Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 21 - Halloween Special

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

On our first halloween special Joe is joined by true crime and serial killer junkie Rich to discuss a Bela Kiss, otherwise known as the "Hungarian Vampire" who turned his victims into pickles, before running off to the Eastern Front of World War One, never to be seen again. Thank you for your support! You can help the show by donating here: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Follow the show on twitter @lions_by

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And I'm going to scare the hell out of you. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. With me today is the friend of the show. Not really. The co-co-host at this point, because this is your third episode. Anyway, Rich is here. Hey. This is our first Halloween special.

Actually, every time I chart out the episodes we're supposed to make i try and completely forget to place them like during applicable time periods which makes no sense like on anniversaries of stuff i always forget that it's the anniversary and i don't talk about it um but thankfully like the entire month of october kind of counts for Halloween, right? It counts. Yeah, totally. You're not a history aficionado, but you are a true crime addict. Oh, yes. I love me some serial killers. Which is why I brought you in today.

We're talking about like the only time in the entire year it makes sense for us to cover a serial killer. And we are talking about the vampire of Hungary, a guy named Bela Kish. talking about the vampire of hungary a guy named bella quiche uh so i would like to say that i love vampires but twilight kind of ruined that for me he definitely doesn't sparkle uh if he sparkled it would actually only make him more horrifying uh so um at least his victims would have saw him coming yeah yeah well maybe not we'll get we'll get to that they probably wouldn't have seen him coming um so before we get that what's your favorite part about halloween as an adult now that we're both 30 we don't exactly dress up and go door-to-door for candy anymore i actually haven't celebrated halloween in years i don't really do haunted houses because

i'm a huge baby i don't really do scary movies cause I'm a huge baby. I don't really do scary movies cause I'm a huge baby. I mostly just listened to a lot of true crime and watch a lot of true crime. I don't do haunted houses. Like I think it was like six or seven. Um, I went to one with my dad and it was after my mom and dad were divorced. So it was like his weekend, which is always kind of a sketchy time. Cause he lived in like a really shitty house and a really shitty part of Detroit. And he decided to take us to a haunted house and there's three of us. So he couldn't like really keep an eye on all of us at the same time. And I was way too young to be in the haunted house. You always keep an eye on the youngest one. Yeah, he didn't. We're the most valuable. Yeah, I definitely wasn't the most valuable at that point. Uh, though he probably could have sold me for a fair share amount of drugs.

But, uh, I got separated in the house and I ended up running outside and ran right into somebody who I thought was an adult. So I like hug onto their leg and started crying. And then I realized it was a guy that was like, I I'm sure he wasn't really this big. It was my memories from six years old,

this eight foot tall crazy man wielding a chainsaw and uh obviously it is one of those fake ones without the chain on it or whatever but he turned around and you think if you're an actor in one of these houses like do i go for the big scare on the six-year-old because this guy did he revved on the chainsaw and like held it over my head and i don't know if i peed myself but i wouldn't be surprised if i did and that's i have not been to a haunted house since actually i think the last time i went i went well i don't know how old i was but i was small enough to sit on my uncle's shoulders throughout the whole thing and hide my face in his hair that works yeah and keeps you protected now i'm going to invite you to watch

scary movies um so uh before we get to the crimes of which there are many we have to get to our star mr bella quiche now it's weird sometimes it's it's shown like quiche bella but it's actually uh you know pronounced like our lovely breakfast egg pie in the quiche, but it's spelled like kiss. So to escape any kind of confusing name situation, I'm just going to call him Bella, which is fitting. On the Twilight theme? Yeah. So Bella was born sometime around 1877 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, around 10 years after the empire's founding. He was raised in a small Hungarian town of Itzhak, whose total population is only about 5,000 today.

And back then, it was a little more than a backwater village whose inhabitants were all related. So his parents were Janos Kish and Verona Varga. It was not a family or a dating situation. It was just a pairing of a prostitute and a john. Always a good start. Yeah. And they were never married.

Once he was born, his mom dropped his ass off in front of his dad's steps and bailed. And nobody ever heard from her again. Prostitutes don't have time for kids, man. You know, either did his dad. So actually, you know, I wrote this script assuming Nick would be here. So this joke makes more sense then. So Bella actually had the same origin story as Nick.

But Nick isn't Hungarian. Oh, no, he's just Mexican. Yeah. I'm not going to tell him I made a joke at his expense. I'll just wait for him to listen to the episode. His dad was a tinsmith and was an abusive drunk and was not involved at all in the raising of his son. He pretty much just showed up to beat his ass and then like teach him how to

Smith tin. So who raised him? Um, the streets, I guess. Uh, I mean like as an infant streets only go so far. You have to have like bottles and shit.

I don't know. Uh, he, maybe he just survived through sheer dumb luck. He was actually adopted by a family of rats, uh, which actually explains how he looks the way he does. And I'm going to wait to show you a picture. So you've never heard or seen this guy before, right?

