Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (11 page)

In 1440 Gilles de Rais became embroiled in a dispute over the sale of some land. The party with whom Gilles was in dispute transferred the land to his brother who was a priest. In a fit of anger, Gilles de Rais rode to the church where the priest was celebrating mass and with an armed escort burst into the church, forcing the priest to relinquish the disputed land. As his attack on the priest was a grave ecclesiastical offense, the offices of the Inquisition immediately investigated Gilles. It was not long before the accounts of missing children reached the Church authorities. On September 14, 1440, Gilles de Rais was arrested and taken to Nantes. During the subsequent ecclesiastical and civil trials, the horrific fate of the missing children, estimated to number between 140 and 800, came to light. (In one of the ecclesiastical indictments, it was charged specifically that he “killed treacherously, cruelly, and inhumanly one hundred and forty, or more, children, boys and girls, or had them killed . . .”)

According to witnesses, Gilles de Rais would approach his victims very gradually after they were presented to him. At first he would treat them as his favorite servants, giving them much attention and remarking on their handsome beauty. De Rais would next caress the child and then begin grasping and pinching. At first if the child took fear and became upset, Gilles would dismiss his actions as playful and assure the child that he meant no harm. As soon as the boy would regain his self-composure, Gilles would pounce on the child and sodomize him. In the transcripts of the trial, which survive to this day, one of Gilles’s servants testified:

The accused exercised his lust once or twice on the children, then he killed them sometimes with his own hand or had them killed . . . sometimes they were decapitated and dismembered; sometimes he cut their throats leaving the head attached to the body; sometimes he broke their necks with a club; sometimes he cut their throats or some other parts of their neck, so that their blood flowed . . .

Often he loved to gaze at the severed heads and showed them to the witness and to Etienne Corrillaut, asking them which of the heads was the most beautiful, the head severed just then or the one cut off the previous day. And he often kissed the head that pleased him the most, and took delight in it.

The witness heard Gilles say that he took more pleasure in the murder of the children, and in seeing their heads and their members removed, and watching them languish, and seeing their blood flow than in knowing them carnally . . . while they were dying, he committed with them the vice of sodomy.
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Gilles de Rais himself confessed:

Because of my passion and my sensual delectation I took and caused to be taken a great number of children—how many I cannot say precisely, children whom I killed and caused to be killed; with them, I committed the vice and the sin of sodomy . . . and . . . I ejaculated spermatic seed in the most culpable manner on the belly of the children, before as well as after their deaths, and also while they were dying. I, alone, or with the help of my accomplices [list of names of de Rais’s servants] have inflicted various kinds and manners of torture on these children. Sometimes I beheaded them with daggers, with poignards, with knives; sometimes I beat them violently on the head with a stick or with other contusive instruments . . . sometimes I suspended them in my room from a pole or by a hook and cords and strangled them; and when they were languishing, I committed on them sodomitic vice . . . When the children were dead, I embraced them, and I gazed at those which had the most beautiful heads and the loveliest members, and I caused their bodies to be cruelly opened and took delight in viewing their interior organs; and was delighted to see them dying, and sat on their bellies and delighted in watching them die thus and I laughed at them with Corrillaut and Henriet, after which I caused the children to be burned and converted their cadavers into dust . . . These crimes and offenses I committed solely for my evil pleasure and evil delight, to no other end or with no other intention, without anyone’s counsel and only in accordance with my imagination.

During the ecclesiastical trial, there was some muddled testimony that concerned satanic rites associated with alchemistic practices, intended to solve the financial ruin approaching Gilles. Perhaps these accusations were merely an attempt before the era of psychiatric theory to somehow find some rational explanation for these murders.

Gilles de Rais was sentenced to death by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and on October 26, 1440, he was hanged and then burned. His last words were reported to be, “there is no sin, no matter how great, that God cannot pardon.” His accomplices were executed with him and their bodies were left to burn away. Gilles de Rais, however, requested that his body be taken down before it burned completely and be buried, allowing him in Christian theology the possibility of resurrection on the Final Judgment Day. Due to his high rank, the request was granted and he was buried at a Carmelite church in Nantes.

