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shy
Crypt Keeper
Australia
265 Posts |
 Posted - 24 February 2003 : 21:16:14
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In 1916, the Hungarian tax authorities noted that it had been a long time since rates had been paid on a house at 17 Rakoczi Street in the village of Cinkota, ten miles northwest of Budapest.
The house had been empty for two years, and since it seemed impossible to trace the owner, or the man who rented it, the district court of Pest-Pilis decided to sell it.
A blacksmith named Istvan Molnar purchased it for a modest sum, and moved in with his wife and family. When tidying up the workshop, Molnar came upon a number of sealed oil drums behind a mess of rusty pipes and corrugated iron. They had been solidly welded, and for a few days the Blacksmith left them alone. Then his wife asked him what was in the drums – thinking they may contain petrol – and he settled down to removing the top of one of the drums with various tools. And when Molnar finally raised the lid, he clutched his stomach and rushed outside. His wife came in to see what had upset him, when she peered into the drum she screamed and fainted. It contained the naked body of a woman, in a crouching position, the practically airless drum had preserved the body like canned meat.
Six more drums proved to contain female corpses. Most of the women were middle-aged. And the police soon realised that there was no way to identify them. They did not even know the name of the person who had placed them there. The previous tenant had gone off to war in 1914, he had spent little time in the house, and had kept to himself, so nobody knew who he was. The police found it difficult to even get a description of the man. They merely had seven unknown victims of an unknown murderer.
Professor Balazs Kenyeres, of the Police Medical Laboratory was of the opinion that the women had been dead for more than 2 years. But at least he was able to take fingerprints, however, at this stage, fingerprinting was unhelpful, since it only told them that the women had no criminal records.
Some three weeks after the discovery, Detective Geza Bialokurszky was placed in charge of the investigation, he was one of the foremost investigators of the Budapest police. He settled down to the task of identifying the female corpses. If Professor Kenyeres was correct about the time of death – and he might easily have been wrong, since few pathologists are asked to determine the age of canned corpse – the women must of vanished in 1913 or thereabouts. The Missing Persons’ Bureau provided him with a list of about 400 women who had vanished between 1912 and 1914.
Bialokurszky narrowed these down to fifteen. But these women seemed to have no traceable relatives. Eventually, Bialokurszky found the last employer of a 36-year-old cook named Anna Novak, who had left her job abruptly in 1911. Her employer was the widow of a Hussar colonel, and she still had Anna’s ‘servants book’ - a kind of identity card that contained a photograph, personal details, and a list of previous employers, as well as, their personal comments. The widow assumed that she had simply found a better job or had gotten married. She still had the woman’s trunk in the attic.
This offered Bialokurszky the clue he needed so urgently, a sheet from a newspaper, the Pesti Hirlap, with an advertisement marked in red pencil
‘Widower urgently seeks acquaintance of mature, warm-hearted spinster or widow to help assuage loneliness mutually. Send photo and details, Poste Restante Central P.O Box 717. Marriage possible and even desirable.’
Back at headquarters, the trunk was examined and a number of prints were found, these matched those of one of the victims. The Post Office was able to tell Bialokurszky that Box 717 had been rented by a man who had signed for his key in the name of ‘Elemer Nagy’ of 14 Kossuth Street, Petszenterzsebet, a suburb of Budapest. This proved to be an empty plot. Next, the detective and his team studied the agony column of the Pesti Hirlap for 1912 and 1913. They found more than 20 requests for ‘warm-hearted spinsters’ which gave the address of Box 717. This was obviously how the killer of Cinkota had contacted his victims. On one occasion he had paid for the advertisement by postal order, and the Post Office was able to trace it. ‘Elemer Nagy’ had given an address in Cinkota, but it was not the house in Rakoczi Street, where the bodies had been found, in fact, it proved to be the address of the undertaker. The killer had a sense of humour.
Bialokurszky gave a press conference, and asked the newspapers to publish the signature of ‘Elemer Nagy’. This quickly brought a letter from a domestic servant Rosa Diosi, who was 27, and admitted that she had been the mistress of the man in question. His real name was, Bela Kiss, and she had last heard from him in 1914, when he had written to her from a Serbian prisoner of war camp.
Bialokurszky had not divulged that he was looking for the Cinkota mass murderer, and Rosi Diosi was shocked when he told her. She had met Kiss in 1914, he had beautiful brown eyes, a silky moustache, and a deep, manly voice. Sexually, he had apparently been insatiable.
Other women contacted the police, and they had identical stories to tell, answering the advertisement, meeting the handsome Kiss and being quickly invited to be his mistress, with promises of marriage. They were also expected to hand over their life savings, and all had been invited to Cinkota. Some had not gone, some had declined to offer their savings – or had none to offer – and a few had disliked being rushed into sex. Kiss had wasted no further time on them and simply vanished from their lives.
In July 1914, two years before the discovery of the bodies, Kiss had been conscripted into the Second Regiment of the Third Hungarian Infantry Battalion. He had taken part in the long offensive that led to the fall of Valjevo, but before that city had fallen in November, Kiss, had been captured by the Serbs. No one was certain what had become of him after all that. But the regiment was able to provide a photograph that showed the soldiers being, Kiss’s face was enlarged, and the detectives at last knew what their quarry looked like.
They had also heard that his sexual appetite was awe-inspiring, and this led them to show the photograph in the red-light district around Conti and Magyar Street. Many prostitutes recognised him as a regular customer; all spoke warmly of his generosity and mentioned his sexual prowess. But a waiter who had often served Kiss noticed that the lady with whom he was dining usually paid the bill.
Now, at last, Bialokurszky was beginning to piece the story together. Pawn tickets that had been found in the Cinkota house revealed that the motive behind the murders was the cash of the victims. But the ultimate motive had been sex, for Kiss promptly spent the cash in the brothels of Budapest and Vienna. The evidence showed he was quite literally a satyr – a man with a raging and boundless appetite for sex. His profession – of plumber and tinsmith – did not enable him to indulge this appetite, so he took to murder. He had received two legacies when he was 23 (about 1903) but soon spent them. After this, he had taken to seducing middle-aged women and ‘borrowing’ their savings. One of these, a cook named Maria Toth, had become a nuisance, and he killed her. After this he decided that killing women was the easiest way to make a living as well as indulge his sexual appetites. His favourite reading was true-crime books about con men and adventurers.
Bialokurszky’s investigations suggested that there had been more victims, and just before Christmas 1916, the garden in the house at Cinkota was dug up, it revealed five more bodies, all of middle aged women, all naked.
But where was Kiss?
The War Office thought that he had died of fever in Serbia. He had been in a field hospital with injuries. But when Bialokurszky tracked down one of the nurses, she remembered the deceased as a ‘nice boy’ with fair hair and blue eyes, which seemed to suggest that Kiss had changed his identity with another soldier, possibly someone called Mackavee, but the new ‘Mackavee’ proved untraceable.
Although sightings of Kiss where reported from Budapest in 1919 – and even New York as late as 1932 – he was never found.
Shy
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Friends will help you move. Real friends will help you move bodies!
shy@shyscyberchamber.com
ICQ : 41364914
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Bella Kiss
