19. Getting Started as a Murderess
After things settled down following the tempest with her fiancée and the castration of the lover who had gotten her pregnant, Elizabeth Bathory gave birth to a daughter, who was quietly hidden. She wed her betrothed in 1575, but kept cuckolding him throughout their married life – a task made easier by his frequent and prolonged absences on military campaigns.
Somewhere along the line, Bathory developed a taste for sadism, and sometime around 1585, she began torturing and killing young girls. She started off with servants at her castle, then began murdering serf girls from surrounding peasant villages. Eventually, even the daughters of local gentry, sent to her castle by their families to receive an aristocratic education and learn courtly manners, were added to her murder menu.