No. Okay. So I'm going to wait until I bring up exactly how he looks and how his neighbors described him. But his dad did teach him how to smith tin and he became a tin smith himself um most valuable thing a man can teach sorry can pass on to his son is a good trade um i guess especially around this time it's like if you weren't a tradesman you're just a homeless dude yeah you don't need love and pats on the back. You just need skills. Yeah. And parenting in 1877, even the best cases probably involved a lot of hitting. So what Bella did between around his childhood and between the age of 23 is completely unknown.

He just kind of falls off the map, though reports have surfaced years afterward from his neighbors and acquaintances and his crimes end up getting incredibly blown out of proportion. Like they picked up mythical properties. People said he was a werewolf, like not in the nickname sense, like that he legitimately was a werewolf. So there's a mythos behind oh yeah so what really happened between them it might be a total lie it might not be true but what we do know kind of is um bella kind of turned into his dad um he was a normal guy that he went to work every day and was generally liked by his friends but he spent all of his money on booze and hookers. Um,

I mean, how do you spend your money? Not on booze and hookers. Uh, that would be, well, I guess, I guess it was probably illegal then too. I don't need to bring that heat on me.

You know, um, other accounts say they weren't actually hookers at all. Is that Bella could just spit mad game. Um, so back then there was personal ads. It's kind of like yield Tinder. Mostly people who are like widows,

widowers would just like put out ads saying who they were, what they did and what they were looking for there. They weren't looking for friendship. They were looking for a spouse and they would just like put an ad in the paper. Bella did this a lot, but he wouldn't marry any of them. He would just fuck them and bail. Um, so he developed a lot of what these, I guess are pen pals through the newspaper. Um, and I guess this kind of makes sense to me. I wouldn't see this like drunk, gross dude being

able to hit on people in public. Uh, he just do it through the written word uh so around now is uh you should look at the thumbnail to the podcast i mean normally they're stupid memes or whatever but um i actually that picture is is the only known sketch of him and uh this is what he looked like This is what he looked like. Attractive. Yeah, so I explained that he looks like a fucked up version of Waluigi. And you didn't know what Waluigi was until I explained it to you before we started the episode. But he is easily the ugliest of the three Plummer brothers. He looks like a pinball with a mustache.

Yeah, and the mustache isn't attractive um you know sometimes people can have like really sweet mustaches uh or like they're just so outrageous you kind of have to give them respect his is more of like a snidely whiplash mustache where you know whenever he says anything he twirls the end of it. I'm sorry. My brain is fried from doing homework today. I meant ping pong ball. I'll take it. I don't know what a pinball is. A pinball. I don't know.

You're going for pinhead. I don't know. So Bella resurfaces for sure around the age of 23 in the town of Singkata, which is a modern-day suburb of Budapest. When he moved in, his neighbors actually remarked on the strange, good-looking newcomer. So he also brought tons of metal barrels with him. Nobody was really sure why. You don't need those for tinsmithing that we're aware of.

Which should speak volumes on the attractiveness of all the men in sincada or sincota around this time because like i said bella looks like he had his face chiseled out of a pawn rock by a blind man low standards in the 1800s yeah i mean yeah i give him like maybe a four because he has money so you get i guess you got to give him something he's and he's got all those sweet metal barrels yeah i mean clearly your level of attractive attractiveness is based on the amount of barrels you have which means i'm uglier than shit because i have zero barrels what the fuck i know it reflects poorly upon my family then i have no barrels

i mean bella is the kind of guy that if you like if you're the kind of guy who looks like me, average at best, you would make friends with him and bring him out to the bar with you. He makes you look good in comparison. What do they call that? Like the designated ugly friend or something? There's a whole movie about it. Duff. Yeah, designated ugly fat friend.

Well, he wasn't fat. Well, it's just all part of the Duff persona. Oh, okay. Well, he was a Duff then. Bella wasn't super friendly, but he would give greetings to his neighbors. He didn't hang out with anybody, but nobody had anything bad to say about him. He would stick to himself in his little cottage, and he ended up getting super into the supernatural and the occult. Um, I couldn't really find anything on what exact weird shit he was into, um, because

he never wrote a memoir or anything and he was, nobody ever figured out what exactly he was doing. But in the area that he lived, uh, was, uh, there's a heavy tradition of Balkan witchcraft, which is based on a particular branch of paganism from before the area was converted to Christianity. There's also a tradition of shamanism that has kind of made a new wave comeback, which includes stuff people may have heard of, like fortune telling, weather magic,

or finding lost objects, which kind of sounds like a really shitty version of captain planet like you can't really do anything cool but you won't lose your car keys captain planet was awesome and powerful and was saving the world right that's why this is the shitty version of captain planet unless you're the the heart kid that's not a power. But he had a monkey. As we learned in the Hogwarts episode, heart is very much a power. It doesn't say love. It just says heart.

