← True Weird Stuff
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- [00:00]
Dish Commercial Announcer
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- [00:32]
Sherry Lynch
Hey, true weirdos. I hope you know how much all of us here appreciate you. You are the people we're making this show for, and your feedback means the world to us. We were so blown away for this show to win as many awards as it has. I mean, at this point, we're working for hardware and handouts. That's true, but at the end of the day, it's you people will walk up to us on the street. I had a guy wave at me wearing a true Weird stuff T shirt at the park. It just is the coolest thing. And that's 100% you. And thank you.
- [01:03]
Carrie Bowser
And we're just covering costs to be able to present this to you. We're not really making any money with it, so if you could do us a favor and patronize any sponsors that you hear throughout the show, that would be great. Also, just go on whatever platform you listen to it and please rate and review it. It really helps us in getting discovered. And if you have a suggestion for anything, just reach out to us at our website, TrueWeirdStuff. And thank you so much for listening.
- [01:35]
Narrator
Once upon a time, there was a village. It was small and poor. So poor that the people didn't even have a doctor.
- [01:44]
Sherry Lynch
The village was called Nagreev.
- [01:47]
Narrator
When the people were sick, they went to a healer. They called her Auntie Susie.
- [01:54]
Sherry Lynch
Auntie Susie had no formal medical training, but the people trusted her.
- [02:00]
Narrator
When the men had pain from working all day in the fields, Auntie Suzie helped them with special potions.
- [02:09]
Sherry Lynch
And she was also a midwife.
- [02:11]
Narrator
Auntie Susie knew just how to make a baby come into this world. But that wasn't the only way she helped the woman of the village.
- [02:23]
Sherry Lynch
Auntie Susie was famous for her tinctures and salves. And there was something else that the village women trusted her with. A very special sort of medicine that offered a very permanent cure to a very particular ailment. The affliction of a troublesome husband.
- [02:44]
Narrator
Not just husbands, other people too. Even parents, even children.
- [02:50]
Sherry Lynch
All that was needed was a little water, some flypaper, and a cauldron. And just like magic in the graveyard,
- [02:59]
Narrator
the carved stones appeared more and more. So many, sprouting like cold, gray flowers.
- [03:09]
Sherry Lynch
Auntie Susie wasn't alone in this very dark, very special work. She had helped. Lots of help.
- [03:17]
Narrator
We call them the angel makers. But that was only later, after everyone learned our terrible secret.
- [03:27]
Sherry Lynch
Angel makers. How many angels did they make? 45? 50? 300? And how did this happen at all? Much less for nearly 20 years. Years.
- [03:44]
Narrator
Drink this, my dear.
- [03:50]
Evie
And then they got a small beam of light against the mirror.
- [04:07]
Carrie Bowser
True weird stuff.
- [04:17]
Sherry Lynch
Nagriv, Tisakort, Oka. Tisa. Fulvad, K. Marton, Mesh, Ter, Salish, Oched. Those are the villages in Hungary where most of the cases occurred.
- [04:31]
Evie
A little knowledge of chemistry unlocked the secret to one of the most atrocious and astounding wholesale murder plots of modern times.
- [04:42]
Sherry Lynch
It all began in 1911, three years before Hungary entered World War I. Susanna Fizekis arrived in Nagreev. She was alone. There were whispers of a husband, dead now or gone. At least Susana was tight lipped about her past. What she did have were references. Letters testifying to her talents as a midwife. There were no hospitals in Nagriv in those days, no doctors. So Susanna was warmly welcomed by the women of the village, who very quickly began calling the midwife Auntie Susie. The women of Nagriv had particular need of a woman with Auntie Susie's skills. Life in the region had changed with the start of World War I. So many of the men had been marched off to fight. The Austro, Hungarian or Habsburg Empire sent more than 9,9 million men into battle. Husbands, fathers, brothers, sons gone. But other men soon came to take their place. Men who'd fought on the other side of the war, only to be captured and imprisoned. By the end of 1914, the Habsburg Empire had racked up a ghoulishly impressive 200,000 captured enemy soldiers. They had to put them somewhere. And that somewhere wound up being roughly 50 large POW camps scattered around the countryside. Now, folks back then had only just really begun to apply germ theory in any sort of practical way. And these camps reflected the military's lack of understanding regarding basic hygiene and sanitation. Which is a polite way of saying that in these filthy, wretched places, men sickened and died by the thousands. Oops. Adjustments were made, but by then the camps were emptying for another reason. The prisoners were farmed out as forced labor with gusto. By mid summer 1915, fewer than 40% of the captured were left in the camps. By Christmas 1916, well over a million POWs had been pressed into forced labor. My idea of the perfect skincare routine Minimum effort, maximum results. That's how I found One Skin. At the core of One Skin is their patented OS1 peptide. This is the first ingredient proven to target the senescent cells. Those are the ones that are creating wrinkles and fine lines and loss of, you know, balance and elasticity. And in four different peer reviewed groups clinical studies, One Skin got at it. Plus One Skin products are designed to layer or replace multiple steps in your routine. It's easy and it's smart. Born from over a decade of longevity research, One Skin's OS1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try one skin with 15 off using code True Weird Stuff at OneSkin co. Slash TrueWeirdStuff. That's 15% off OneSkin co with code True Weird Stuff. After your purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please support your fellow True weirdos and tell them we sent you.
- [08:00]
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- [08:31]
Sherry Lynch
Some of those POWs were shipped to the front lines, including combat zones. The fact that this was illegal didn't stop it from happening. The Habsburg Empire put prisoners to work in armament factories and sent them out as mine sweepers. They were poorly treated, poorly fed, and sometimes dropped dead. Exhaustion. No worries. Spent prisoners would simply be replaced by fresh batches brought up from the rear. Other POWs were deployed to work projects far out in the countryside. Some found themselves assigned to small farms and sleeping little villages. That was the gig to get for a prisoner of war. More and better food, better, more comfortable accommodations. But none of these assignments were random. Military leadership factored nationality and cartoonish stereotypes into the decisions to send which prisoners where. And since they considered Russian POWs, for example, to be dull witted peasants, they packed them off to do after agricultural work. Now, as has always been true in wartime, the welfare of the prisoners wasn't much of a concern. When has it ever been? But there was something. The military brass was all in a dither over fraternization. They didn't want the civilian population getting too cozy with the POWs. But a couple of factors made that super tricky to enforce. For one, the prisoners had to be supervised. But both officers and soldiers were needed to fight the war, not babysit the captured. At first they tried sending out big contingents of prisoners, a couple hundred at a time, but that proved unworkable. What was needed were smaller units that could be managed by the employer, not the military. Those POWs who found themselves assigned to small businesses or farmers arms naturally found themselves brushing up against Austro Hungarian civilians. There were rules about that, particularly when it came to the local women. Everyone from the army to the nosy neighbors to the Catholic Church was strongly opposed to any kind of mingling. Love, romance and sex between civilian women and the captured men was forbidden. Such things could only blur the lines between enemy and ally, between stranger and homeland. Because if there's one thing humanity is determined to prevent, it's unity can't be having that. There's no profit to be made from peace. The village of Nagriv became home to a POW camp for Russian captives. Nagri Grieve had many war widows. Husbands gone, though not necessarily deceased. Many of those women had affairs with the Russian prisoners. Let's don't judge. These things happen, and they've always happened throughout the course of human history. Rape and pillage and whatnot. At least in this one instance, the women had some say in the matter, which was one of the few things they did get a say in. Theirs was a world where marriages were arranged. It was common for teenage girls to be married off to much older men, chosen for them, not by them. Divorce wasn't legal, which meant that if the husband was abusive and cruel, or drunk and shiftless, oh well, nothing to be done but endure a loveless, unhappy and even violent marriage. With all of Hungary experiencing crushing poverty and political unrest in the months and years leading to World War I, these wives suffered tremendously. And then their husbands were sent to war, leaving them with families to care for, but no money or support. And those POWs sent to work the farms. In time, many fell into the rhythms and routines of village life. Cautious courtesies at first, and then friendships. And for some, those friendships deepened into love affairs. This was a new kind of freedom for the women of Nagriv. Their own desires had never been considered, much less indulged. Some of the women took two, three, four or more lovers juggling multiple captive Russian boyfriends. And we all know what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much. Blah, blah, blah. Auntie Susie found her Services in great demand. Her skills as a midwife extended to terminating unwanted pregnancies too. When summoned, she would appear in the black dress and apron she always wore, carrying a pouch of tobacco, a box of matches and a little corn cob pipe. Auntie Susie was discreet and knew how to take care of situation. Abortion was illegal in Hungary then, and Auntie Susie was arrested at least 10 or more times between 1911 and 1921. But the charges just never stuck. Judges in her trials found her to be a sympathetic character. Or perhaps their sympathy were with her customers. Either way, every time they hauled her in, she was acquitted and sent back to Nagreev to continue her work. The Great War ended, as wars eventually do, and the men who'd survived slowly returned home to Nagreev and the surrounding villages. It was a rough homecoming. The wives they found waiting had tasted independence, both financial and emotional. The young brides had grown up and grown accustomed to their new freedoms. The older wives had lost whatever patience they'd once had for harsh words and stinging blows. They were now used to running their households as they saw fit, used to choosing when and how they would be touched. They had a new knowledge of just how capable they were to return to a life of subservience at best, violence at worst. It was unbearable to imagine. Yet in staunchly Catholic Hungary, divorce was unthinkable. There was only one path to freedom for an unhappily married woman. And standing on that path, so ready to help, so willing, so able, was that small black clad figure puffing away on her little pipe. Auntie Susie.