The details of Gilles de Rais’s assaults on his victims are indistinguishable from those of some serial killers today.

 Elizabeth Báthory—The Female Vampire Killer

With the kind of weird balance history sometimes provides all on its own, the other infamous serial killer from premodern times was a woman—Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Transylvania. Born in 1560 to George Báthory (Ecsed branch) and Anna Báthory (Somlyo branch), Elizabeth was a product of the intermarriage between the dwindling Hungarian noble families. The Báthory family was one of the richest and most powerful Protestant families in Hungary. From her family came two of the most important ruling princes of Transylvania, a number of war heroes and church officials of Hungary, and a great empire builder, Stephan Báthory, prince of Transylvania and king of Poland. Elizabeth’s other relatives included an uncle rumored to be addicted to secret rituals and worship of Satan; her aunt Klara, a well-known bisexual who enjoyed torturing servants; and Elizabeth’s brother, Stephan, who was a drunkard and a lecher.

The countess had a reputation for sadistic treatment of her servants, whom she would torture for the slightest mistake. Elizabeth, with her own hands, tore apart the mouth of one 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 a bathtub and bathed in it. For the next ten years, Elizabeth bathed in blood daily, believing that the ritual would preserve her skin from aging.
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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 daughters of 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 girls had murdered other girls in her service and then committed suicide. Nonetheless, noble families began to refuse Elizabeth’s offers to take their daughters into her court, and the countess’s servants developed a ruse in which they would dress-up peasant girls in fine clothes and present them as nobility to Elizabeth.

In the beginning, Elizabeth saw to it that the dead girls were given proper Christian burials by the local Protestant pastor. But as the body count rose, the pastor refused to perform further funerals because too many girls were coming to him from Elizabeth who had died of “unknown and mysterious causes.” She threatened him in order to keep him silent and continued to have the bodies buried secretly. Near the end, many bodies, mutilated and drained of blood, were disposed of in a haphazard manner in conspicuous locations such as nearby fields, wheat silos, the stream running behind the castle, and the kitchen vegetable garden. This gave rise to lurid vampire myths in the region.

Traveling between Vienna and northwest Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Báthory murdered some 650 young women over ten years. As in the case of Gilles de Rais, many people knew that girls were disappearing in Elizabeth’s court, but no one dared to raise a voice of complaint against the countess, and those who did were quickly silenced by members of Elizabeth’s powerful family.

So far, Elizabeth had been protected by two circumstances. First, throughout her life there was a degree of lawlessness in Hungary following the war with the Turks. The fact that her husband was a noted warrior in the battle against the Turks gave her powerful status. Second, Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Protestant-Catholic rivalry lead to a delicate balance of power in Hungary that nobody wanted to upset. All of that changed after the peace of Vienna in 1608, when Protestant and Catholic provinces were united under the Catholic Habsburg crown. This was followed by Protestant uprisings in Austria, which were brutally put down by the king. These factors eroded Countess Elizabeth Báthory’s power, and the numerous reports and complaints about her began to gain momentum.

In the winter of 1610 Elizabeth still felt that her social position made her virtually untouchable before the law; she had her servants toss four murdered girls from the ramparts of Castle Cséjthe. This was done in full view of the Cséjthe villagers, who reported this latest atrocity to the king’s officials.

The Hungarian parliament finally ordered an investigation, and officers of the crown searched Elizabeth’s castle. There they found numerous bodies of young women, drained of blood, their hair torn out, their breasts cut off, and their genitals burned.

In 1611 Elizabeth’s servants were tried for the murders and executed, but Elizabeth herself, still powerfully connected, was not put on trial. Although she was sentenced to death by an executive order, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in her castle. She was bricked up inside her bedchambers in Castle Cséjthe, with only a small port left open through which food could be passed to her. She died four years later at age fifty-five.