That's what heart is. Not always. Unless you're talking about like crunching it up for a potion or something. I'm pretty sure when the Indian kid yelled heart, he just slapped somebody with a raw organ and just splash blood everywhere. At least he used the power of dead men's hearts to fuel his own strength. If you eat it for strength, I learned that from researching all of our African warlord episodes. So maybe that was his thing. I could see it.

Yeah. So there you have it. Captain was fucking general butt naked. Not captain. I demoted him on accident general butt naked was in captain planet that's that's now canon uh so so now you have this waluigi looking motherfucker locked away in his castle of random empty metal drums trying to control the weather all while his all while his neighbors think he's an all right guy. I don't get it. Before the age of internet and TV, this is before the age of widespread electricity. I thought neighbors were always upping each other's shit.

I think it depends on the time and the region. I don't think in the 1800s they really were. I don't know. All of our grandparents keep telling us that things were way cooler back in the day because everybody knew everybody. I mean, is this a white picket fence suburbia type situation or is this just a bunch of dirty

1800s folk just trying to get by? I think the village he came from was the dirty 1800s folk trying to get by. But this is like a rather well-to-do neighborhood. He has a lot of money. I don't know. I think the friendly neighbor up in your business thing came around like the mid-1900s.

Well, this is about the 1900s, not quite the mid-1900s. But I guess we just have picket fence suburbia to blame for that shit. So this is how he actually made his money. We're not exactly sure how much money he made from his various ventures, but the tinsmithing wasn't it. He actually got his money because he turned to a new racket, ripping off widows and old people. got his money because he turned to a new racket ripping off widows and old people using those um those newspapers that he was he had been using to pick up some strange he'd actually put out personal ads uh to claim to be a lonely widower looking for a new wife under the fake name hoffman remember that name it'll become important later um also it will reveal that he's not good

at coming up with new names um when the poor unsuspecting woman would show up he would earn their trust maybe by showing them his sweet magical tricks and then uh finding their lost purse or something uh once he did that he would convince them to give him money and their assets uh once he had stolen everything from them he would then break up with them and send them away uh actually numerous times people filed police reports against him but what he did wasn't actually illegal i mean i guess if they gave everything over willingly right also women had significantly less rights back then so nobody believed them good thing that doesn't happen anymore but how stupid do you have to be

i don't you know he isn't the only person who did this. There's actually quite a few serial killers back in the day who did this. I believe the devil in the white city in New Orleans did this as well. I remember hearing about another serial killer

that did it, but they targeted like the elderly. Well, that's what he's doing too. And less. Well, widowers,

now they, maybe they died of old age, maybe they didn't, and just gullible old people, people who needed a connection. So he's preying on the weak, whether it be young and weak or old and weak. He actually made so much money, he hired a housekeeper. An old widow named Mrs. Jakubek.

And his housekeeper noticed he kept whole groups of women in the house all at once while posing as a fortune teller and managed to rob them blind either waluigi really was magic or this village is full of the dumbest fucking people on earth hey you know that charisma will get you i guess i don't know he didn't succeed in anything else he did he's only good at lying to old women. Everybody's got their skills, man. Yeah. I mean, anyway, this constant sleeping around and robbing strangers while acting like some kind of wizard must have gotten old because he finally got married, actually. He married a woman named Marie in 1912. Marie was actually 15 years his junior. And by all accounts, she was way better looking than he was. 15 years his junior.

And by all accounts, she was way better looking than he was. And while I'm sure this marriage was based solely on his good personal skills and not the vast quantities of money he had from stealing from old people, because love was fleeting. However, his young bride immediately began cheating on him with a local artist, a guy more her age named Bakari. Nobody really knows anything about Bakari except that he was a local artist, a guy more her age named Bakari. Nobody really knows anything about Bakari except that he was a local artist, which I'm sure also means back then that he was just a local unemployed guy. And she's the reason he started his killing spree, right?

Yes. I was just kidding, but OK. Maybe not necessarily. OK, so maybe maybe I gave her too much credit. I was just kidding, but okay. Maybe not necessarily. Okay, so maybe I gave her too much credit, but Bakari and Marie would be his first two victims. Mysteriously, the two young birds vanished, with Bella just simply telling everybody they ran off together.

And he must have not been that good looking, because everybody's kind of like, oh, yeah, I get it. Like nobody asked any other questions. Cops didn't come by. Nothing. They're like, oh, yeah, I would have left you, too. Like if like if my wife was to leave me. And or at least if I told everybody, yeah, she's gone, she left me like I would hope somebody at least asked for details like they're not like, yeah, sure. Well, different times.