- [15:22]
Evie
Suzanne Fazikas was indeed respected everywhere in the village by the dumb, red cheeked presence. She was a good doctor, an expert in the sick room. They spoke of her in that superstitious village as a wife, wise woman.
- [15:39]
Sherry Lynch
As it turned out, folks in Nagriv had need of Auntie Susie even when there wasn't a war on or prisoners to tangle with.
- [15:47]
Evie
It was the practice of many parents in the little village to have only one child, so that the land would not be divided by their death. Often, when an additional baby was born, Mrs. Fazikas would be called in.
- [16:03]
Sherry Lynch
Now there was no official one child policy in Hungary. There wasn't even a suggestion that families ought to limit their size. The truth was way more awful than that.
- [16:17]
Evie
In Negriv, the hunger for land was particularly keen. But the people had little chance to acquire land. The 18,000 acres surrounding the village were owned by Countess Boisse, who would not sell any of it. One of the results of the Greed for land among the Hungarian peasants was the widespread custom of having only one child. They solved the problems of birth control in a very simple way for themselves.
- [16:49]
Sherry Lynch
But of course, babies insisted on coming. And after being arrested and tried 10 times as an abortionist, Auntie Susie found a less dangerous, equally effective way of getting rid of unwanted infants.
- [17:04]
Evie
There is a whole row of babies graves in the small churchyard at Negrivre. All beautifully cared for. They all belong to well to do families. All of the babies died within three to four days of their birth. Yet sanitary conditions were no worse in Agriv than they are in other Hungarian villages.
- [17:29]
Sherry Lynch
Such was the way of things. Things we like to pretend didn't happen. Not in the good old days, you know, when folks were decent, moral, God fearing and all that. We just want to overlook maybe that they were also human and sometimes making choices we can't even imagine as to how many mouths they could feed, how much land could be shared. Choices about what they would or would not tolerate. Desperate people with little or no options will create their own. That's always been true. And the women of Nagariv were poised to do just that. Women who chafed against the bond of the lives that had been chosen for them.
- [18:11]
Evie
There were so many women in the village who invade Physicus. She also owned her own property, had no husband to bother her or dictate to her.
- [18:22]
Sherry Lynch
There had been a Mr. Fazeckis once upon a time. He was prosperous for a peasant, owning a few acres of land and a home. The couple had only been married for two years before the man contracted a mysterious disease. One that just didn't respond to any sort of treatment. Tragic, really, the way he died. Died sad. But at least the widow Physekis could console herself with the small fortune left to her by her late husband. No one in no grave knew the man. Auntie Susie had come to the village alone, literally wearing her grief in the form of widow's weeds. It made sense that she wanted a fresh start. A place where she could dedicate the remainder of her life to healing the sick as a way of coping with her own sorrow. Only the cruelest people would question that now. To be fair, while the women of Nagriv and the nearby villages were dismayed to find themselves yanked back into subservience, the men who returned home from the war weren't the same men who'd left. Shell shocked was the term they used back then. Today we call it ptsd.
- [19:36]
Evie
The term shell shock was born of the necessity for finding some designation thought to be suitable for the number of cases of functional nervous incapacity. The wear and tear of a prolonged campaign of trench warfare, with its terrible hardships and anxieties of attack, produced a condition of mind and body properly falling under the term war neurosis.
- [19:58]
Sherry Lynch
Imagine. Imagine living in thick sodden mud in a trench, gashed in the earth for up to four years. You're always wet, always afraid. Trench foot was a constant threat. Imagine your flesh rotting, the skin peeling off as easily as a glove. Men lost toes, even their whole foot to it. Then there was the noise, the ear splitting, earth shaking roar of bullets and bombs, sometimes as many as 10,000 shells an hour, raking the skies overhead. That could be a mercy, though. Sometimes the bombs drowning out the moaning of the wounded, the weeping of the fearful, the choked last breaths of the dying. The men who flowed into this killing machine from the Hungarian countryside, they were mostly flying farmers. Who could have ever prepared them for the grim facts of trench warfare? There was more death in World War I than in all of the wars in the western world from 1790 to 1914 combined. Maybe the dead or the lucky ones, the men who survived it. A human being being exposed to shell blasts like they were, doesn't walk away unscathed. Many had crippling headaches, lapses in memory and nightmares so terrible that they'd wake screaming, drenched in their own cold sweat. Some develop tremors, paralysis, anxiety and blindness. Not to mention the loss of limbs, the shattered bodies, the faces torn and shredded by shrapnel. Did you know that modern plastic surface surgery was born from the need to help repair these soldiers ruined faces? It's impossible to overstate the horrors these men endured. They came home broken, some in body, some in spirit. There was no therapy, no counseling, no support groups. There wasn't a way to talk about it. Those men were expected to put the war behind them and get on with the business of living. But how? Their children, if they had any, were either too young to remember them or old enough to be frightened of the strangers their fathers had become, to shy away from contact. Their wives were now independent, the heads of their households. In some ways, the men who returned to no grieve were ghosts. Ghosts expect it to pass for the living. And for the unluckiest men, those with physical injuries, they suddenly found themselves in a whole new role. No longer providers, now they were dependents. Where they had been physically capable, now they were fragile, if not outright disabled by wounds that never properly healed. Many of the wives, remember, had not married these men for love. They'd been forced. And now they were burdened by these hollow eyed strangers and resentful. Another mouth to feed at a time when all of Europe was devastated, crushed by debt and rampant inflation. And then there was the alcohol. Drinking was already a feature of daily life for the men of Nagriv. But now they were self medicating the trauma they brought home from the war, throwing back the traditional Hungarian brandy called palinka, and gambling and fighting and too often toting that violence home. At the end of the night, women gathered at kitchen tables to complain and commiserate. And look who was there. With a kind listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. It was Auntie Susie whom they'd grown to trust. She'd kept their secrets. She understood their struggles. And that's how it started. If there's a problem with him, I have a simple solution. Arsenic. The poison of choice for millennia. Oh, sure, there was a test for it in Auntie Susie's day. One developed in 1836 by a chemist named J. James Marsh. But in a place like Nagriv, too small to even have a trained doctor, an impoverished backwater and a country shattered by war, the chances of anyone even thinking to test for arsenic were pretty close to zero. And as it turned out, Auntie Susie didn't need to buy arsenic. She'd figured out how to source her own near bottomless supply.
