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Serial Killer Who Escaped in WarBela Kiss Hungarian Bluebeard who disappeared in WWI
The Great War was a means of escape for one of the most mysterious serial killers of the 20th Century. Hungarian murderer Bela Kiss came to light because of that war.
Born somewhere around 1877 in Hungary a man known as Bela Kiss (which translates into Bill Small) would lead a life of mystery. What is known about him is that he was a ferrier and then later a tinsmith and something of a lady's man. After mandatory service in the KuK Army in the 1890s, Kiss was a member of the Honved reserves. He lived in the small suburb of Czinkota, first at #9 Kossuth Street and then at #17 Rakcoczi Street, just outside of Budapest, where he kept largely to himself. Starting in about 1903, Bela Kiss began to correspond with lonely women. These women were contacted through classified ads he placed in various newspapers seeking companionship. When paying for these ads he always used either the name Hoffman or Elemer and never his own. When Hungarian police went through his personal papers in 1916 they found that Kiss had traded correspondence with no less than 174 women, at least 70 of which he extended offers of marriage to. Many of these women visited him and were never seen or heard of again. In 1912 he married a woman some 15 years his junior who subsequently disappeared. Kiss told neighbors that she had ran away with a lover and left him heartbroken When World War One erupted he was called up as part of the Royal Hungarian Landwehr (Honvéd), and assigned to the 40th Honved Infantry Brigade. He paid a housekeeper to take care of his property which included several metal storage drums. She was made to promise never to open his study or tamper with the drums. Kiss’s unit was decimated on the eastern front facing the Russian Army in the Carpathians during the early part of the war. It was thought that Kiss contracted typhoid there in 1915. He was mentioned on casualty lists and this mention led many members of his hometown to speculate on his death. In June 1916 the local home guard came to Czinkota looking for illegal stockpiles of gasoline. The drums at Kiss's residence were immediately looked at. To the surprise of the army detail they were found to contain not gasoline but preserved human remains. A total of 23 women and one man were found sealed in these drums, all strangled to death. The body of his wife along with that of a man named Paul Bikari, thought to be her lover, was among these bodies. The original detective on the case was Geza Bialokurskzy and then later Charles Nagy. Hungarian police investigators believed Kiss to be responsible for the deaths of upward of 30 women. His victims were generally successful women who were independently wealthy with few if any close friends or relatives. Military officials advised the detectives that they may have the man known as Bela Kiss in a field hospital in eastern Hungary (now Rumania). When Detective Nagy went with a team of officers to arrest him the man they found in the bed labeled "Bela Kiss" was already dead. However the soldier in question was not Kiss. Kiss was a swarthy man in his forties and the dead "Kiss" was a tall blonde haired boy in his 20s. It was ascertained that Kiss had switched his papers for the dying man's and made good effect of his new identify by escaping. He was spotted all over Hungary and even almost apprehended in Budapest 1919 only miles from his old home. Another near miss was related in 1924, where a soldier in the French Foreign Legion who went by the name Hoffman was thought to be Kiss. "Hoffman" matched the basic description of Kiss and he had related to members of his unit when drunk that he had 'been good with a garrote’ and had strangled women before the war in Hungary. When investigators arrived to question Hoffman he promptly vanished again. He was sighted around the world subsequently in later years but never apprehended. SourcesEveritt, David, Human Monsters, Contemporary Books, Chicago, IL, 1993. Marilyn Bardsley and Denise Noe The Crimes of Bela Kiss Haines, Max True Crime Stories: 50 Headline-grabbing Murders - 2005 Fanthorpe Lionel The World's Most Mysterious Murders Dundurn Press 2002 Howard Amanda and Smith, Martin River of Blood: Serial Killers and Their Victims- 2004
The copyright of the article Serial Killer Who Escaped in War in Military History is owned by Christopher Eger. Permission to republish Serial Killer Who Escaped in War in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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