The Crimes of Bela Kiss

BY Marilyn Bardsley and Denise Noe

The Tinsmith Cometh

Sketch of Bela Kiss

In Hungary in the early 1900s, young Bela Kiss moved into a house at 9 Kossuth Street that he rented on the outskirts of Cinkota, a quiet little town just of outside of Budapest.

Kiss was a rather handsome man with blond hair and remarkable, vibrant blue eyes.  He earned his living as a tinsmith and was 37-years-old when he was called into the armed services in 1914.

Not only had Kiss taught himself his trade as a tinsmith, but he was a voracious reader and was highly conversant on art, literature and history. With no formal schooling at all, he was able to discuss virtually any subject with the most intelligent and educated of the town's people.

He struck his fellow villagers as an amiable and  hard-working fellow with a penchant for throwing parties at a local hotel. He was known as a generous person. Everybody liked Bela Kiss and he was considered by the women of the town to be its most eligible bachelor.

Not particularly eager to marry quickly, Kiss hired an elderly woman, Mrs. John Jakubec, as a housekeeper to perform the domestic duties that a wife would normally do.

Cinkota had a limited choice of female companions, so Kiss kept an apartment in Budapest and took out advertisements in newspapers there. Women began corresponding with Kiss. 

Town gossips noted that over the years a steady stream of lovelies from Budapest spent short periods of time at Kiss's home in Cinkota, but no one in the town, not even Mrs. Jakubec, was introduced to these young women who came and went so quickly.

Reservoir of Rage

Dr. Charles Nagy, Detective Chief of the Budapest Police, received an alarming call in July of 1916 from a landlord in Cinkota who believed that he had discovered the evidence of a murder on his property.

The landlord explained that a soldier named Bela Kiss had rented the house he owned on Kossuth Street, but had let the lease lapse and was rumored to be a prisoner of war or possibly even killed in battle. The landlord had gone to the house to see what repairs were needed before he put the house up for rent again.

Outside the house, he found several large metal drums. When he punctured one of the drums, a nauseating smell overwhelmed him. The chemist next door told him that it was the unmistakable smell of human decomposition. The landlord begged Dr. Nagy to urgently investigate. He could not rent out the house again until this matter was resolved.

Bela Kiss's home (left)

Nagy grabbed two of his best detectives and sped to the quiet little town of Cinkota. When they reached the house on Kossuth Street, the landlord rushed to greet them. However, the aged Mrs. Jakubec, who had promised to safeguard the belongings of her employer, was furious and shouted at the policemen to leave her master's property alone.

Nagy had one of the metal drums opened and confirmed the landlord's worst suspicions. Inside was a sack and the preserved body of a young woman with a full head of long dark-brown hair. Also inside the metal drum was the rope with which she had been strangled. The wood alcohol in the drum was the preservative.

Metal Drums

Drums used to store bodies

Upon questioning, Mrs. Jakubec said that she had been perplexed by the big metal canisters that Bela Kiss had brought to his house before the war. People had begun to talk. He could be storing illegal liquor in them, some had speculated. The Cinkota constable had gone to have a chat with Kiss on the subject of the metal drums. Calmly Kiss had reassured the constable that he was not keeping any illicit liquor. War was on its way, he said, so he was stocking up on gasoline.

Woodshed, interior where two bodies
were found

When the detectives examined the other six metal drums, they found that each contained the body of a naked young woman. All of the victims had been strangled.

After the detectives arranged for a mortician to collect the victims found in the metal drums, they began a search of Kiss's home and the grounds around it, finding even more bodies that had been buried. Each victim, even those that had been buried, had been preserved in alcohol. The bodies were still recognizable and could be easily identified if they had some names with which to work.