- [24:48]
Evie
You could find arsenic in cosmetics and in medicines.
- [24:54]
Sherry Lynch
But I found another way.
- [24:58]
Evie
Flypaper. Cheap enough and common. Auntie Susie, according to the story told by the women under her dominance, saw a fly drop dead after having tasted the sheep sugar that was strewn on a circle of fly paper, the common kind sold in every village shop. She saw a chicken eat the fly and in its turn drop dead. After a few convulsions, her plan was complete.
- [25:31]
Sherry Lynch
Auntie Susie would boil the flypaper in water until the liquid was reduced to about an inch or so in the blue bottom of the cauldron. Then she'd carefully scoop the milky white fluid into small glass bottles. It was that easy. The thing about arsenic poisoning is that it can occur naturally. Because arsenic is a highly toxic element that occurs naturally in the earth's crust, which makes it easy for arsenic locked up in sediments, to dissolve and contaminate water. For example, in rural villages like Nagriv in those days, reliable, safe sources of drinking water were scarce. Throw in poor sanitation and why not? There was almost no infrastructure in those post war villages and no resources for the testing of wells or springs. Plus, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning are similar to the symptoms of cholera. A vicious little bacterial contaminant, hell bent on getting into your drinking water, which was very convenient. Discolored skin, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain. The much feared and dreaded cholera would be suspected long before anyone thought to look at the beloved village midwife. An unhappy woman had only to whisper to Auntie Susie that her husband was a tiny tyrant or a drunk or too free with his fists. And the little midwife would press a bottle of that milky white fluid into the woman's hand. It was tasteless, odorless, easily slipped into a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. No one, my dear, will be the wiser. Auntie Susie was was clever enough to know that as undetectable as she believed arsenic to be, tracks must still be covered. So she enlisted the services of a helper, the village coroner. She was another Susie, Susie Ola, who knew a thing or two about an unbearable husband, having poisoned her own when she was just 18 years old. In exchange for a cut of the action, Suziola filed death certificate tickets for each of the poisoning victims of Nagreave. With those eyes dotted and those T's crossed, there was never any reason to ask questions, much less investigate. The deaths of some farmers out in the middle of nowhere was nothing the beleaguered and busted Hungarian government had any interest in. Bigger problems to solve, bigger losses to mourn. As settings for mass murder go, it was close to perfect.
- [28:21]
Carrie Bowser
That, it seems, is how it started. In the coils of a terrible war that turned the very continent upside down. Empires dissolved and crumbled to dust. And the same thing happened to Nagriv's ideas of morality.
- [28:38]
Sherry Lynch
It started slowly, so the deaths of the men didn't seem at all suspicious. It was very like the babies dosed with Auntie Susie's deadly elixir. Hungary had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe. In the years following World War I. Almost one in five babies died. Poor health and poor living conditions. As for the grown men who were suddenly stricken, Unfortunate shell shock. Things just delayed. Casualties of the so called Great War. Like Ishmaan Yulyart, who returned from the trenches completely blind.
- [29:13]
Evie
His wife found that rather troublesome.
- [29:17]
Sherry Lynch
And then there was Lajos Takac. The war left him a complete invalid.
- [29:22]
Evie
He couldn't work. Who would keep a husband who didn't work?
- [29:27]
Sherry Lynch
And what kind of person could be so cavalier with a human life? A woman named Maria Sendi was an eager customer. She'd been one of Nagre's beauties, much pursued in her youth. Now Middle aged, she was weary of her husband. Oh, his tiresome jealousy, his aches and pains. He was older than she was and she feared his age made her seem old as well. Her grown son every bit as annoying. He mocked her appearance and declared that he was disgusted by the way she carried on with her lovers. It only took a visit to Auntie Susie for Maria to silence them both. Business was booming, so much so that Auntie Susie hired an assistant, another midwife in the village named Mrs. Chas. Soon dozens of other women would join the team and the death toll climbed. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Did no one ever demand an autopsy? An inquest? Something? Not grieve? Where there was neither a doctor nor a hospital, postmortems were conducted by the village barber who was in no way qualified to even make a guess as to cause of death.
- [30:48]
Evie
Astonishing as it seems, these practices went on for years.
- [30:54]
Sherry Lynch
You know how it is. The first one is always the hardest. And then as the days fly by and no one ever comes to the door with questions, well, it starts to get easier. It starts to feel normal.
- [31:11]
Evie
The midwives and their helpers charged from $8 to $40 for furnishing the poison and a single assisting at the death.
- [31:21]
Sherry Lynch
8 to $40 back then was like spending 150 to $750 today. A lot of money for a people as impoverished as those post war Hungarians were. Not just anyone could afford to murder a bothersome husband. It was a privilege.
- [31:41]
Evie
The poison habit spread to neighboring villages.
- [31:46]
Sherry Lynch
Villages where some deaths were thought to be suspicious.
- [31:51]
Evie
The district physician reports that patient whom he had treated for bronchitis died suddenly a few hours after his visit and had been buried before the doctor was notified of the death.
- [32:05]
Sherry Lynch
The district doctor was adamant that there was no medical cause whatsoever that might explain the man's sudden decline. He demanded an inquest.
- [32:14]
Evie
No witnesses and no proofs were forthcoming. The authorities refrain from exhuming the body as the doctor demanded, without proof of any kind.
- [32:27]
Sherry Lynch
The government refused to investigate any further on the grounds that exhuming and examining the body would be a considerable expense. But the district physician wasn't the only person asking difficult questions. Anonymous letters had begun trickling into the district police. A trickle that soon became a flood and still no inquiries were made. The letters, it was believed, were nothing but idle gossip and personal feuds. Which is a crazy take given that there were apparently dozens of people suggesting that men were being reported murdered and that maybe the cops could swing by and take a look. Nothing. Nothing was done. Auntie Susie kept boiling her fly paper bottling the result and selling it to an ever growing cohort of co conspirators until the spring of 1929. By that point, even the authorities couldn't deny that something peculiar was afoot in these rural communities. Communities. The sheer number of the dead was hard to overlook. All of these men falling suddenly ill and then dying. Oh, sure, it took a decade and a half and a few hundred corpses, but folks were finally starting to, you know, wonder about just what exactly was going on here. It took another anonymous letter to finally break the whole thing wide open. That letter had been sent to an attempt attorney of the court in Solnak, a city roughly 60 miles southeast of Budapest. Weary of the endless rumors, this man decided that there was but one way to put this story to rest. Exhume and test one of the bodies.
- [34:15]
Evie
The body ordered to be exhumed had been buried for 12 years. In the body there was foundation found sufficient poison to kill a half dozen horses.
- [34:27]
Sherry Lynch
Here's a fun fact. Arsenic has a peculiar effect on the decomposition of a dead body. Something known to science. Now for a couple hundred years, arsenic inhibits the bacteria that break a body down after death. And it remains in the hair, nails and skin. Something the poisoners of Nagriv didn't know. They just watched in dismay as more graves were opened.
- [34:54]
Evie
41 bodies were exhumed and in each one there were traces of arsenic.
- [35:01]
Sherry Lynch
Then came the arrests. Woman after woman each confessing her guilt. Though for some it took being confronted with the accusations made by family members and neighbors. They were all united in pointing the finger at Auntie Susie who supplied, they said, not just poison, but persuasion. She had made it all seem so simple. Now please don't think, not even for a second, that admitting guilt is the same thing as remorse.
