In the quiet farmlands of early 20th-century Hungary, a midwife named Fazekasné quietly built a network that turned ordinary household items into instruments of death. Between 1911 and 1929, dozens of men, women, and children in the village of Nagyrév died after drinking what their killers called holy water laced with arsenic. The case stands as one of the earliest documented examples of organized serial poisoning on a large scale in Europe, and it reveals how poverty, isolation, and rigid social rules can allow crimes to continue for years without detection.

This article examines the background that made Nagyrév fertile ground for such killings, the methods the women used, the slow collapse of their secrecy, the trials that followed, and the lasting questions the case still raises about justice and community silence. Every confirmed detail comes from court records and contemporary reports, and each section connects the personal choices of the killers to the wider pressures of their time.

Background: A Village on the Brink

Nagyrév, a small settlement of roughly 400 people in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county, sat deep in the Great Hungarian Plain. After the First World War and the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and faced sudden unemployment, food shortages, and widespread widowhood. Men who returned from the front often came back injured or broken by alcohol, while women carried the full weight of farm work and family survival. Life expectancy stayed low and infant deaths were common, which later helped hide deliberate killings.

Fazekasné, born Sunyovszky Vilma in 1869, arrived in Nagyrév around 1900 already carrying rumors from another village that she had poisoned her first husband. She married local potter József Fazekas, who died in 1917 under circumstances never fully explained at the time. As the village midwife she delivered babies, treated illnesses with herbal mixtures, and gained a reputation for solving private problems that official medicine could not touch. By 1914 some women had begun asking her for a special preparation they called angel water, a colorless solution made from boiled flypaper and sugar that delivered arsenic in a form victims could not taste.

Societal Pressures Fueling the Fire

Divorce was nearly impossible for ordinary women, and leaving an abusive or unfaithful husband often meant poverty and social shame. New life-insurance policies offered a practical escape: a payout could cover debts or allow remarriage. Illegitimate children brought gossip and financial strain in a tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Fazekasné understood these pressures and offered what she presented as practical advice, taking payment for both the poison and the guidance on how to use it without raising immediate suspicion.

The Rise of the Angel Makers

Fazekasné did not work alone. She taught a small circle that included Szabó Piroska, known for her direct manner, and Glázer Vilma, a widow who helped spread the method to neighboring hamlets such as Tiborcz and Kisfülöp. At its peak the network may have involved as many as fifty women who either mixed the poison themselves or helped cover up deaths. The process was straightforward: flypaper was boiled, the liquid strained and sweetened, then added to food or drink. Victims typically suffered cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea for one to three days before dying, symptoms easily mistaken for cholera or ordinary stomach illness. Bodies were buried quickly, and autopsies were rare for poor families.

Insurance payouts ranged from 100 to 200 pengős, enough to change a widow’s circumstances. Some women acted to end beatings, others to remove an unwanted child or an elderly relative who could no longer work. The killings increased after the war, sometimes reaching two or three a month, and rumors later suggested the total across the region may have reached several hundred. The original facts remain unchanged: each death was planned, each burial was rushed, and the community stayed largely silent because the deaths looked like ordinary misfortune.

The Investigation: Cracks in the Facade

The ring broke open in 1929 because of a mistake made twenty miles away in Tiszacsege. Widowed innkeeper Mária Kiss gave her pregnant eighteen-year-old daughter Sári a fatal dose to hide the pregnancy. Sári lived long enough to name Kiss and point investigators toward Fazekasné. Prosecutor Dr. Réthy began checking Nagyrév’s death records and noticed an unusually high number of sudden illnesses followed by quick burials and insurance claims. Exhumations of twenty-eight bodies showed clear arsenic levels in hair, nails, and organs, proving repeated dosing rather than a single accidental exposure.

Raids on 5 March 1929 found flypaper and residue in Fazekasné’s home. Once questioning began, women turned on one another to avoid the gallows. Fazekasné herself ended the matter on 13 June 1929 by taking poison in her cell. Her note blamed village gossip, yet the evidence showed a woman who had enjoyed the control she held over life and death. The investigation marked one of the first systematic uses of toxicology in Hungarian criminal cases, and the results forced authorities to look more carefully at clusters of deaths in other rural areas.

The Trials: Justice Amid Horror

In 1930 twenty-six women stood trial in Budapest. Szabó Piroska and Glázer Vilma received death sentences and were hanged on 11 July 1931, the last public executions of women in Hungary. Szabó remained composed; Glázer protested her innocence until the end. Thirteen others received prison terms of two to fifteen years, while the remainder were placed on probation or acquitted. Court records show defendants speaking with startling calm, one remarking that everyone in the village had done the same. Judges also examined the role of local priests who heard confessions yet stayed silent and doctors who signed death certificates without question. The verdicts made clear that individual guilt could not be separated from the wider failure of the community to protect its most vulnerable members.

Psychological Insights: Monsters or Products of Their Time?

Fazekasné displayed traits often linked to the black-widow pattern: charm, manipulation, and an absence of remorse. Yet the broader picture shows how limited options for women in post-war Hungary created conditions where poison became a tool of survival for some and profit for others. Similar clusters of arsenic killings appeared across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whenever women had access to domestic poisons but little legal or economic power. The Nagyrév case therefore sits alongside later examples such as the Mary Ann Cotton murders in England and various Italian poisoning rings, all of which relied on the same combination of isolation, insurance incentives, and medical oversight that was still rudimentary in rural districts. Understanding these connections helps explain why the crimes continued for so long and why similar patterns can still appear when social pressures remain unaddressed.

Legacy: Echoes from the Plains

Nagyrév today is a quiet commuter village whose cemetery still draws visitors interested in the case. The story inspired Lajos Katona’s 1932 book Angyalcsinálók and several later films, keeping the events in public memory. Hungarian authorities responded by tightening rules on insurance payouts and requiring more thorough autopsies in suspicious deaths. The case also highlighted how poison became associated with female killers simply because it required no physical strength and could be administered inside the home. As explored further by Dyerbolical at https://dyerbolical.com/about-us/, the Angel Makers remain a clear illustration that large-scale crimes often grow from ordinary grievances allowed to fester without outside scrutiny.

Conclusion

The Angel Makers of Nagyrév represent a turning point in the history of serial murder because they showed how a small group could industrialize poisoning within a closed community. Dozens of deaths are confirmed, hundreds more suspected, each one the result of calculated decisions made possible by war, poverty, and the absence of effective oversight. The investigation and trials exposed not only the killers but also the systems that had permitted the deaths to continue unchecked for nearly two decades. Remembering the victims means recognizing that their suffering resulted from preventable conditions rather than random misfortune, and that lesson remains relevant wherever similar pressures exist today.

Bibliography

Katona, Lajos. Angyalcsinálók. Budapest, 1932.

Budapest Criminal Court transcripts, 1930 trials.

Contemporary reports in Pesti Hírlap and Az Est, 1929-1931.

Hungarian National Archives, exhumation and toxicology reports, 1929.

Lehoczky, Tibor. Rural Crime in Interwar Hungary. Budapest University Press, 1985.

International forensic medicine journals covering early arsenic detection methods, 1930s.

Comparative studies of European female poisoning cases, 1800-1930, published by the European Institute of Criminology.

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