The Secret Room

Det. Chief Charles
Nagy

Faced with the biggest case of his career, Det. Chief Charles Nagy took some immediate steps. First, he notified the military that Bela Kiss, if he were still on the front, was to be arrested immediately. Within an hour, the orders for the manhunt had reached the army. Next, he detained and interrogated the terrified housekeeper. Then, concerned that Kiss might have had an accomplice, he notified postal and telegraph authorities in the surrounding area that they were to hold up any messages destined for Bela Kiss. News of the gruesome discovery was spreading rapidly throughout Cinkota and would soon hit the newspapers in Budapest. Nagy wanted to be sure that any accomplice could not get a warning to Kiss.

Several facts made the investigation even harder than normal. Thousands of Hungarian soldiers were imprisoned and the army was scattered and disorganized. Worse, the names Bela and Kiss were extremely common Hungarian names. It was likely that there were many, many men in the army named Bela Kiss.

Inside one of the drums, as seen from
above, victim's face covered

Finally, Dr. Nagy focused on the identity of the victims. The clues from the metal containers were very sparse. Nagy was able to locate the embroidered initials K.V. on one piece of clothing and what he thought was a faint M.T. on a handkerchief.

Inside the house that Mrs. Jakubec had kept immaculate for two years, he found her sitting in the kitchen almost paralyzed with fear. "Please, sir," she begged him, "I know nothing of this terrible thing. I knew Bela Kiss only as a man who was kind to me and paid me well."

She showed Nagy and his detectives Bela Kiss's bedroom which they thoroughly searched but found nothing of relevance to the investigation. Nagy noticed another door that was locked.

"That is the secret room of Bela Kiss," she told Dr. Nagy. "He told me never to enter it and never to let anyone in."

Mrs. Jakubec reached in her apron and pulled out an old-fashioned key to open the locked door. Nagy noticed immediately that the room was lined with bookcases filled with books. The only furniture was a large desk and desk chair.

Inside the desk, Dr. Nagy found a huge volume of correspondence between Kiss and various women. He also found an album with photographs of more than a hundred ladies.

Hen-house in which a body was found

At this point, Dr. Nagy began to worry that the victims might number more than the victims they had already uncovered.

Then Dr. Nagy went back to the hundreds of letters, most of which were filed in some 74 packets so that mail from the same woman was kept together. These women wrote to him after seeing his ad in the newspapers. All wanted marriage. Later it was revealed that Kiss had received 174 marriage proposals. To 74 of these women, he offered marriage and kept up his correspondence with them.

Something else became quite clear as he read the many letters. Bela Kiss was defrauding these women of their savings, in many cases their entire financial resources. Some of the letters went back as far as 1903.

Nagy took a break in his reading to examine the many books in the room. He was amazed to see how many related to poisons and methods of strangulation.

Nagy wondered how it was possible that Kiss could correspond with so many women and bring many of them to his home with nobody becoming suspicious about his intentions.

Surely someone had an inkling of what was going on.

An Amiable Young Man

Dr. Nagy began with Mrs. Jakubec. He stared at her as she sat in the kitchen. Then suddenly she screamed at him. "I'm just a simple old woman! Don't send me to prison!"

When Nagy calmed her down, she told him that she had looked after Bela Kiss since 1900 when he came to Cinkota. "He was such a good-looking boy of 23. We were so fond of him. He was kind to everyone; he wouldn't hurt a living thing. Once a dog had broken its leg, he made splints and nursed the animal to recovery. I am sure it is a mistake — he did not kill those women! Someone else did it!"

She admitted seeing lots of different women who came to visit Bela Kiss over the years, but she claimed that she did not know their names. "I scarcely ever said a word to them. I was only a servant and spent the nights in my own home. What Bela Kiss did with these ladies was none of my business. They were all city ladies, not peasants like me. They would come for a day or two and then go away."

The more Nagy pressed her for details, the more hysterical she became. "I am innocent!" she screamed at him.

Nagy pulled out a document from his pocket that he had found in Bela Kiss's desk. "Do you see this?" He showed her Kiss's will. "He leaves you a very substantial sum of money."

"I knew nothing of it," she insisted and began to cry.

