There is no question that Béla Kiss, a Hungarian tinsmith who went on a murderous, undetected rampage around the time of World War I, was one of the cagiest serial killers of all time. Kiss apparently didn’t start to kill people until he was in his forties, which is extremely rare for a serial killer— usually they begin in their twenties. And some people believe that a single event triggered his descent into murder.
In February 1912, forty-year-old Béla was happily taking his new bride, Marie—fifteen years his junior—to his house in Czinkota. But within weeks of taking her marriage vows, she had also taken on a lover, a man named Paul Bikari.
Kiss was not too close to his neighbors. He was a known sorcerer and had a certain weirdness about him that kept the neighbors at arm’s length. Few would approach his house. However, they did observe that, within weeks of his marriage, his new bride did not seem to be around and that periodically young women would visit. Near the end of the year, someone got up the gumption to approach and ask where Marie was. Kiss’s heartfelt, sad response was that she had left him for another man. The parade of women into his house was left unexplained.
The neighbors also noticed something else. As time went by, Kiss started to collect large metal drums, and when the local constable questioned him about them, Kiss said they were filled with petrol—that because World War I was looming on the horizon, gas would become scarce. The constable had no reason to question what Kiss said.
In 1914, World War I started, as Kiss and many others had predicted. Although he was forty-two years old at the time, Kiss was drafted into the army. Before he left for the service, he sealed up the house with bars and locks. But he never came back—eighteen months after he entered the service, in spring 1916, town authorities were notified that he had been killed in action. In June of that year, Hungarian soldiers came into Czinkota looking for gas supplies, and the constable directed them to the house where Kiss had lived.
They broke into the house and found seven gas drums in the attic, their weight supported by special framing. The soldiers took the drums outside and opened them up, only to recoil in horror. Instead of petrol, each of the drums was filled with the decomposing corpse of a nude female, stored in alcohol. And each had distinctive ligature marks on their neck showing how they had left the world. Among the bodies were those of Marie and her lover Paul.
The police turned the house upside down, and they uncovered not only a great variety of female clothing and jewelry but also innumerable pawn tickets for more valuables. They also found many letters from many women who had responded to someone named Hoffmann at a different address. Hoffmann claimed to be a lonely widower looking for female companionship. And there were more than seven bodies. As they searched Béla Kiss, Hungary the surrounding countryside, there was another shocker—seventeen more drums, each packed with a nude female. Kiss had killed twenty-three females and one male in all. Police theorized that Kiss had killed Marie and Paul when he had discovered their affair, and that that event had triggered his homicidal campaign to bilk widows out of their money and worldly goods.
After such a horrible discovery everyone wanted justice, but Kiss was dead. Or was he? In spring 1919, “Hoffmann” was reputedly sighted near the Margaret Bridge in Budapest. Police swarmed over the scene, then launched an investigation to determine whether Kiss was dead. The probe extended into Kiss’s military service, and it was determined that he had been shipped to Serbia, where he was wounded and died in a military hospital. But investigators found that the Béla Kiss who had died was a young man and looked nothing like the real Béla Kiss.
In 1932 the sharp-eyed New York city detective Henry Oswald, who had a reputation for remembering faces and was aware of the most wanted criminals in America and overseas, said he spotted Kiss coming out of New York City subway in Times Square. But before he could do anything Kiss disappeared into the crowd and was never seen again.
