100 Most Infamous Criminals Read Online Free PDF Page A

No one in the village ever thought to tell him that whenever he was away his wife was often seen out with a young artist called Paul Bihari.
    Nor did anybody particularly remark on the fact that when he returned from the big city he started bringing oil drums back with him. Everyone, after all, knew that war was coming, and that fuel was likely to be scarce. When Kiss’s wife and the artist Bihari ended up disappearing from Czinkota, the villagers took it for granted that they’d eloped. Why, Kiss even had a letter from his wife that said as much.
    Besides, poor man, he was clearly distraught at what had happened. He withdrew from village life – and it only became clear much later what the oil drums, which he continued from time to time quietly to bring back from Budapest, along with the occasional woman overnight guest, were really for…
    After war came in August 1914, the reclusive Kiss was conscripted. While he served in the army, his house remained empty, its taxes unpaid; and then, in May 1916, news arrived that he’d been killed in action. His house was sold at auction for the unpaid taxes, and bought by a local blacksmith, who found seven oil-drums behind sheets of corrugated iron in the workshop. One day he opened one of them. It was full of alcohol – as were the rest of the drums. But in each one floated the body of a naked woman. When police subsequently searched the garden, they found the pickled bodies of another fifteen women, aged between 25 and 50, and that of a single young man. All of them had been garrotted.
    It wasn’t long before police in Budapest picked up Kiss’s trail. He’d been placing advertisements in a newspaper, giving a post-office box number and claiming to be a widower anxious to meet a mature spinster or widow, with marriage in mind. Both the name and the address he’d given the newspaper proved false. But one of the payments he’d made to it had been by postal order, and when the signature on it was published in the press, a woman came forward and said it was that of her lover, Bela Kiss – and she produced a postcard sent from the front to prove it. When a photograph of Kiss was found and published in its turn, he was recognized as a frequent – and sexually voracious – visitor to Budapest’s red-light district. He’d apparently been using the savings he’d persuaded his victims to withdraw – in advance of their marriage – to feed his constant need for sex.
    Kiss was, of course, dead. So the case was closed. But then a friend of one of his victims swore she’d seen him one day in 1919 crossing Budapest’s Margaret Bridge. Five years later a former French legionnaire told French police of a Hungarian fellow-soldier, with the same name as that used in Kiss’s ads, who’d boasted of his skill at garrotting. In 1932, Kiss was again recognized, this time in Times Square in New York. Had he swapped his identity with a dead man at the front and got away with it?
     

Ilse Koch
    I n 1950, when the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ Ilse Koch was finally tried for mass-murder in a German court, she protested that she had no knowledge at all of what had gone on in the concentration-camp outside Weimar. Despite the evidence of dozens of ex-inmates, she insisted:
‘I was merely a housewife. I was busy raising my children. I never saw anything that was against humanity!’
    As hundreds of people gathered outside the court shouted ‘Kill her! Kill her!’ she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
    Ilse Koch was born in Dresden, and by the age of 17 she was a voluptuous blue-eyed blonde: the very model of Aryan womanhood – and every potential storm-trooper’s wet dream. Enrolling in the Nazi Youth Party, she went to work in a bookshop that sold party literature and under-the-counter pornography and she was soon having a string of affairs with SS men. Then, though, she came to the attention of SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, who selected her as the perfect mate for his then top