savagely attacked her with a chain.
In 1923, she confided in her friend Julianna Lipk, who was also a poison-maker, about her plan to kill him and then turn herself in. Juliana was shrouded in rumours and accusations. Working as a servant from the age of ten, fingers were pointed at her when an old, sickly couple she lived with died.
She was also accused of murdering her half-brother and sister in law.
After Julianna, orphaned young and hardened by a brutal life, listened to Maria’s plans, she told her there was no need to hand herself to authorities after killing her husband – she could make it look as natural as possible.
While the poison didn’t work the first time, it did the second. Maria stirred the powder into her husband’s coffee, and when he died, doctors blamed it on a stroke, just like Julianna had promised.
The killings weren’t just Zsuzsi and Julianna’s work. Others joined in, including healers, widows, and midwives. The knowledge spread quietly but quickly, like wildfire.
Julianna began helping women kill without asking for payment. She listened to them, gave them the tools, and brushed off the dealings.
When Maria Koteles, a local seamstress, told Julianna about her abusive husband, Julianna returned the same afternoon with a vial of poison. They mixed it into palinka, and he succumbed to the poison.
In nearby villages like Tiszakurt, midwives Eszter Szabo and Krisztina Csordas did the same. They accepted butter, cooking fat or garden roses in return for their toxic concoctions.
Rozalia Holyba, Lidia Sebestyen, Julianna Lipka and Maria Koteles seated at their trial in December 1929
One mother, Anna Cser, was battered throughout her pregnancies. After giving birth to her third child, she found herself with no milk and no strength. With Zsuzsi’s help, she fed her newborn daughter sugar water laced with arsenic and the baby died within days.
Many women who knew there was no way they could take care of their newborns began poisoning them like Anna.
By the mid-1920s, death had become commonplace in the region, and police were none the wiser. Doctors also didn’t catch on to the pattern – some were even bribed to stay quiet.
As the bodies kept mounting, anonymous letters began to arrive at police stations, accusing women of poisoning their husbands.
Although most of them went ignored, in June 1929, the authorities finally acted. It all came to a head when Rozalia Holyba killed her war veteran husband with the help of Zsuzsi and her sister. When Rozalia went for a death certificate, the regional doctor became suspicious.
He had only seen her husband a week earlier, and he showed no signs of grave illness. An investigation was launched, and police arrested Auntie Zsuzsi after a couple confessed to buying poison from another midwife who also admitted she bought it from Zsuzsi.
Zsuzsi was released on bail but did not realise it was a set-up all along. The police wanted to watch her, follow her movements, and identify the rest of the ring. On July 19, as officers approached her home, she pulled a vial of her own poison from her dress and drank it.
Police found Zsuzsi convulsing on the floor, her legs kicking wildly. They tried to force milk down her throat, hoping to make her vomit, but she clenched her jaws shut. A doctor was called, and they tried to get her to a hospital, but she died.
Several women from Nagyrev and Tiszazug were rounded up, interrogated, questioned, and imprisoned
That summer, the police went door to door, interrogating and arresting suspects across the Tiszazug region. Some, like Zsuzsi, took their own lives before trial, while others were subjected to brutal questioning, group interrogations, midnight visits, manipulation and threats.
One officer, Sergeant Janos Bartok, once hid under a bed while two suspects, including Rozalia Holyba, discussed their crimes. When Rozalia agreed to confess, he leapt out and grabbed her ankle in triumph.
Eventually, 28 people stood trial – twenty were from Nagyrev, and nearly three-quarters of the confirmed victims were their neighbours.
Five women, including Rozalia Takacs, Julianna Lipka and midwives Eszter Szabo and Krisztina Csordas, were sentenced to death by hanging. Julianna and Rozalia’s sentences were later reduced to life in prison.
The tale quickly became forgotten, but the women of Nagyrev had used the poison as a weapon to reclaim their freedoms from abusive husbands.
For them, justice did not come from the law – it came from their kitchen cabinets and teaspoons.
