The Serial Killer Who Preserved 24 Bodies In Alcohol

Béla Kiss was a Hungarian serial killer. He is thought to have killed at least 23 young women and one man and tried to pickle their bodies in large metal drums that he kept in his home.

Béla Kiss was a tinsmith who lived in Cinkota, a town near Budapest. He was an amateur astrologer, and people say he was involved in some occult practices. Kiss was married twice, and he and his first wife had two kids, Aranka and Ilonka. Kiss hired Mrs. Jakubec to clean his house in 1912, after his wife reportedly left him for another man.

Jakubec noticed that Kiss wrote to a number of women. Most of the time, he got them by putting ads in newspapers offering to link them to their dates and possible husbands, sometimes he also claimed to be a fortune teller. Sometimes, Kiss brought the women to his house on their own.

Even though he was liked by his neighbors, Kiss never got close to them. People in the town also noticed that Kiss had a lot of metal drums. When the town police asked him about the drums, he said that he put gasoline in them to get ready for scarcity during the coming war.

When World War I started in 1914, he was called up and had to leave his home in the care of Jakubec, his maid.

Bela's Crimes

In July 1916, Kiss's landlord called the police in Budapest to say that he had found seven large metal drums in his apartment. The town policeman remembered that Kiss had a lot of gas, so he led soldiers who needed it to it. When they tried to open the drums, they were overcame by a strange pungent smell. Detective Chief Károly Nagy led an investigation and, despite Jakubec's objections, opened one of the drums.

There, they found the body of a woman who had been strangled. The other drums also had horrible things on them. When Kiss's house was searched, 24 bodies were found.

Nagy told the military that if Kiss was still alive, they should arrest him right away.  Nagy also took Jakubec into custody and asked the post office to hold any letters to Kiss in case he had a partner who could warn him.

Nagy thought that Jakubec might have been involved in the murders at first, because Kiss had left her money in his will. Jakubec told the police that she had nothing to do with the murders. She showed them a secret room that was locked and that Kiss had warned her not to go into. The room was full of bookcases and had a desk with a lot of letters and a photo album from Kiss's relationships with 74 women.

A lot of the books were about poisons or how to choke someone to death. Nagy learned a few things from the letters. The oldest letter was from 1903, and it was clear that Kiss was cheating the women, who were usually middle-aged and looking for marriage, out of their money. He put ads in the marriage sections of several newspapers.

Most of the women he chose didn't have family nearby and didn't know anyone who would notice their disappearance quickly. He tried to get them to like him and send him money. Police also found old court records that showed two of his victims had taken him to court after he stole money from them. Both women had gone missing, so the cases against them were dropped.

Every woman who came to the house was killed by strangulation. Kiss put their bodies in alcohol and put them in metal drums with no air holes. Police found that the victims' necks had been pierced and that their blood had been drained from their bodies. This made them think that Kiss may have been a vampire.

Nagy got a letter on October 4, 1916, that said Kiss was in a Serbian hospital. Nagy got to the hospital too late, though. Kiss had already left, leaving the dead body of another soldier in his bed. Nagy told all of the Hungarian police, but none of the supposed sightings that the police looked into were true.

No one knows what happened to Kiss or how many people he killed.