There's not as much. I mean, they're now they're social security and social media and credit cards and all that stuff to where if your wife was to leave you, they would still be able to see a trail of her being alive. Yeah. a trail of her being alive yeah and i mean he actually was married once before but um it was uh so uh uh short time is only like less than a year that uh they got married um immediately had two kids uh like back to back and uh almost as soon as the second kid was out she was gone she bailed she didn't die the kids and her survived but she got as soon as the second kid was out she was gone she bailed she didn't die the kids and her survived but she got as soon as you could and he was left alone again um and literally no one would ever hear from those kids again or her for that matter so he's

apparently only charming short term yeah and that's not super unheard of i mean i'm sure like once you actually have to live with somebody you you're like, oh, you're just kind of a prick. And like, it's not like they had anything to fall back on. He's definitely like making all the money from robbing everybody around him. You know, that's a quality, you know, and also I have to wonder what's the housekeeper think here like she knows the person that she's working for

is not some kind of magical wizard who can tell the future or does she I guess I mean I don't know I guess that would explain

why she kept working for him even though he is very obviously nuts and killing his spouse oh you know a job is a job yeah it's like

is it the Flintstones where they do something fucked up and like the bird who also acts as their shower head is like, work is work or whatever. I don't remember that. his wife was out of the picture more of his rich widow friends began appearing around the house again uh because apparently he worked his way through his bank account and i don't know maybe added a new wing to his fucking weird mansion or something i don't know but they started appearing again this time the housekeeper notes she doesn't remember them leaving also again why are you still working for him um now it is around the year 1914 and uh world war one is actually just about to start um and the number of steel barrels that had gathered around his property had grown so large that local

police actually went to go talk to him about it well that's why the women keep coming around it's those damn barrels i mean first of all how many fucking barrels do you have to have like you know i just kind of assumed the village and city life around this time was kind of like a lawless free-for-all i you know maybe they had cops or something um i didn't expect the 1914 equivalent of a homeowners association to like show up um i mean i have to deal with that shit god forbid bell ever forgets the edges long around the sidewalk. Those fuckers are going to slap him with a fine so small you wonder why the hell they even bothered.

I mean, maybe cops back then were just like, I mean, there's a rich neighborhood. The rich friends are going to call and they're like, oh, yeah, bring down the property value by arraying his sweet metal drums everywhere. Or just the... I'm blocked. i'm sorry i wish my brain worked properly right now um and you know this is uh this wasn't this long after um the archduke franz fernand had been assassinated and everybody knew

war was coming they just weren't sure when So people had actually began hoarding food and gasoline and rubber. Like everything they knew would be rationed during a time of war. Everybody's holding on to it for dear life. And so Bella explained to him that because of the impending war, he was hoarding gasoline that he used for work. Mind you, Bella didn't own a car and you don't you don't use gasoline for tin smithing. OK, so that's what I was trying to say earlier. Because in current times, if we happen to wander by a house that just had a bunch of barrels just piled up outside, I would just assume automatically dead bodies. And maybe that's because I listen to a lot of true crime. Yeah, probably.

But that would just be my automatic go-to. Because you listen to so much crime, you think Tyler Florence from the cooking channel is a sociopath. He is. Have you ever seen him smile? There is nothing behind his eyes. They're dead. It's a strong take to have on the dear chef. Everybody go and look at a picture of Tyler Florence smiling right now.

I might have to Google that to see if one exists. Now, I might have to Google that to see if one exists. Anyway, so like I said, he explained to him was gasoline, but the war hadn't kicked off yet. So hoarding itself wasn't illegal yet. Normally, hoarding supplies during a time of war is illegal, especially during times of strict rationing. So the cops were satisfied with their answer and left him alone. So there are more homeowners association than detectives. They're like, don't even need to look at them. We're fine with that explanation.

Goodbye, sir. I want to know what cops actually did in this time because that's like the biggest stories that you hear of people getting away with shit like this is cops spoke to them and looked into them multiple times and never actually followed up on anything. Well, if you, I don't know any kind of, um, like historical tests on text on law enforcement or anything, not exactly a scholar in that area of the woods, but I do remember looking into

Jack the Ripper. And if you remember the police work from Jack the Ripper, it almost doesn't exist. Uh, they're just kind of a bunch of random dudes bumbling about tripping over their own dicks and occasionally beating up prostitutes. They weren't really cops. They're more just like village constables that didn't really do a whole lot. You see this girl?