- [35:35]
Evie
Lydia Ola, guilty of only one murder, said, we are not assassins. We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang or drown them either. They died from poison. This was a pleasant death for them.
- [35:55]
Sherry Lynch
No remorse. 100 women were arrested. 34 women were tried for murder in 42 cases of arsenic poisoning.
- [36:03]
Evie
Police accused the 63 year old widow of well to do farmer Peter Hegades. Acting on an anonymous letter, the widow thereupon killed herself by poison.
- [36:17]
Sherry Lynch
The trials were a sensation. By March 1933 women had been sentenced to life in prison. Two women were sentenced to death.
- [36:26]
Evie
The wife of Laszlo Sabo and the widow of Belint Kordash. Both fainted when they saw the gallows and they were hanged simultaneously while unconscious
- [36:39]
Sherry Lynch
horror heaped upon horror Women charged and convicted of the unthinkable. Like 66 year old Julianne Lipka, who murdered her husband, her sister and her brother in law. The magnitude of the crimes, the cunning attempts at covering it all up. For example, in the Nagrav cemetery, dozens of tombstones had been moved from their original location and placed at other graves in an attempt to confuse the authorities who were now hell bent on exhuming bodies and convicting the killers. And where was Auntie Susie in all of this? She wasn't implicated in every case. She'd done a first rate job of building, holding out her network of helpers. And the secret of boiling flypaper was no longer much of a secret at all. She was directly accused in at least 20 cases.
- [37:33]
Evie
Though Auntie Suzanne Falzikas was arrested, she denied knowing anything about the deaths of the husbands. Then she was allowed to go home free under the impression that she had outwitted the authorities. Meanwhile, her home was searched.
- [37:52]
Sherry Lynch
A large supply of arsenic flypaper was found carefully tucked away in the attic. Row after row of small bottles were lined up neatly on shelves. Some of the bottles appeared to have strips of flypaper soaking in them. Others were filled with a milky looking substance. Those turned out to be the finished arsenic solution just waiting for the next customer. What Auntie Susie didn't know was that she was being followed. Detectives watched and listened as she made hasty visits to widow after widow, warning them that questions were being asked and that they should be ready with answers that might deflect suspicion. The widows were fearful and pressed Auntie Susie for reassurance that the police would find no nothing to implicate them in the deaths of their husbands. Auntie Susie insisted that arsenic couldn't possibly be traced in a decaying body. She was wrong about that, as we now know.
- [38:54]
Evie
But the authorities meanwhile had learned about a telltale fingernail test. They looked for dark splotches under the fingernails which conclusively proved the proof presence of arsenic poisoning.
- [39:08]
Sherry Lynch
Armed with this evidence, investigators returned to Auntie Susie's house to arrest her again. This time they didn't knock.
- [39:18]
Evie
She saw them come in. She looked wildly about her for a chance to escape. There was none. But on the table was a bottle containing the other arsenic solution.
- [39:33]
Sherry Lynch
A bottle intended for yet another unwanted husband.
- [39:38]
Evie
She seized it and poured the contents down her own throat. Then from her came a wild scream. Her death was as agonizing as those of her victims.
- [39:56]
Sherry Lynch
It was rumored that Auntie Susie kept detailed records of her transactions hidden away in her room.
- [40:03]
Evie
Within a short time nearly 100 widows were arrested and charged with murdering their husbands. Some of them were even accused of poisoning their fathers and brothers.
- [40:20]
Sherry Lynch
News of Auntie Susie's suicide spread rapidly throughout Nagreb and the surrounding villages. It caused a panic among the other widows, four of whom managed to take their own lives while in jail awaiting trial. Justice in this instance came with a karmic twist. Whether sentenced to a term of 15 years for some, life in prison for others, death by hanging for the most unfortunate few, each defendant was ordered to pay the cost of prosecution, which meant that the little plots of land, the small cottages that they had been willing to commit murder to own it all had to be sold. So much suffering, so much death. Greed was called out as the motive, the insatiable hunger for ownership of land and property. In deeply Catholic Hungary, no one really spoke of the other motive, the desire to be free, freed from unhappy, often violent marriages. Divorce wasn't exactly illegal. It was permitted in cases where the marriage had been conducted before a civil official. Very, very few people pursued it, though, since Catholic canon law forbade was crazy business for the deadly widows of Nagriv to choose murder over divorce, since the Catholic Church also most definitely felt frowned upon killing. It's like the fifth commandment out of, you know, 10. Divorce doesn't even make that list. The fact is, sometimes people are lulled into acts of evil, even extreme evil, simply because everyone's doing it. That makes it feel acceptable. The fancier way to say that is herd mentality or group think, as in, you might shrink away in horror at the prospect of poisoning your husband, even if he is a drunken brute. Then you see others, people you know and respect and maybe even love, doing just that. Your thinking adjusts to this new reality, and in time it seems less and less awful and more and more reasonable. Your friends are encouraging you to join in. The more the better. It's a way of making the unthinkable thinkable. It's a pattern that plays out over and over in human history. It's this tendency to react to the unspeakable, first with silence and then with complicity, that inspired the German pastor Martin Niemoller to write the poem. First they came.
- [43:04]
Evie
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.
- [43:39]
Sherry Lynch
For the women of Nagre and those other villages. First they came for the violent husbands and then the drunken ones. And then the fathers with their high handed authority. And then the brothers who stood to inherit the land and so on after getting away with it for 20 years the women had allowed themselves to believe that the day would never dawn when it was them they came for. One of the attorneys for the defense was a man named Dr. Viraj who had a surprisingly generous take on the crimes. He described what life had been in the villages and long vanished pre war days.
- [44:25]
Evie
The Griev was Eden then. Then the war came.
- [44:31]
Sherry Lynch
And when peace finally came, Virage ruefully pointed out that poverty had followed right along with it.
- [44:38]
Evie
Instead of plenty, there was barrenness instead of joy, despair. No priest ever visited them. No doctor came to cure their sick. In Negrive, where most of the people could not read or write, desperation became a breeding ground.
- [44:59]
Sherry Lynch
And at just that moment, Auntie Susie appeared.
- [45:04]
Evie
An unlicensed village doctor. She tempted them. Tempted them as perhaps no woman has ever been tempted. She alone is to blame.
- [45:16]
Sherry Lynch
Girl's girl that I am, even I don't agree with that. Auntie Susie may have been the Pied Piper of poison, but the women who took those bottles of arsenic home, they did that willingly. They poured that deadly fluid into brandy, coffee, soup, porridge. Then they stood there, false sympathy pasted onto their faces and coldly watched as their tormentors writhed in agony and died in excruciating pain. It's shocking and unsettling to think of so many women quietly conspiring to commit mass murder. Simple truth is, the angel makers of Nagriv were far from the first women to dispatch an unpleasant spouse with poison. And they certainly wouldn't be the last. Last? That's facts. Men who campaign with fierce piety against such things as no fault divorce would be wise to learn from the past. After all, a cornered animal is a dangerous animal. And humans are already the most dangerous animal of all. You may think she's forgiven you. You may hope she's forgotten the threats, the betrayals, the blows. Of course she has. Look at her. She's so loving, so attentive, so cheerfully submissive. How she respects your headship. How well she's learned her place. Here she comes now with a warm and loving smile and a nice hot cup of tea to help soothe your jangled, weary nerves.
- [47:00]
Narrator
Drink this, my dear.
