The Hungarian women who poisoned their husbands for decades

Telegraph

18 hours ago

Is murder ever justifiable? That is the question at the heart of Hope Reese's compelling new book, The Women are Not Fine, which tells the story of the group of Hungarian women who killed at least 101 people – possibly many more – between 1910 and 1929. The 'women of Nagyrév' poisoned their victims, most of them men and many their own husbands, by lacing their meals with arsenic.
Reese herself came across the story by 'ending up in Budapest, mostly on a whim', having left Kentucky, where she was working as a freelance journalist. Here she met a man named Zoltan, who told her that his grandmother had spent 25 years in prison for trying to poison his grandfather in the 1960s. Apparently, her crime had been inspired by an earlier group from Nagyrév known as the 'angel makers'. Zoltan urged Reese to investigate.
Her story begins with the village midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas. Auntie Zsuzsi, as she was known, smoked a pipe and could often be found at the village bar. She held a uniquely powerful position: she could perform abortions (illegal at the time), and, using her knowledge of drugs, created an 'elixir' that could calm violent men who were beating their wives. It was first supplied to her neighbour Maria, whose husband did indeed 'calm down' – before dying three weeks later.
News of the 'elixir' spread, and over the following decades, Auntie Zsuzsi and other ringleaders assisted many more women with their marital problems. Vials were passed from hand to hand, the method for extracting arsenic from fly paper by soaking it in vinegar whispered across kitchen tables. Life expectancy was so low – just 37 for a man in 1900 – and many of the victims were already sick, so their deaths did not cause much suspicion. The murders continued for decades before people began to write anonymous letters to the authorities, and eventually an investigation was launched.
The scale of the case caused a sensation. Reese begins her book with the first trial, in December 1929; a black and white photograph shows four defendants, hollow-eyed in their shawls and heads bound with black kerchiefs. These were the first of 28 women who would be prosecuted for the region's murders. International journalists, locals, Hungarian grandees, society ladies, politicians and doctors squeezed onto the benches to witness the legal exposition of this lurid tale. The women were denounced by the judge for 'coldblooded murder'.
And yet, as Reese reveals, most of these women killed for a reason, and mostly as a last resort. Born into relentless poverty, they were pressured into marrying young and lived a life of labour and hardship: 'being a wife meant obeying a litany of unwritten rules, rigidly delineated by gender.' Nagyrév was rife with alcoholism, misogyny and domestic abuse, significantly worsened by the First World War, which had left surviving men physically and psychologically crippled. In this 'toxic cocktail', the Nagyrév women began to see murder as the only way to survive; as one woman calmly told the police: 'I do not feel guilty at all. My husband was a very bad man, who beat and tortured me. Since he died, I have found my peace.'
It is a brutal story. The name 'angel makers' originally came from the word for abortionists, and this is where a dark tale turns black: food was so scarce that women were also seeking out dangerous abortions or even choosing infanticide over watching their children starve to death.
Reese also draws some fruitful parallels with today's world. As with the Nagyrév women – those who were convicted were hanged or imprisoned, some took their own lives – a history of abuse is rarely considered relevant in cases where a woman has murdered her partner. This is despite research showing that about half of female prisoners have experienced domestic violence. Men who commit a 'crime of passion' can be treated more leniently; but in lacking physical dominance, this is usually not possible for women, who have to plan their crime. As Reese shows us, women usually kill when they feel there's no other option: statistics show that when there's more access to domestic abuse shelters, fewer men are murdered by their female partners.
The story of The Women Are Not Fine is not morally clear-cut. If, as in many of these cases, the woman's life was at risk, murder might be understandable, not excusable. However, as the murders escalated, some women killed elderly relatives because they were abusive or had rowed – poisoning had become easy and commonplace, and seen as the easiest way to achieve independence.
The ringleaders of the poisonings cut even more complex figures: were they feminist heroes, helping women in the most horrific of circumstances, or brutal serial killers who orchestrated murder on a vast scale? That is the dilemma Reese skilfully presents. But she leaves no doubt that, regardless of moral positions, violence always begets violence.
★★★★☆