She's dead. You see how he ripped her guts out there? I wonder why he did that. Yeah, that's fucking weird. Anyway, you want to go get a beer yeah man it's almost over yeah um so when the war finally did kick off and with the austro-hungarian empire's forces invading its tiny neighbor serbia in july of 1914 bella actually dropped what he was doing ran to the nearest recruiter's office and en enlisted in the Royal Hungarian Hanved portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

So because we are a military history podcast, just to segment here off to the side, I have to explain that the Royal Hungarian portion of the Austro-Hungarian Army was actually one of just four different armies that the Empire had that wore different uniforms, had different ranks, different equipment, and spoke different languages. If you can't figure out why they're one of the worst functioning armies of the entire war now you know um they're awful also like one army didn't want to work with the other um and one army like when one army was short of equipment the other army wouldn't give them any even though they're all part of the same country. So it would be like if the National Guard and the regular army hated each other as much

as we all pretend they do. Or the army and the Marines. Yes. So anyway, back to Bella. Actually, I have a little footnote here. Some people claim that Bella was drafted. No way to decide one way or another. I found more sources that said that he volunteered, which is strange because he was incredibly

rich. He would have eventually been drafted because pretty much everybody in his age group was drafted into the war. Maybe he knew that his forest of fucking metal barrels was eventually going to become uncovered and he had to get out of town. Maybe he just had a strong sense of duty to his country, Joe. Which one?

Anything's possible. The whole war is based on nationalistic core shit, so maybe he really was loyal to the old emperor there. So, it didn't take long after his enlistment to be shipped out to the Serbian killing fields as one of the Empire's armies got thrashed by the Serbs'

much smaller army. He left everything to be looked after by his dear old housekeeper. No one really knows what she did while he was gone, but everybody knows that she sat in the house, didn't go anywhere, cleaned the house, whatever,

kept the property up. I don't know. Waiting for her master to come home. Do we call him her master or do we just call him her employer? I don't know. i'm gonna go with mass ployer uh so how do we know that she was still in the house well because six months later bella was reported killed in action like hundreds of thousands of other soldiers all around europe during this time um and the notice came to the house where she picked it up and since his wife

uh his wives were gone one permanently and his children never really knew him or possibly even knew what his name was. His property was to be turned over to the town. They would take inventory of stuff and auction off. A lot of stuff that was important would be kind of taken by the state and used for the war, which is where his drums come in. Because of his past contact with the the cops local soldiers knew all about his vast fields of gasoline which they desperately needed so they're like well let's go get the fucking gas right um so cops popped the top of one of the metal drums and did not find gas at all and so they found the pickled corpses of his wife mar Maria, and her lover, Bakari. Pickled? Pickled.

They had been strangled, stripped naked, hung upside down, and bled dry through their necks through various small puncture wounds and stuffed in the barrel of pickling juice. Where did he bleed them? Somewhere in his house. There's actually,

there's a room that we're gonna talk about in a little bit. His housekeeper, what she says, was not allowed to go in. She's in on this. That's what the cops thought too. So the cops looked around and saw they had at least 30 more barrels, just like this one. And every one they opened had at least one body in it, sometimes two or three.

How long was he doing this for no one's really sure but they know it probably it only could have started once he moved around the age of 23 into the town so around um 1905 so he's been at for quite a few years at least a decade at this point um Each woman, other than the late, each one of them was a woman rather than the late Bakari. Every single one had been killed

in the exact same way. It put in a giant pickle jar and left out on the side. One of his victims, a woman named Isabel Koblitz, was actually the minister of commerce's niece. Somehow nobody caught on to that how we're not

how it's it's like um think about how serial killers flourished in like the 60s through the 80s there's no way to catch them unless you catch them in the act thinking now think it's the 1900s how the fuck are they gonna catch this guy i i still stand by my previous statement that the tens of silver silver barrels outside this guy's house is kind of a red flag you know i would have thought the same thing too but he seemed like such a trustworthy guy with that such a nice guy that's what they say about every serial killer yeah nobody really said he was a nice guy though everybody's what they say about every serial killer. Nobody really said he was a nice guy, though. Everybody said he was pleasant.

And I guess by pleasant, because nobody hung out with this guy. By pleasant, they meant when you saw him in passing, he didn't swing his dick around like a helicopter or something. I don't know. But nobody thought anything of it. So once the news got out around town. I feel weird that that's your line of unpleasantness. I don't know. I mean, this is 1900s.

I don't know how they fly, man. They seem super trustworthy. Imagine getting a letter. Imagine you meet your husband through a letter in the mail without ever seeing him. And he just says, come to this address. Because they were trustworthy enough to be like, yeah, right. Seems legit. Yeah.

Checks out. Hoffman. Soon, tons of women came forward and said they'd been attacked by someone who matched Bella's sketch. To include some stories that include being attacked by a wildly crazed animal in the middle of the night. This is where the werewolf shit comes in. And I'm just going to assume it's all factual. Bella Keisha is a werewolf. Soon, the local police chief and honestly the only dude in this entire story that seems like he knows what the fuck he's doing is a guy named mccarley naggy i might be pronouncing

that wrong it's hungarian um was on the scene and immediately ordered bella's housekeeper arrested now this has been hours and nobody's done this yet, but he finally has her arrested. He also began searching through Bella's house. Again, nobody had done that yet either. And found a secret locked room that his housekeeper claimed that she was under strict orders never to go inside.

I'm sorry. If he died and left her alone there and she was just there for months and months waiting for his return, she's going through everything. I know how girls are. And remember, like it had been six months until she got noticed that he was dead. She definitely went in there. Oh, yeah. She's going through drawers.