- [47:14]
Sherry Lynch
Next time on True Weird Stuff. It's hard to imagine how chaotic the battlefield can be when you can't communicate with your soldiers. That's what General John Pershing was staring down. And he knew that there was an answer. It was those professional, warm, friendly telephone operators at, AT and T. So he put out a call for volunteers. Hundreds of women served their country in the trenches. And what their country did to them when they returned. Well, that's on the next True Weird Stuff.
- [47:50]
Carrie Bowser
Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Charlie King, Carrie, Doc Bowser, don Morgan, and Ms. Evie. This is such a unsettling, fascinating story. And the fact that this went on for 20 years is absolutely astonishing.
- [48:16]
Sherry Lynch
I mean, at 20 years, that's like. That's like a generation.
- [48:20]
Carrie Bowser
Right, right, right.
- [48:21]
Sherry Lynch
Entire generation of women, casually. And it wasn't a secret. Like, everybody. The women all knew what the women all knew and what the men suspected. I'm guessing that a lot of them, as they were doubled over and, you know, foaming at the mouth, suspected that their beverage had been adulterated. But it's hard. It is. It's hard to believe. That's the shocking thing. The shocking thing to me is not that people kill each other or that men are brutal and that, you know, women can snap. That's. That's just reality. What's shocking is how many men had to die before somebody went. You know, this is. This seems weird to me. Like, there's something going on in. Not grief.
- [49:07]
Carrie Bowser
I'm gonna say something that's. It's gonna seem a little bit weird, but have you ever been involved in a situation where somebody and the thought did cross your mind, well, if they weren't here anymore, that certainly would solve the problem. I think that.
- [49:22]
Sherry Lynch
Oh, yeah.
- [49:22]
Carrie Bowser
I mean, I think that. And of course, I think that everybody. I think that.
- [49:28]
Evie
Good.
- [49:28]
Carrie Bowser
Right. Thinking People have that stuff cross their mind from time to time. I guess what I'm saying is I've admitted that before, but. But you never sort of take an action on that. But the idea that as a group, everybody's looking around going, boy, this is a really difficult situation. And some of these are really bad guys. You can't get divorced. That would look wrong. We can. We can kill them.
- [49:53]
Sherry Lynch
Oh, okay.
- [49:53]
Carrie Bowser
Well, let's get. Since other people are doing it, it seems like it's okay.
- [49:57]
Evie
I'm.
- [49:58]
Sherry Lynch
And you can. You can see that. You can. I mean, they. The one woman who said it wasn't like we stabbed them.
- [50:07]
Carrie Bowser
I know. And she said it was a rather pleasant way to go. Well, as it turns out, it really was not a pleasant way to go. I don't know much in this world But I do know that arsenic poisoning is not a pleasant way to go. And I think that it's very interesting that Auntie Susie ended up dying that
- [50:25]
Sherry Lynch
way and by her own hand and bloody. Was that because she knew. I mean, they, they did hang several of these women and they hanged them, they fainted and they hanged them before they even came to. Which I can't even imagine what that whole scene looked like. That's so barbaric and insane. But here's. We have to talk about groupthink here because, yeah, that, so there are a couple of factors and you have to, like, you have to set aside this is not an elitist perspective at all. These were very uneducated people. Everyone in all directions, the men, the women, everybody was an uneducated person, unsophisticated, unworldly people. And so you only had to get away with murder a few times for it to seem like a completely reasonable, normal and normal approach. And there are so many things that happened in Nagariv and this part of rural Hungary that contributed to this. Like, without all of these factors, this event never takes place. So the. Before the country plunged itself Into World War I, you had, you had arranged marriages, which, you know, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. But you, you, you did not necessarily have people that were happy to be partnered.
- [51:55]
Carrie Bowser
Right.
- [51:55]
Sherry Lynch
With each other. Okay, so there's that. You had a culture, you had a very heavy handed patriarchal culture where, you know, a husband was allowed to slap you around. It was just, that was just part of what marriage was. So you had that and you had a culture of heavy drinking that was socially endorsed.
- [52:18]
Carrie Bowser
Right?
- [52:19]
Sherry Lynch
And so you had a lot of, you had a lot of drunken men knocking women and kids around. And that was just life. And you know, so, so there's that, right? There's that whole piece of it. Then the men go off to war and the ones that come home are destroyed. Yeah, the, the what, what World War I did to the, the people who served is just unthinkably brutal. So they were, they were not, they were not okay when they returned home. And the women by this point had been independent. They had starfished in their beds. They had lived in homes without violence. They had, they had not been taken and used sexually by a man who made their skin crawl. They had taken lovers that they felt passion for and wanted to be with it. You can see how the storm now is beginning to build and that it's going to lead to some horrific eruption. And that's exactly what happened. And in Hungary divorce was not illegal if you had a civil marriage. If you were married by a priest in a church, divorce was illegal. So it wasn't just that the Catholic Church would not let you get divorced. The country of Hungary would not allow you to be divorced if you'd been married in a church. So. And most of these people were so divorced, the only way out was death. That was it. That was the only way out of this that these women could see. And the trusted village healer made it so easy.
- [54:01]
Carrie Bowser
This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance tech at a university, he knows ordering from multiple suppliers takes time away from keeping their arena up and running. That's why he counts on Grainger to get everything he needs, from lighting and H vac parts to plumbing supplies, all in one place. And with fast, dependable delivery, he's stocked and ready for the next tip off. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. You were talking about the men coming back from war with the ptsd. And I think that certainly in wars prior to this, that sort of thing happened. But one of the things that happened with World War I, they were able to videotape, take movies of. I guess they weren't really videotaping, they were taking movies. They were able to take movies of these men. And all of a sudden, it was widespread, being able to see certain examples of what had happened with this. And I think up until that time, I don't think that people accepted it as a condition based on what had happened in the war. It was not something that was widespread. You have to believe that during, like the Civil War in this country, that sort of thing happened all the time as well. But World War I was, they're all bad. But it was. You talked about it in the script. It was a particularly. That trench warfare was particularly awful. I mean, the conditions were just absolutely brutal because not only were you dealing with things like trench foot and living with your feet in water, there was vermin. It was just. It's the kind of existence that you wouldn't wish on people. And so not only do you have those conditions, oh, by the way, there's people shooting at you as well.
- [56:02]
Sherry Lynch
And there was no. There was nothing for these men. Like, there was no VA Hospital, there was no, like, this is in Hungary, but there was no equivalent of like the American Legion or the VFW where at least you could go and commiserate with your brothers.
- [56:23]
Carrie Bowser
Right? There was no Wounded Warrior project.
- [56:27]
Sherry Lynch
These men were snatched out of the fields and sent to the trenches. And it was absolute like if, if, if there was ever a time that hell existed on this earth, that might have been it, that might have been inhumane and unspeakable. And nobody came back. Okay. No one came back okay.
- [56:53]
Carrie Bowser
No.
- [56:54]
Sherry Lynch
And there were things that we didn't know then that we know now about. Like the impact on the human body of proximity to an explosion. 10,000 shells an hour blowing up overhead while you're living in mud with trench foot and blood and urine and fecal matter and blown off limbs and hungry and cold and dysentery. Oh my God. These men came home destroyed. And the women they came home to had moved on for better or worse. And a lot of the cases worse, they'd moved on and, and now in the defense of the women and children they came home to. Do you think that those people were in any way prepared for the impact that combat had had on these men?
- [57:43]
Carrie Bowser
No, absolutely not.
- [57:46]
Sherry Lynch
I mean we're just now it's 2026 and we're just now really talking openly about PTSD. And I mean we do have the Wounded Warrior project and we, we have, I, we, we still are on, we are, we are terrible with our veterans falling short. We do not take care of our veterans. But at least we're now having conversations about post traumatic stress disorder. These, these, these people came home from the trenches and they were self medicating with alcohol. Some of them were so disabled psychologically and physically that what came home, what came home was something no one recognized. Right. And they could not resume their old lives. Their old lives no longer existed for them to resume. And these women just weren't, they weren't having it. They were, they just weren't going to be having it. It was hard pass gonna. And, and thought because they weren't shooting and stabbing them that they were like merciful euthanization. I guess when, and that just wasn't the case at all.