Nagy and his colleagues questioned all of Kiss's neighbors and everybody in the town who knew him. Everybody liked Bela Kiss and didn't think it was particularly unusual for a handsome, amiable bachelor to entertain a number of women. The married men of the town envied him.

The Monster of Cinkota
Nagy contacted the police departments in every place that he found a woman who had corresponded with Bela Kiss. Eventually, he felt certain that he understood the technique that Kiss used to safely snare his victims. As Nagy had guessed, Kiss did not write any incriminating letters to his victims. Rather, he placed carefully worded advertisements in newspaper matrimonial columns, always requiring information about the woman's financial resources.

When a letter arrived from a not-too-distant woman, Kiss would visit the prospective victim and lavish money and attention on her. At that same time, he would inquire about her relatives. He only concentrated on women who did not have close relatives nearby and who would not be immediately missed if they disappeared.

Most of the letters that Kiss received after he had initiated a relationship indicated that the woman had sent him money, sometimes everything she had. If he thought there was any chance that she would contact the police, he immediately arranged to eliminate her.

Eventually, Dr. Nagy traced the K.V. initials he had found on a victim's clothing to Madame Katherine Varga, a good-looking, young Budapest widow with considerable means. She had a very profitable dressmaking business, which she sold when she went to be with her prospective husband, Bela Kiss, in Cinkota.

When Katherine Varga disappeared, she had no relatives who would miss her.

Then there was another breakthrough. Nagy had located in Kiss's house some clothing with the name Julianne Paschak stitched in it. One of Nagy's detectives had gone through old court records and found that two women, Julianne Paschak and Elizabeth Komeromi had each sued Bela Kiss for taking their money on the promise of marriage. The suits lapsed when neither woman appeared in court and could not be found.

By that time, Nagy had enough evidence to prove that Kiss had murdered 30 women, but there was still only one woman of the seven victims in the metal containers that had been identified.

Then one day, two women came to visit Dr. Nagy: Mrs. Stephen Toth and her daughter-in-law. Mrs. Toth told the detective about her daughter Margaret, who had gone to Budapest to work. On one of her visits, Margaret introduced her mother to Bela Kiss who persuaded the mother to give him some money on the promise that he would marry Margaret. But afterwards, Margaret accused Kiss of reneging on his promise. When Mrs. Toth went to Cinkota to confront Kiss, he claimed that he just wanted to delay the marriage and that Margaret had become angry and left for America.

Eventually, Dr. Nagy pieced together what had happened. In 1906, when Margaret Toth came to visit Bela Kiss at his home, he forced her to write a letter to her mother claiming that she could not bear the shame of rejection by Bela Kiss and that she was going to look for a new love in America. After she had written the letter, Kiss strangled her, hid her body in the metal container and mailed the letter to her mother.

War Casualty?

On October 4, 1916, Dr. Nagy received a message from a Serbian hospital claiming that a solider named Bela Kiss died of typhoid in 1915. It was followed by another message that said that Kiss was alive and a patient at the hospital. Dr. Nagy traveled immediately to the hospital, which was then in Hungarian hands. 

"I think we have your man," the military commander told Dr. Nagy. Nagy was overcome with excitement. They did not reach the hospital until dark and when the reached the ward where Bela Kiss was recuperating, they were in for a shock. The man in Kiss's bed was dead, but it was not Bela Kiss.

French Foreign Legion

Somehow, Kiss had been warned and had substituted the body of another soldier in his bed. 

Dr. Nagy made sure that all of Hungary knew that the Monster of Cinkota was still alive. Tips poured in from every part of the country. Then followed many sightings of Bela Kiss in disparate places around the world. Someone claimed to have seen the serial killer walking down a Budapest street in 1919.

Five years later, in 1920, a suspicious member of the French Foreign Legion went to a police station to report a fellow Legionnaire that he believed could be Kiss. The man, who gave his name as Hoffman, an alias that Kiss used, bragged about how good he was with a garrote. The police went to the unit to question Hoffman only to find that he had deserted without warning.