She's going through closets. She's going through cabinets. It's just her nosy. Yeah. Yeah. and it's, it's just, they're nosy. Yeah.

Yeah. And that, this is why this is one of those times that, um, it starts to, the question starts before him. How many people did he really kill before he resorted to the drums? Uh,

because the room was full of bookcases, but also had a desk that held the, um, a large number of letters, Bell's correspondence with 74 women and photo albums, including all of them. Didn't he come to town with the drums? Yes.

So he had them from before, but I mean, when he had nobody remarked like, hey, there's a barrel full of pickled women at his old house. Like he was only ever renting. So like, and maybe he lost his security deposit because there's blood everywhere. But like maybe he dumped the bodies before and realized it'd be a lot easier to just pickle them. I don't know. I think in that time,

it might've just been easier to dump them. Like especially if you're just gonna leave them outside of your house. Yeah, it's not like he had a garage. He's left them in the yard. So many of the books in the room were about poisons or strangulation i don't even know how like multiple books about strangulation why do so many exist like why does more than one book about strangulation need to exist especially

in the 1800s yeah because like it's not like he had a subscription to i strangle bitches monthly i don't know um like i know watch lists weren't really a thing back then but when you go to a bookstore i'm like this book was so good i like when just like it and it's about strangling people to death you get put on ye olde watch lists yeah see that's why i think it's not really that time of neighbors and everybody's business or anything like that. I think it's a time of everybody just kind of looks away and minds their own. Yeah, apparently

especially in Hungary. From the letters, Nagy discerned several things. The oldest of the letters were from 1903, and it became clear that Bella was defrauding the women, usually around middle age, who had been looking for marriage. He had placed ads in marriage columns of several newspapers and had selected mainly women who had no relatives living nearby.

There's marriage columns? Yeah. What is this, married at first sight? Kind of. It's like I told you about the pen pals. They would put the ads in saying, you know, I'm a widower. I'm a widow. This is what I'm looking for. This is what I have. They just don't want to die alone effectively. That's just sad. I mean, that's what Tinder is now, right? Except without all the widows.

Yeah, but you go to Bang not to get married. I mean, these people were fucking too. They just couldn't put it in the ad because it's 1903. It's not like my name is Sebastian Golfbrait from whatever village, really into butt stuff. I have a 10-inch cock. Here's the picture and staple the Polaroid to it. Take a dick pic back then. You have to sit still for like 10, 15 minutes. And and by then you're soft and it doesn't look good um but yeah he found all these newspaper columns and because he saved them all like a fucking psychopath um police also noticed uh disappearances

were uh like noted when like he kept dates of when like he decided like this person isn't leaving anymore um and again because he made sure these people had no connections nearby no living relatives no one was going to miss them he he was pretty good at seeking out his his uh victims and even if he wasn't i mean he kidnapped and murdered the minister of commerce's niece. Like, imagine if like the Department of Commerce's niece goes missing tomorrow. It's going to pop up. Yeah, it's going to be like a statewide manhunt. Yeah, not so much in Hungary.

Yeah, not so much in Hungary. Police also found old court records that indicated that two of his victims had initiated court proceedings because he had stolen from them. Both the women disappeared, though, and the court cases had to be dismissed. So maybe he actually started killing because he realized, like, eventually these people are going to realize like courts exist and they're going to sue the shit out of me and, uh, decided that it'd be better off if he just made them into human pickles. It's like a really gritty remake of pickle Rick. Um,

Nagy also found something else in the letters, his old alias Hoffman because Nagy already knew that the notice had been sent back to his house, assuming, I'm assuming the military thought he had a family, that Bella was dead, he decided, well, there's no need to look after a Bella Kish in the Hungarian Hanved because he's dead. I'll look for Hoffman. So by using the name Hoffman, he ordered this soldier to be found as soon as possible. And you can imagine how hard it would be to track down one soldier in front of millions of soldiers who everyone now thinks has faked his death at least once. Now, it never really says like what clued Nagy into thinking that he faked his death because nobody knows that yet. So the theory is that he ran off to war and changed his name and enlisted and essentially

did all this because he knew that they were eventually going to come and search his house? Maybe. And I mean, honestly, to fake your death during the war. Um, I mean, all you'd have to do is switch out your dog tags or whatever their version of ID tags were on a dead body. Cause there's thousands of them laying around and then go to a unit where nobody knew you. I mean, there's no records of anything anywhere. Uh, it's not like your, uh, ID had a picture attached to it. Uh, the only picture that we know we have of them is a sketch. Right.