- [59:01]
Carrie Bowser
You know, I wonder, you said that it this spread to some surrounding communities. I wonder if we, if they, if this full scope of this ended up being underreported in the long run. As to how many of these men were killed.
- [59:19]
Sherry Lynch
I think it absolutely had to be just based on. Okay, so it went on for 20 years.
- [59:25]
Evie
It's a long time.
- [59:26]
Carrie Bowser
It's a long time.
- [59:27]
Sherry Lynch
20 years. And it was Nagriv and the surrounding rural communities. There were multiple anonymous letters and complaints that weren't taken seriously at all. In part because of another factor which was Hungary by the. All of Europe post World War I and Hungary, the. The dis. The Depression. Keep in mind, when this happened, right, the Great Depression, people were starving, right? Europe was in a shambles, Hungary was in a shambles. The. They're trying desperately to rebuild post war, and some folks complaining that some random farmer died unexpectedly, that just didn't get it. Nobody cared.
- [60:13]
Carrie Bowser
And the Depression.
- [60:14]
Sherry Lynch
Nobody cared.
- [60:15]
Carrie Bowser
The Depression they had over there happened immediately after the war. There was here in the United States. It really didn't hit till the 1930s, but over there, you know, World War I ended in 1918, and so it was almost immediate that they were in some kind of a depression. And the huge number of young men who died in that war, the thing that is horrifying about it is the generals would have these massive charges and whatnot, and all these men would be slaughtered. And it would. They were poor decisions. They were tactically poor decisions. And you realize how many millions of these men died just because of poor tactical decisions by the leaders in this war. Not to mention, as you were saying, some of them that were coming back, that you said in the script, that not only they have the ptsd, but many of them missing limbs, blindness, all of those kinds of things that they're coming home to. And,
- [61:19]
Sherry Lynch
and there was nothing. There was no infrastructure, there was no way to catch these returning soldiers in. In any kind of meaningful, supportive way. Like they literally were just sent back to the farms. Figure it out.
- [61:36]
Carrie Bowser
I'm just thinking that Josh Mankiewicz really would have been very busy with this. Can you imagine?
- [61:48]
Sherry Lynch
It is. It is painful that it went on for as long as it did, but again, this is one of those where you have to look at the whole picture because you can go, what do you mean this went on for 20 years? Well, the country was in ruins, the continent was in ruins. People, people were desperate and everything was devastated. And a bunch of farmers in the middle of nowhere dropping dead hardly seemed like news.
- [62:21]
Carrie Bowser
They had fly paper.
- [62:23]
Sherry Lynch
Yeah. So. And Auntie Susie, you know, she took cover in this, and I hope you realize I didn't come right out and say it because it hasn't been proven, but. But it sure does look like she killed the husband to get the money and the property.
- [62:40]
Carrie Bowser
I'm sure, I'm sure that she did. It's interesting, you were saying, when they took the corpses to the barbers, the barbers were kind of the catch all for everything. They were the dentists back in the day. If you had any problem, get a haircut. And in fact, I Believe the barber pole. So they did bloodletting too. The barber pole, that has the. The red, the white and the blue. The red is the blood, the blue is the vein you took it from. And a white must be what you were wearing. I don't know, I can't remember. But those barber poles, they all meant something, surprisingly enough.
- [63:22]
Sherry Lynch
And the barber was apparently a cousin of Susie Ola who was writing up the death certificates. So the whole thing was like super mafia, right? And not only was. Well, the. The judge was legit, but the barber, not only was he Susie's cousin, but he wasn't that. He wasn't that bright. Like, he wasn't even that good a barber. And so he. The hell did he know what he was doing? Looking at a dead body, conducting the postmortems. He's the barber.
- [63:51]
Carrie Bowser
Do you think he at least cut hair? Well,
- [63:57]
Sherry Lynch
I'm not sure that what, that the standard of a haircut back then would.
- [64:02]
Carrie Bowser
Am I, am I thinking too much about that?
- [64:04]
Sherry Lynch
I mean, it was. He got it out of your eyes. And I think that was the job.
- [64:08]
Carrie Bowser
Okay?
- [64:09]
Sherry Lynch
Primary the thing. So this was very corrupt and it was Auntie Susie spun herself a very corrupt and cunning little web and, and gave herself a fair amount of plausible deniability because, you know, eventually she was like one of those MLM people that you see on Facebook. You know, she. She sold the poison to people who then made and sold the poison.
- [64:33]
Carrie Bowser
Right.
- [64:34]
Sherry Lynch
Like she had a pyramid scheme going. And. And so she was not implicated in all of these deaths, but enough of them, and she knew she'd be hanged and that's why she slammed the poison down and took herself out when the police showed back up a second time. So there, there were all of the, like real long term vision and planning belonged to her. Everybody else was just in the moment trying to survive. And we really do have that one lawyer in Solnak to thank for getting this anonymous letter and going, you know what? Where there's smoke, there's gotta be some kind of fire. Let's dig one of these bodies up and if it tests clean, then we'll know it's just a bunch of village superstition.
- [65:21]
Carrie Bowser
I was thinking about him because it seems like every time we have a story where some horrific thing is happening, there's always a hero that was able to bring it to light. Who stood up and went, something's wrong here. Can anybody not see this?
- [65:37]
Sherry Lynch
And that was him for sure. Yeah, he was that guy. So thanks to him there were some prosecutions, but There it was sort of like, you know, I feel kind of bad for the first wave of women that were prosecuted and tried because the public appetite sort of seemed to die down after we hanged a few and sent some more to prison. And I think a lot of people got away with murder in rural Hungary
- [66:09]
Carrie Bowser
post World War I. I have no doubt of that. I think that wherever they found that, that they didn't find it all.
- [66:16]
Sherry Lynch
Yeah. Oh, they didn't get everybody. And it's. Look, you know, you. There are things, there are bigger pictures. Let's pull on some of the big picture threads here because we're currently living in a moment where people are yammering, you know, to get rid of no fault divorce, for example, you know, the sanctity of the family and all that. I'm just going to tell you, unhappy people will find a way out. They will. Before no fault divorce was made legal in the United States of America, we did have people die of stomach upset and poison. But we had a bigger problem. And you really see this in like the early 20th century, the great Depression, Prohibition, right up through World War II. Bigamy.
- [67:05]
Carrie Bowser
Oh, yeah.
- [67:07]
Sherry Lynch
People were like, well, can't get a divorce. I'm out of here. And now, now I'm with you.
- [67:12]
Carrie Bowser
Go reinvent myself somewhere else. Another part of the country.
- [67:16]
Sherry Lynch
People's family trees are probably. There's probably a lot more big me in the average family tree than we have any way of knowing. Because you would say, well, I was married. Well, are you divorced? Oh, yeah, I'm divorced. Did you just get married again? So people, you can impose laws and restrictions on human behavior, but you can't, you will never eliminate certain human things. You just can't. People will find a way. Miserable people will find a way to be free. They always, always have. And like, okay, you don't like divorce. All right, yeah, I hear you. It's miserable. Do you prefer murder? Because
- [68:05]
Carrie Bowser
it seems like if it's illegal, if you are married in the church in Hungary at this time and you just simply can't get divorced and you are in an intolerable situation, you can see where somebody who has no means whatsoever to go somewhere else would say, this is it. This is what I've got to do. I'm not trying to say that it's okay, it's murder, but you can see where somebody could get wind themselves into a situation where they felt so cornered and so trapped that they didn't have any other option.