New York subway exit near Times
Square

A Hungarian soldier claimed that Bela Kiss was imprisoned in Romania for burglary. Another said he died of yellow fever in Turkey.

A New York City homicide detective named Henry Oswald felt certain he saw Bela Kiss walking out of the Times Square subway station in 1932. Oswald was nicknamed "Camera Eye" by other detectives for his extraordinary memory for faces, so many people gave credence to his report. The enormous crowd in Times Square prevented Oswald from pursuing the suspect. However, after the detective's report, some people became convinced that Kiss, who would have been in his late 60s at the time, was living in New York.

In 1936, gossip had it that Kiss was working as an apartment building janitor. The police went to the building to interview this janitor, but he had taken off and left no information behind.

As noted by David Everitt in Human Monsters, "Despite all this alleged globetrotting by Kiss, no other murders were ever attributed to him." Unfortunately, that does not necessarily mean that Bela Kiss stopped killing, only that, if he did, they were not traced to him.

A Monster's Mythology

Antonin Artaud

Many of the facts about Bela Kiss will never be known. He has to a large extent passed into myth and, in some imaginations, has grown into a figure larger than life. A Swedish metal band is called Bela Kiss and another metal band called PUS recorded a songs about him.

The famous, enormously talented but deeply troubled French surrealist poet, actor, and playwright Antonin Artaud wrote a scenario for a silent movie inspired by Kiss. Never actually made into a film, it is called "Thirty-two" and appears in Volume 3 of Artaud's Collected Works. In "Thirty-two," the Kiss figure is a medical professor. A distressed young woman approaches him after attending one of his lectures. She pours out a tale of woe. She has foolishly become involved with a man who has left her. 

The professor appears sympathetic to the poor lady. He invites her to his home. She notices that he has 32 large canisters. She is understandably baffled, then frightened. She makes a quick getaway.

Later, the Great War breaks out and the instructor of medicine is called away to do his patriotic duty. People hear that the young professor has lost his life in that bloody conflict. They also remember that the deceased man was said to have hoarded paraffin in his home. Authorities go to his house to open the canisters. They pull the top off of one and discover a dead woman, strangled with a silken cord.

The old radio program "Unsolved Mysteries" (not to be confused with the contemporary television program of the same title) did a dramatization of the Kiss story. It was titled "Bela Kiss: Mystery Man of Europe." All the broadcasts began with the disclaimer, "Out of deference to persons who may still be living, character names in some of these true Unsolved Mysteries have been changed." However, at least in its rendition of the Bela Kiss case, much more than names were altered.

Jay Stephens wrote a lively comic book called The Land of Nod: Rockabye Book, which includes an evil character named Bela Kiss. A reviewer for The Comics Journal praised Stephens' work, writing, "If Hanna-Barbara dealt with existential angst and deconstructionalism, the end result would probably resemble The Land of Nod, the new comic from Jay Stephens."

The story of the comic is about a group of villains recruiting new members to their Jetcat Haters Society. Jetcat in the book is a superhero who is really a child named Melanie McCay. Like Clark Kent becoming Superman, she turns into Jetcat in order to fight evil. One of the new recruits to the Jetcat Haters Society is a fellow calling himself Bela Kiss. Stephens' cartoon Kiss looks little like the original. He is a pint-sized monster with a Frankenstein-like flathead wearing a Dracula-like cloak.

And so, Bela Kiss lives on in one incarnation after another. Fortunately, the artistic renderings, even the silly and tasteless ones, are preferable to the original Bela Kiss.

Bibliography

Artaud, Antonin, Collected Works, Vol. 3, Calder & Boyars, London, 1972. 

Everitt, David, Human Monsters, Contemporary Books, Chicago, IL, 1993. 

Newton, Michael, Still at Large, Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, Washington, 1999. 

True Detective Mysteries, "The Seven Dead Ladies in Kossuth Street" by Hubert Dail.

Vintage Broadcasts, #8633, Unsolved Mysteries, "Mystery Man."