In the entire history of the world, I challenge anyone to come up with a better name for a group of poisoners: may I introduce you to the Angel Makers of Nagrev.
In the years immediately following the First World War, the small village of Nagrev in Hungary experienced an unusually large number of people – mostly men – dying of heart attacks. The ages of these deceased ranged widely, and after a time (and somewhere between 40-300 deaths), the village began to be known as “the murder district”, and in 1929, people finally figured out the mystery — these had been deliberate arsenic poisonings.
Turns out that a woman named Zsuzsanna Fazekas had been running a clandestine murder operation that involved a whole community of female accomplices. Fazekas was a widowed migrant to Nagyrev, brining her much in-demand skills as a medicine woman to the village which had no doctor. And beginning with World War I, it had a lot less men as well, since they had been conscripted into battle. The absence of the male population frequently didn’t bother the women who lived there. Nagyrev’s conservative culture promoted young women marrying against their will, frequently to older men. During the war, many women elected to have affairs with men who had been imprisoned and placed into local camps.
When the soldiers returned, they were unhappy to find their wives involved with other men, and cases of wife abuse ramped up. Enter Zsuzanna Fazekas, who started teaching these women how to boil flypaper and extract the heated arsenic from it. Fazekas and her Angel-Makers (as they called themselves) began serving arsenic-laced water to their abusers. Fazekas tried to regulate the practice, claiming that only “bad men,” never “good men,” women, or children should be poisoned. But after a while, some of the Angel-Makers began to break the rules. Eventually the fatalities became suspicious, and some of the deceased bodies were exhumed and examined for poison.
While Fazekas killed herself before authorities could get her, many of the Angel-Makers went to trial. Only two of the women were eventually hanged.
Source(s): Image wikkimania. Wikipedia. _Horror-Bound_, “Angel Makers of Nagrev – Who Buys This Much Flypaper?” Sept 9, 2020, Dave in real life horror series.