- [68:42]
Sherry Lynch
Well, and one of the things that you see, especially if you're you know, a Dateline watcher, true crime person. The killer will have a justification. Now, it sounds real weak and pathetic and shabby in the light of, you know, the courtroom, but, you know, they always have a story.
- [69:03]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah.
- [69:03]
Sherry Lynch
For why it seemed like this was the only way out. You know, I often think about the Chris Watts case. Chris Watts is a family annihilator. He murdered his wife, Shanann, and their two daughters, and she was pregnant. Shannan was pregnant, and he dumped their bodies in an oil tank. He was an oil field worker. He was having an affair. He had a mistress who had no idea that he was married and was horrified when she found out. And he really felt like, you know, that was his option. Murder was. Murdering his whole family was the only way that he could, you know, be happy and free. And divorce was perfectly legal. It was an option on the table that he chose not to take. So, you know, anytime you think you can legislate morality or legislate behavior that fits into your religious scope or your idea of how people should conduct themselves, you. You run across human nature. And human nature will always find a way.
- [70:05]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah.
- [70:05]
Sherry Lynch
And unfortunately, often, you know, it's this. And men used to. Men used to. Men used to die of upset. Tommy's, like, a lot more often than they do now, in part because, you know, we do have that test for arsenic, and we've had it since forever, a couple hundred years almost, but. But also now, you know, we've got criminal forensics, and so it's harder to have. It's harder to just tell folks, oh, my husband, he had this weird upset stomach, and now he's dead. Like, it's harder to just say that without being questioned.
- [70:41]
Carrie Bowser
Do you wonder, in looking at this situation, whether some of these women individually. Yes, there's the group mentality, but do you wonder if some of them individually had second thoughts about doing this, felt guilt about doing this?
- [70:54]
Sherry Lynch
Oh, sure. Yeah.
- [70:55]
Carrie Bowser
You know, that's the thing that I've sort of wondered as you were talking about it. Yes, you could make the decision to do it, but then later you go, well, he was blind. He came back from the war. It really wasn't his fault, you know.
- [71:08]
Sherry Lynch
Oh. I suspect there are women who suffered until their last breath with guilt and remorse. They, you know, they don't tend to make the news. They don't. They don't tend to get remembered by
- [71:24]
Carrie Bowser
history because statistically, all of these women were not sociopaths. Now, maybe Auntie Susie was, but. Or a psychopath, but. But all of these women Aren't. And so that's just the one thing that I was thinking about when you were telling the story. It was like, there has to be somebody that went, boy, you know, I did do this and I feel really bad about it now.
- [71:48]
Sherry Lynch
Well, there was, there was a culture, there was a mindset that made murder more comfortable in this part of the world at this time. So something that we haven't really talked about because it's so distasteful and heart wrenching. They killed a lot of babies. They did. They killed a lot of babies. Auntie Susie was an abortionist, but it became easier to poison the babies after they were born.
- [72:20]
Carrie Bowser
Well, that was the thing that I was going to ask you about because it seemed like that that was a pretty common thing as well.
- [72:27]
Sherry Lynch
So this, this, this one child situation. The people of rural Hungary, when the angel makers of Nagriv story broke on the world stage, they were like absolutely condemned as greedy peasants. And you could see that, you could hear that in some of the press coverage of the day, Right. There was no birth control in part because this was a Catholic population and no contraception. And also it hadn't been invented yet. Really.
- [73:01]
Carrie Bowser
No.
- [73:02]
Sherry Lynch
So the only, you know, there were the old methods, tried and true, but it wasn't like anybody could take the pill or get an IUD or whatever. And yet heavily Catholic country, rural Hungary. And it's weird how the families are so small. Like, it's weird that we have all these single child families. Like, statistically, that doesn't add up, right?
- [73:26]
Carrie Bowser
No.
- [73:27]
Sherry Lynch
And in the families where there was land to be inherited, those were the people whose babies died shortly after birth. The churchyards were filled with little tombstones of babies that had lived two, three, four, five days in families that had, that had land, resources and wealth. So when we, you know, we talk about, it's kind, it's just, it's so fun to talk about. Oh, the drunken, obnoxious husband. Here's some soup. Oh, he's gone. But that there's a dark on absolutely horrific layer to this story that never got the same attention that the husbands did and that's all the dead babies. Now why do you think it is that, do you think that it was just so much more sensational to talk about the dead husbands and so devastating and evil to talk about the dead babies that we kick that to the side. What do you think?
- [74:34]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah, I think that it's just the fact that, you know, when people become adults, I mean, it's murder's murder. I understand that But. But maybe there's a feeling of. Because that these were not humans that we could see had personalities and talked and everything else, that in killing them, it was. Wasn't as bad that they were not fully. They're fully formed humans. That's not what I'm saying. They're not. Their personalities are not fully formed. Let's put it that way.
- [75:07]
Sherry Lynch
Well, here's. Here's what I think. I think that it's easier for us as humans to talk about adults killing adults. It's wrong, and we condemn it. You know, and we can say. And I. I have tried to be very generous to the husbands in this story who came back from World War I just destroyed. Right. But there's a certain amount of it. It's sensational and it's lurid and it's socially acceptable to talk about murder when you're talking about a drunken, brutalizing, loud of a man. Right. But people back then, when this story broke, people back then shied away so hard from acknowledging how many babies they had murdered.
- [75:59]
Carrie Bowser
Is it just because it's too horrific to think about?
- [76:01]
Sherry Lynch
I think so. Yeah. I think so. I think it didn't get the kind of press coverage that the husband, father, brother murders did for a couple of reasons, starting with what kind of woman poisons her own baby? That's monstrous. And I think that. And you have to remember where we are in time. I think we're at a point in time, time when collectively, that was so difficult to talk about, that we just didn't. Yeah, but we could talk about, you know, your drunken husband who's too free with his fists. Let's kill him. You know, let's. We're doing him a favor. So that was my feel, because the. The baby thing, like, I went, I. Every time I encountered it, it was this brief, like, whoa, whoa, back that up. Whoa, whoa, back that up. What do you mean? What do you mean? These families only had one child and multiple pregnancies over and over again? What do you mean? There are so many of these infant tombstones. Well, they were. They were getting their milk dosed.
- [77:15]
Carrie Bowser
And once again, is anybody feeling bad about this? That's my question. I know that it's a rhetorical question, but, you know, I mean,
- [77:28]
Sherry Lynch
even. Even when this came to light, that it was. There was just. Well, and there. There were some babies too. Like, people just couldn't talk about it. So we. We know for a fact that a lot of people got away with murder Post World War I in that part of the world. A lot of people got away with murder and a handful of people were brought to justice. And it. I think even today the true count is not known or knowable. What do you think?
- [78:04]
Carrie Bowser
I think this is gonna haunt me. I think that's the case. But I think you're right. I think the true number of people that died from this, I don't think we'll ever know. I only think that they hit a certain number. I'm not going to say as that they scratch. Just scratched the surface. But I think there were more. I really do. For 20 years. For 20 years.
- [78:24]
Sherry Lynch
Come on. And, and you know, we. When. If you zoom out a little bit further and, and this is, you know, people. Nothing good comes of denying human beings their inherent dignity and their rights and their freedom. Nothing good comes of that. It never ends well. And so when you had a culture, when you had a world where no one was free to choose who they married, you're not a woman. Like, I gotta tell you, when you're 16, having some drunken guy old enough to be your paw, you know, running on top of you is not the life you want for yourself.
- [79:06]
Carrie Bowser
It's. It is horrifying. And it wouldn't take much. I can understand where you would feel so backed into a corner and there were others around you doing it. And it would. It would. The thinking would be this will draw less attention to myself. I can see where you say I have no choice.
