The Hungarian Town Where the Women Decided to Murder Their Husbands by the Dozens After World War I

Jim Fish, in BBC News (March 29, 2004):

A two-hour drive south-east of Budapest, the village of Nagyrev is like countless others dotted across the Danubian plain.

Modest single-storey homes line its few muddy streets. But beneath its pastoral exterior, Nagyrev nurses a dark secret. Nearly a century ago, with World War I raging, the womenfolk here began to poison their husbands.

Now aged 83, Maria Gunya was a little girl when her father, a local official, was asked by the police to help investigate a series of unexplained deaths in the village.

It turned out that the woman behind many of the deaths was the village midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas. At that time, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no resident doctor or health service.

The midwife enjoyed a monopoly of basic medical training.

"The women used to come to Mrs Fazekas with their problems," Mrs Gunya recalls.

She said that when they complained about their drunken or violent husbands, Mrs Fazekas told them:"If there's a problem with him, I have a simple solution".

That solution was arsenic, distilled by the midwife by soaking flypaper in water.

Over the years, with the village cemetery filling up, police suspicions grew. They started to exhume bodies.

Out of 50 bodies examined, 46 contained arsenic. Fingers pointed towards the midwife....

As for their motives, theories abound. Poverty, greed and boredom are just a few. Some reports say that the women had taken lovers from among the Russian prisoners of war drafted in to work the farms in the absence of their menfolk at the front.

When the husbands returned, the women resented their sudden loss of freedom, and, one by one, decided to act.