The Angel Makers: The Village Where Women Poisoned Their Husbands
Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries A whitewashed kitchen in rural Hungary, sometime in the 1920s. A woman boils strips of flypaper in a pot, skims the arsenic residue off the top, and bottles it. In the next room her husband coughs. Outside, the church bell rings and someone hangs laundry. In the tiny village of Nagyrév, about sixty miles from Budapest, this was a routine that lasted some twenty years, and the whole vil...
Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries
A whitewashed kitchen in rural Hungary, sometime in the 1920s. A woman boils strips of flypaper in a pot, skims the arsenic residue off the top, and bottles it. In the next room her husband coughs. Outside, the church bell rings and someone hangs laundry. In the tiny village of Nagyrév, about sixty miles from Budapest, this was a routine that lasted some twenty years, and the whole village, it seems, was in on it. When investigators finally started digging up the graves in 1929, they reportedly opened around fifty and found arsenic in forty-six. Husbands, mostly. Also fathers, in-laws, boyfriends, and some children. The newspapers called the women the Angel Makers, and the region the murder district.
This week, for October, Mugshot Mysteries went looking for something spooky and found a story where the scariest part is how ordinary murder became. Kathryn and Gabriel go to Nagyrév, and what starts as a creepy-village tale turns into something closer to a seminar on how good, church-going people talk themselves into the unthinkable.
The story begins in 1911 with a stranger: Zsuzsanna Fazekas, a midwife with solid references and a husband who had vanished, whom the village came to call Auntie Suzy. In a place with no doctor, the midwife was the entire medical system, the one who delivered the babies, set the bones, ended the pregnancies, and heard every secret too dangerous to tell a priest. Arrested something like ten times and acquitted every time, she taught the village a lesson it wouldn’t forget: nothing happens. We trace how World War I emptied the village of men and handed its women four years of running the farms themselves, how the men came home broken and traumatized to wives who had changed while the old rules hadn’t, and how, into that pressure, came a recipe: boil the flypaper, skim it, stir it into the soup. Arsenic that mimicked cholera, in a village with no one to test for it, even though the test had existed since 1836.
And we build the real argument, because this is where the episode lives. Why did one dead husband become a cemetery? We walk it through the great social thinkers, Bandura’s moral disengagement (you don’t say poison, you say remedy), Durkheim’s anomie and Merton’s strain theory for a world whose rulebook had stopped matching reality, Milgram’s obedience experiments and the “agentic state,” the bystander effect at the village well, Vaughan’s normalization of deviance (every funeral that drew no police made the next one safer), and finally Arendt’s banality of evil, because the women of Nagyrév didn’t kill in a frenzy. They killed like it was a chore, then went to Mass. We cover the disputed death toll (forty-five to fifty confirmed, possibly well over a hundred and sixty, with regional estimates as high as three hundred), the anonymous letter that may have ended it, the graves that arsenic had kept eerily intact, Auntie Suzy’s death before she could be tried, and the Szolnok trials that followed.
This is the Angel Makers of Nagyrév.
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SOURCES:
Historical accounts of the Nagyrév/Tiszazug arsenic poisonings (roughly 1911-1929) and the Szolnok trials of 1929-1931, including Béla Bodó’s scholarly history of the case and Patti McCracken’s The Angel Makers; contemporaneous 1929 Hungarian newspaper coverage of the investigation, exhumations, arrests, and trials, and the statement attributed to government minister Kuno Klebelsberg; the 2004 BBC reporting from the village, including the interview with resident Mária Gunya; and the documented history of arsenic as a poison and the 1836 Marsh test. The social-science framework referenced throughout is drawn from standard citations in psychology and sociology: Albert Bandura on moral disengagement; Émile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) and the concept of anomie; Robert Merton’s strain theory (1938); Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments (1961); Diane Vaughan’s normalization of deviance from her work on the Challenger disaster; John Darley and Bibb Latané on the bystander effect; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); and Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Where historical accounts disagree, including on how the case was uncovered, when the poisonings began, and the total number of victims, the episode presents the range rather than a single figure.
DISCLAIMER:
Content warning: This episode discusses serial poisoning and murder, including the killing of elderly, disabled, and infant victims, as well as suicide and references to war trauma and domestic abuse. Please take care while listening.
The Mugshot Mysteries podcast is independently produced and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any individual, publication, broadcaster, or institution referenced in this episode.
This episode recounts a historical case from the early twentieth century; all those involved are long deceased, and the events described are drawn from historical scholarship, contemporaneous reporting, and later journalism. Because this case is nearly a century old and was heavily sensationalized in its own time, many specifics, including the number of victims, the identity of the first victim, the degree of any individual’s involvement, and exactly how the poisonings were discovered, are genuinely disputed among sources; the episode presents competing accounts rather than treating any single version as settled fact. Details attributed to particular books, newspapers, or interviews reflect those sources. The psychological and sociological theories discussed are presented as frameworks for understanding the events, not as established explanations of any specific person’s conduct, and the hosts’ commentary reflects their own opinions and interpretations. The references to historical figures such as Adolf Eichmann and to the Challenger disaster are offered as points of comparison drawn from the public record. Any third-party names and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners and are referenced under fair use for purposes of commentary, criticism, and reporting. Nothing in this episode constitutes professional advice.
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