No DNA or dental. Right. had a picture attached to it uh the only picture that we know we have of him is a sketch right no dna or dental right and especially not during world war one where one crater would hold a hundred dead bodies just switch out real fast and bail but it turns out naggy found the needle in the haystack he was in luck the army reported that a soldier from bella's unit with the name hoffman was recovering from wounds in a hospital in serbia So he didn't have to look that hard. Bella stayed in his unit, which means like everybody was cool. Like,

Oh, so we're calling you Hoffman now. Okay. Hoffman's not even a Hungarian name. It's Austrian, I guess. And, but the way the military worked,

he wouldn't have been, he wouldn't have been in that unit. Anyway, um, when Nagy showed up at that hospital, this guy is like some kind of ye olde Hungarian super cop because to do all of this isn't fast. He's not going to jump in a car and drive to the front.

He's going to get in a fucking horse cart or something. Not to mention this required him sending letters through the mail to the military who's embroiled in a fucking world war. He didn't have his iPhone? Nah. Oh, shit. Unfortunately, it was the first casualty of the war. Super tragic.

So Nagy showed up at the hospital and he was brought to the soldier's bed and he thought he was in luck. There was a soldier laying there, but he found Bella gone. and he thought he was in luck. There was a soldier laying there, but he found Bella gone. The soldier where he was laying was a strangled corpse with the dog tags of Hoffman attached. Ooh, he strikes again.

This had become the closest anyone would ever come to arresting Bella Keish. There were reports later in the war that he popped up again under the name Macarey and was cited multiple times on the Italian front. So it's weird that even though he's running from the cops, he stays in the same war. He gets to kill people without even having to cover it up.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe that's what he's like. This, this is kind of nice. This is a life, man. I just have to worry about I die.

But even then I probably won't feel it like and also i mean at this point he's like a hungarian um everybody knows who bella quiche is uh news has gotten around but um it's pretty pretty quickly taken out of the headlines because it's world war one and millions of people are dying. Post-war, there are numerous stories of what became of him, including that he died in a Turkish prison or he was arrested in Romania for burglary. Still, another story, and one I actually believe, has him running off to join the French Foreign Legion. Again, under the alias Hoffman, because a French foreign legionnaire said he knew a Hungarian guy with the name Hoffman who really liked to brag about how good he was with a garage and looked exactly like quiche. But by the time the gendarmes decided to follow up on this legionnaires reports he was gone and that's where he vanishes from history until 1932 guess where where new york city this is the last known sighting of bella an nypd homicide detective named henry oswald said he swore to God he saw Bella exiting the subway in Times Square.

Oswald had developed a weird obsession with the case through historical studies or something, and he knew him on sight. But he wasn't at work, and he had to run and tell somebody about it. When Oswald decided to track the guy down, he actually tracked down where he exactly where he worked. He worked as a janitor in an office building. And he was like, I got you motherfucker. I'm going to wrangle up all my boys. I'm going to come and arrest you.

I'm not just exactly sure how the extradition worked back then, but he wanted his dude. By the time he showed up, the janitor was already gone. Couldn't that just be like a case of the dude? He's got like an obsession with the case. And so he's seeing it like, I don't know. Psycho. I don't know if psychos a case of the dude he's got like an obsession with a case and so he's seeing it like i don't know psycho i don't know psychosomatically is the word but

like if he's you know he's thinking about it all the time and reading about it and everything it's certainly possible but i mean he doesn't make any other claims he saw him any other time yeah i guess it's more interesting if he actually saw him i choose to believe that it was him because that actually i you know what? I didn't research this for the article, but there was another story of something like this happening in New York City where somebody found somebody from World War I. And it was like somebody of note. And they found him as a janitor in a building in New York City. He wasn't a serial killer. He

was some like war hero from a different country. But, and I really wish I did, I did some research on that, but I'm a hack and a fraud and I did not. That makes sense though, to leave, you know, like such a tragic thing and just go away and live a quiet life where nobody knows you. And not to mention he's from a podunk town in, in Hungary, which is now undergoing massive amounts of change because the post-war the empire fell apart and he had to deal with all the fallout of that. Where would it be easier to go in, you know, incognito a village or New York city where there's millions of people. Oh, New York city. Absolutely. And that's really where nobody cares

and everybody just looks the other way and lets you mind your business. That's even today. Yeah. That hasn't changed. Yeah. So that was the last sighting that anybody had of him,

even if that wasn't a sighting. That's the last time anybody claims to have seen him. That's considered, you know. Somewhat legit. Yeah. His eventual fate and even his exact number of victims remained a total mystery. But, you know, there was tons of barrels.

Some of them were empty. Some of them were full of bodies. He had letters that randomly petered out after they said, yeah, I'll come visit you. They had multiple time frames of women disappearing that he kept on his calendar never found the bodies you know they they click everybody credits him to between 24 and 25 uh victims i'm willing to bet it's significantly higher so did they call him the vampire because he bled his victims yeah they uh they that name was actually given to him almost immediately which is kind of

cool but uh yeah he used something they're not exactly sure what he didn't like slice their throat open but he made small puncture marks and then drained them out and they're saying in that special room of his that his housekeeper wasn't allowed to go in. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Because in none of her other statements, anything else that she's made, did she ever say, oh, yeah, then he brought the girl into his special room and I never saw them again. And was there a drain in there? Where did the blood go? No, it was just the house.

