Elizabeth Báthory: the World’s Greatest Serial Killer
All of the rotten scoundrels on this list have so far been men, but here is a woman just to prove that the fairer sex has its own inclination towards occasional deviancy. In the sixteenth century, somewhere in rural Hungary, there stood a castle, isolated in the beautiful rural Transylvanian countryside. Therein lived a woman with powerful appetites and deeply disturbed, sociopathic tendencies. She lived in the feudal world where power was absolute, and the aristocracy was above the law. The potential for insane killers to freely explore their appetites was almost uninhibited, so long as those killers were born into the right class.
Báthory’s family included kings, cardinals, knights and judges. Among these, Elizabeth was not alone in cultivating habits of sado-sexual torture, which was her particular specialty. At age fifteen, she married Count Ferenc Nádasdy de Nádasd et Fogarasföld. Under her direction, he built her a custom torture chamber. This chamber’s victims were typically servants and local peasants; young girls lured by the promise of employment.
The Count was a complicated figure in this tale. While he was certainly no saint and indulged his wife’s activities, he protected her and acted as a check against her darkest interests. When he died, however, that limitation disappeared, and it seems then Elizabeth set to work on the local peasantry in earnest.
What did she actually do? Well history is not specific, but tales emerged from the castle of the usual pleasures of branding, burning, lacerating, stretching and bending, with occasional whispers of cannibalism. All of this, of course, had a sexual/sadistic character, and as Elizabeth aged, her practices grew more varied and creative, but also more brazen and more risky.
The disappearance of a steady stream of peasants was a curiosity, but nothing to cause an investigation. Orgies of bloodshed and torture became traditional at family celebrations, including her daughter’s wedding, and after a while Elizabeth ceased to hide her activities, and was quite open about what she was doing. Things changed, however, as she began to select from among the daughters of the aristocracy, and as they began to disappear, the authorities sat up and took notice.
The investigation that eventually got her was conducted by the Palatine of Hungary György Thurzó, who visited the castle on December 30, 1610, and there caught Elizabeth Báthory in full costume. One young women was on the rack, dying of some unnamed brutality, others lay ready for disposal, and yet others locked up awaiting their turn. A year later, after an exhaustive investigation, Elizabeth Báthory and a number of accomplices were put on trial, and Christendom was riveted as details of what had been going on for all of those years emerged. Eighty counts of murder were laid on the table, and all involved were charged and convicted. Most were put to death, but again class and privilege prevailed, and Elizabeth Báthory escaped with a version of house arrest that isolated her from any contact at all. She was fifty four years old in August 1614 when she was found dead in her bricked up chambers.