- [79:23]
Sherry Lynch
And it just get. It just was easy, you know, it was just an easy thing to do. And these, some of these men were so broken by the war that I think that their poisoners convinced themselves they were doing a favor. And you know how easy it is to talk yourself into something terrible if it's what you want. Yeah, like that. That's what's. That's what makes human beings such a handful.
- [79:49]
Carrie Bowser
Sherry. I've done that with cheesecake before and rationalized and I've done that before myself. So I can certainly understand where that could escalate to murder.
- [79:58]
Sherry Lynch
Oh, easily, easily. Like, that's the thing about the story of the angel makers of Nagriv. There are so many different roles that you can slide into and understand how these things happened, including the part on the part of the police and the courts ignoring it for 20 years.
- [80:24]
Carrie Bowser
Right.
- [80:24]
Sherry Lynch
You can understand that now. The. The one like, I totally get like, oh, you. That's. I've had enough of you. Drink this. Like, I get that the part that I don't get is killing a baby so that I can get a few hectares of grass. That part I don't understand.
- [80:42]
Carrie Bowser
That's a pretty high level of selfishness.
- [80:46]
Sherry Lynch
I can't, like, I can put myself into the shoes of, of a lot of these women and be like, oh, my God, if this man touches me one more time, go, go get the poison. You know, I can see that. But the children, and they were also, you know, they were, they were knocking off fathers and, and brothers too, because the, and you have to think about again, like, super, super, you know, he, like old school Catholic patriarchal culture. Your brother could be a drunken half wit and he's going to inherit everything and you're not getting anything.
- [81:23]
Carrie Bowser
Yep.
- [81:25]
Sherry Lynch
Now if, if something were to happen, God forbid, your brother's no longer here.
- [81:32]
Carrie Bowser
God forbid.
- [81:33]
Sherry Lynch
Yeah. That's another conversation. But you see how easily these women slid into this.
- [81:43]
Carrie Bowser
That is, it's okay, because it seems like there's a lot of this going on. This seems like it's become an acceptable solution to this problem.
- [81:54]
Sherry Lynch
So you have to just say to yourself, because you can. We see this on Dateline. We see this on 2020 all the time. Even now, when it seems impossible that you're going to get away with anything based on forensics and DNA and all that, we see how people go from, I'm unhappy and I feel trapped to I'm unhappy and I feel trapped, and this is the only way.
- [82:23]
Carrie Bowser
And a lot of times they have a partner in crime who they talk about it with. And as long as they both agree, you go, well, this person agreeing with this too. And we, this, this does make sense. This is the right thing to do.
- [82:39]
Evie
Yeah.
- [82:40]
Sherry Lynch
And, you know, and if the first one is always the hardest, some of these women, they killed a husband, they killed another husband, they killed their father, they killed their brother, they killed a baby. Like some of these women were what you would call serial killers today. Right?
- [83:01]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah. The, the only thing, serial killers usually don't know their victims. But these women certainly, certainly did. They knew their victims.
- [83:09]
Sherry Lynch
They certainly did. But if you think about it, right.
- [83:13]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah, yeah, it's a serial killing. Yeah, I agree.
- [83:17]
Sherry Lynch
But, but the first one was the hard one. The first one was terrible. Oh, it was so hard that first time. You were a nervous wreck. You, you were nervous wreck buying the poison. You were shaking like a leaf. Maybe you brought it home and you put it in the cupboard and, and you know, just thought about it for a while. Maybe it took, maybe it took hours, maybe it took weeks for you to pour it into the soup. And then it was too late. There was no like on. There was no undoing it once you poured it into the soup, watched him drink it. His death, his brutal death was inevitable. And by that point, now you've done. It's done. It's done. Now what are you going to do? You have these children to deal with. You have a fire to build or whatever. You've got to get him in the ground. Yeah. So I would just say, guys, uh, some of y' all have some very, very anachronistic ideas about how life should work. And. And trust me, you don't want to go back to those days. You don't want that. You think you do. You think that, oh, somehow you're. Everything will be better for you if. If people have fewer choices or fewer options. Nothing will be better for you if people have fewer choices.
- [84:43]
Carrie Bowser
Especially if you were in Hungary from 1919 to 1929.
- [84:48]
Sherry Lynch
Dude, I've seen Dateline episodes where you didn't want to be in Peoria six months ago. Like, you when someone is desperate. And like I said in the episode, there's nothing more dangerous than an animal that's been backed into a corner.
- [85:05]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah.
- [85:05]
Sherry Lynch
Especially if that's a human animal.
- [85:07]
Carrie Bowser
Yeah.
- [85:08]
Sherry Lynch
With opposable thumbs and, you know, a brain. Whoa, buddy. That's bad. So do you have any last. I want to thank our incredible cast, including my niece Evie, making her voice acting debut. She was as cute as a button, was she not? She was so excited doing this episode. She did such a great job.
- [85:29]
Carrie Bowser
And thank you for allowing me to be the voice of Auntie Susie.
- [85:35]
Sherry Lynch
No one, no one plays a better Eastern European crone than you do, my friend. So, any last thoughts on the angel makers of Nagreave before? No.
- [85:47]
Carrie Bowser
No, it's just. No, I don't really. I mean, it is if you stand away from it and you sort of stand away from the horror of it. It's a fascinating story and I really. I am fascinated by it.
- [86:04]
Sherry Lynch
You know what I wonder? They got caught. They got caught because that attorney finally responded.
- [86:10]
Carrie Bowser
You're going to letter something I was going to say earlier. And that is. It makes you wonder if this has happened somewhere else and they didn't get caught and whoever the person was that was the ringleader just died or something.
- [86:23]
Sherry Lynch
I'm pretty sure it's happened more than once. I have a feeling that it happened during the great days of Manifest Destiny. I have a feeling that some of those, you know, hard, hard formed Western widows made the choice to be Western widows. Like, I think this has happened. Has it happened on this scale because that's what's really shocking about this story, is that it was so many people in such a large area for so long. Maybe it's never happened quite on this scale, but it's happened. And there's a really strong chance that somewhere in your family tree, gentle Listener, is an uncle or a grandfather who died young and suddenly, and nobody's really sure why. Was it appendicitis? Was it food poisoning? Did he have stomach cancer? What happened? One day he was fine and the next day he was gone.
- [87:21]
Carrie Bowser
But my grandmother was from Austria, so.
- [87:28]
Sherry Lynch
So join us next time on True Weird Stuff. Since we're in the World War II state of mind, we're gonna a World War I state of mind. We're gonna stay there and we're gonna meet the hello Girls and their story.
- [87:42]
Carrie Bowser
I'm looking forward to this, too.
- [87:43]
Sherry Lynch
Absolutely incredible and shocking. And it just shows you that we've come a long way, but we got a long way to go. So thank you so much for listening to True Weird Stuff. Our website is TrueWeirdStuff.com and we're on Instagram and we'd love to hear from you. We do take requests for episodes. You can shoot us a message@truewordstuff.com or DM us on our True Word Stuff Instagram. We've done episodes by request and we'd love to hear from you because you're the person we're making it for and we appreciate you. We'll see you next time.
- [88:16]
Carrie Bowser
And if you listen to us on Apple Podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review True
- [88:29]
Sherry Lynch
Weird Stuff, hit our website true weirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff stuff.com and follow
- [88:42]
Carrie Bowser
true Weird Stuff on Instagram.
- [88:44]
Sherry Lynch
True Weird Stuff is a NOW Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sherry lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Carrie Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Fury. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axeland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and zane Nash.
- [89:16]
Carrie Bowser
Copyright 2026 Now Media.
- [89:20]
Sherry Lynch
All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.
- [89:27]
Carrie Bowser
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- [89:35]
Evie
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- [89:42]
Carrie Bowser
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- [89:47]
Evie
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