It was just the room house. Um, I, I don't know. The housekeeper story makes no sense. Uh, and she is not charged with anything and she ends up just kind of vanishing from history,

but she was totally in on it. Oh yeah. Um, that I don't know how, you know, I guess I could see how somebody pulls this off. I mean, John,

uh, John Wayne Gacy's wife lived with him and he killed like 40 kids in the house. Yeah. Anything's possible. Oh, definitely. There's a lot of serial killers that were killing right under people's

noses. Yeah. And maybe the housekeeper was, uh, know there's i think it was like the green river killer um's wife that stated like oh i never knew he would do anything like that even though it was all happening right right next to him well in btk he had a wife and kids and he was like a church-going man wasn't he uh yeah he got caught because he sent a floppy disk off from his church yeah but like years after he actually stopped killing yeah well it didn't help that uh he sent a letter to the cops and said if i send you a floppy disk can you guys trace it and the cops are like no of course

we couldn't that's some good police work right there i think the hungarian cops could have figured that one out like sure but also like huge props to hungarian super cop naggy who actually at least made bella work for it yeah i don't know i mean there's a very good chance he died during the war um world war one had so many fucking casualties that nobody ever identified that he could just be some nameless pile of bones somewhere in northern italy that's probably more likely than anything else in a perfect world yeah i mean especially because he fought in that with the hungarian military which is one of the worst of the entire war and they took terrible casualties i mean most people took terrible casualties, but they took a lot.

The more likely story here is that he died in some hole somewhere. And it's a lot cooler to think that some Waluigi-looking, werewolf-looking motherfucker is stalking through the streets of New York, isn't it? As some immortal hell beast. motherfucking motherfuckers stalking through the streets of New York as some immortal hell beast. So, okay. So he was abandoned by his prostitute mother abused by his alcoholic father.

Yes. Um, I mean, do you think that's what contributed, contributed to him being a serial killer? Do you think there was like something else? You know, it's hard to say because, you know, he vanishes from history for 10 plus years. We don't know what happened during those 10 plus years. He could have killed other people during those 10 plus years.

He was being trained by the previous vampire. Yeah. That's how Batman happened. He actually was taken away by a fuck. I'm going to get so much shit for not remembering what that group's called, who trained him. And, uh, there's actually, there's actually a whole vampire society in Austria, Hungary,

Hungary that, uh, spent their time training young adolescents. Yeah. It's a branch from Transylvania. Yeah. They're pretty well known. Yeah. Um, um, you know, I would like to think that it's something as simple as, you know, he was abused by his parents and were abused by parent abandoned by the other parent.

And he's just a product of that. I feel like sometimes when we try to explain those things away like that, we, we want to simplify crazy people or people who want to hurt other people. to simplify crazy people or people who want to hurt other people. Um, sometimes people are just bad. I think, um, like green river killer, Gary Ridgeway from about two, two hours North of us, pretty decent childhood. He was a good father to this day. His son will say, I understand what he did and it was awful, but he was a good dad. Yeah. Sociopathy is a mental disorder. We can maybe interview Tyler Florence on it one day.

It's not like he could go to a shrink in Austro-Hungary in the 18th century. This didn't exist. Most sociopaths wouldn't go to a shrink anyways, and even if they did, they would be able to fool the shrink into thinking that they were okay because they just have those kind of – they don't have empathy, but they are able to fool people into thinking that they were okay because they they just have those kind of they don't have empathy but they are able to fool people into thinking that they do oh yeah it's part of self-preservation they're really good at that um i don't know anything we say about his origin story

is all conjecture and rumor it's built on mythos but as a guy who could have abandoned the war, I mean, thousands of people deserted. He could have deserted and it probably would have been a much better way to escape from the cops. But he kept switching identities and stayed somewhere where he could keep killing people. Maybe he just found something he was good at and God damn it. He was going to get the, he's going to be the best fucking serial killer he could be. Yeah. He probably enjoyed it.

Yeah, I guess. Um, it's not like he had many friends back home. No, he had none. I mean, even his housekeeper says they weren't friends.

Like he didn't speak to her. He just like, she was a shadow in her, in his house. I don't know. It's, it's weird to think about cause she worked for him for years, but never really described him as a person. Like, yeah, he's my boss.

Okay, and? That's all I got. So we're at about 50 minutes now. Again, thanks for coming on. I know you only enjoy coming on here whenever it's something you like talking about, whether it be Harry Potter or serial killers from the olden times. It's just what I'm able to contribute to more. Yeah. I'll have to have you on if I ever cover Texas history so I can insult it in front of you. It's not going to be good for you.

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