Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky Page B

servant girl who had made an error while sewing. Every day, young servant girls who had committed some infraction were assembled in the basement of the castle for brutal torture. Elizabeth delighted in the torture of the young women and never missed a session. While torture of one’s servants in seventeenth-century Hungary was not a crime, it was by then considered “impolite.” Thus when traveling and visiting other aristocrats, the first thing the countess did was to have a private room secured where she could torture her servants in privacy without offending her hosts. It was noted that the girls chosen for “punishment” seemed to be always those with the biggest breasts. Elizabeth was obviously sexually motivated in meting out her tortures.
    Elizabeth was married at age fifteen to a fierce Hungarian knight, Count Gyorgy Thurzo, known as the “Black Hero of Hungary.” Her husband, far from discouraging her sadistic practices, taught her some techniques of torture he had developed on the battlefield in the war against the Turks. It was, however, after he died that Elizabeth began her killing.
    One day when Elizabeth’s maid accidentally pulled her hair while combing it, the countess struck her so hard as to draw blood. A few drops splashed on Elizabeth’s hand, and when she wiped them off it seemed to her that her skin appeared more transparent and rejuvenated. The countess became convinced that she had discovered a cosmetic secret for rejuvenating aging skin. Reportedly she ordered the girl’s blood to be drained into abathtub and bathed in it. For the next ten years, Elizabeth bathed in blood daily, believing that the ritual would preserve her skin from aging. *
    The ruse she used for finding victims was similar to that of Gilles de Rais. Young peasant girls would be lured to Elizabeth’s castle with promises of positions in the household staff. Upon their arrival they would be tortured by Elizabeth or her servants in nightlong sessions, and at dawn the countess would bathe in their blood.
    In the countess’s murderous service was her manservant, referred to only as Ficzko (which means “lad” in Hungarian); Helena Jo, the wet nurse; Dorothea Szentes (also called “Dorka”); and Katarina Beneczky, a washerwoman who came into the countess’s employ late in her bloody career. Also, between 1604 and 1610, a mysterious woman named Anna Darvulia, who was believed to be a lesbian lover of Elizabeth’s, taught her many new torturing techniques.
    One accomplice testified that on some days Elizabeth had naked girls laid flat on the floor of her bedroom and tortured them so much that one could scoop up the blood by the pail afterward. Elizabeth had her servants bring up cinders in order to cover the pools of blood. A young maidservant who did not endure the tortures well and died very quickly was written out by the countess in her diary with the curt comment, “She was too small.”
    At one point in her life Elizabeth Báthory was so sick that she could not move from her bed and could not find the strength to torture her servant girls. She demanded that one of her female servants be brought before her. Dorothea Szentes, a burly, strong peasant woman, dragged one of Elizabeth’s girls to her bedside and held her there. Elizabeth rose up on her bed and bit the girl on the cheek. Then she turned to the girl’s shoulders, where she ripped out a piece of flesh with her teeth. After that, Elizabeth proceeded to bite the girl’s breasts.
    It is said that Elizabeth became particularly desperate about her aging. Convinced that peasant girls’ blood was not pure enough, she began to murder young women of noble birth. At first she focused on daughtersof the impoverished families of fallen gentry, who were invited to become Elizabeth’s companions. When questioned about the disappearance of the girls, she concocted a story that some of the