Despite his small number of victims, Jack the Ripper is generally seen as the greatest killer in history, so great that other famous murderers pale in celebrity to this unknown, knife-wielding maniac. For example, have you ever heard of a lady called Elizabeth Bathory? Probably not. She was a noblewoman!…Still not doin’ anything for yah? Hmmm. Elizabeth Bathory is one of those obscure figures of history, you either know about her, or you don’t know about her. And if you know about her, you’d wish you didn’t.

The Blood Countess, as she was called, is proof that just killing bundles and bundles of people doesn’t get you on the ‘Top Ten’ list of famous killers. And believe me, she had a lot of fun doing what she did. And her score on the Super-Killers of History list would be right up there along with Mengele and Stalin and that kid who pours kerosene down anthills and lights them on fire. But enough about them, this article is about old Lizzie the Blood Countess…

Who was the Blood Countess?

In her native Hungarian, she was Báthory Erzsébet, or in English, “Elizabeth Bathory”. For the sake of convenience, I’ll use her English name in this article.

Elizabeth Bathory was born on the 7th of August, 1560, the daughter Gyorgy Bathory. In her childhood, she was taught German, Greek and Latin, and had an interest in science. The Bathory family was incredibly rich and very powerful. They had connections, through blood or marriage, to almost every other family worth knowing in 16th century eastern Europe. Her family had powerful and wealthy members who controlled entire countries, such as the lands controlled by Stephen Bathory. To Elizabeth, he was just ‘Uncle Stephen’. To everyone else, he was the King of Poland. Elizabeth’s own father, Gyorgy, was a prominent nobleman. Elizabeth’s husband, a warrior count, was a national hero in Hungary, after successfully fighting against the Turks. When they married, the count gave his wife a grand castle to call her home. And she did call it home. For her husband rarely did; he was often off on wars and battles, trying to stop the Turks from barging into Hungary again…and again…and again…

It got to the stage that Elizabeth got used to living without her husband. Incredibly rich and free to do as she wished as the wife of the local nobleman, she exerted her power and authority over the helpless peasants of her domain, who lived in the various villages around her husband’s several estates.

Elizabeth’s Victims

Women with husbands who do a lot of work and head out on business-trips all the time can sometimes find themselves lonely and doing weird things. Elizabeth was no exception. Only, her husband’s business-trips were liable to get him killed. With the absence of the local lord, the lady of the castle was able to do whatever she damn well pleased. And she did, too.

Starting in about 1590 at the age of 30, Elizabeth started capturing and arresting and imprisoning girls and young women. Teenagers and women in their twenties were swept off the streets of the villages around her castles and Elizabeth had them locked down in the dungeons. These girls became the countess’s servant-girls and slaves. But above all things, they became her beauty-lotion.

It is widely believed that Bathory killed hundreds of young, female virgins for their blood. Literally. She drained their bodies of their blood and bathed in it, believing that it would help her reclaim her youth. Some accounts say that she even drank blood. But Elizabeth didn’t get blood in any way that we would recognise today. She didn’t set up a neat little blood-bank and needles and hoses and syringes. No, she preferred to do it a bit more earthy-like. To get the blood that she wanted, she mercilessly tortured and killed hundreds of girls and young women, cutting them open, locking them in cages, flogging them to death or mutilating their bodies. There are stories of her forcing women to strip naked in the snow during the freezing Hungarian winters. Bathory would then have dozens of buckets of freezing water thrown over her kneeling victims until they quite literally froze to death.

Bathory got away with her crimes because of her position. When your uncle rules an entire country and your husband is a national hero, it’s unlikely that people are going to jump up making wild, murderous accusations about you, is it? Peasants were terrified of their demonic mistress and when another girl in the village went missing, people kept their mouths shut.

Elizabeth Bathory. The Blood Countess

Capture and Trial

Position or no position, however, social standards dictates that it’s bad manners to go around butchering your neighbours. Especially when your neighbours are sweet little girls. Word had travelled around Hungary that Elizabeth was doing all kinds of weird and questionable things. Some people suspected her of witchcraft, a crime which was punishable only by death in Medieval Europe.

Eventually, though, the other nobles decided that Elizabeth could not be tolerated. Her bloodlust was giving them all a bad name, and something had to be done. Oh, and think of those poor, poor peasant-girls…yeah…the girls. It could be said that Elizabeth was sought out by the nobles, not for justice and legal reasons, but more because she was blackening the Hungarian aristocracy. And the other nobles weren’t going to take it much longer.

Rumors had been spreading for a while, but one man, István Magyari (Stephen Magyari), was determined to make things known. Magyari was a Christian minister, and between 1602-1604, he complained to anyone and everyone who would listen, that something had to be done about Elizabeth’s butchery. By now, rumors had been spreading for at least the last decade, and Mr. Magyari was getting worried.

Eventually, his persistence paid off, and King Matthias of Hungary decided that enough was enough. Acting on Magyari’s information, the king appointed Juraj Thurzo to investigate these wild and ludicrous claims against the Blood Countess. Thurzo was the Palatine of Hungary, a position roughly akin to the Supreme Judge or the Prime Minister. Thurzo was effectively the second-in-command in Hungary, and his office was directly beneath the king’s.

Thurzo, in company with Magyari the priest and a bunch of soldiers, headed to Elizabeth’s castle. They had to tread very carefully here. Elizabeth might have been a monster, but she was a monster with very powerful connections. They couldn’t just barge in and arrest her…this had to be done carefully.

While Thurzo, Magyari and the soldiers were busy trying to figure out how to get at Elizabeth Bathory, King Matthias sent notaries to do some more investigating. The notaries’ reports were worrying…Elizabeth wasn’t just killing peasant women, she was also going after the young women and the daughters and young sisters and neices of people who were in fact…other noblemen! Attacking peasants was one thing, but butchering women of the noble classes was something that the king had not expected. A consultation was held with Elizabeth’s family, specifically her son Paul and her two sons-in-law. Execution of Elizabeth would cause a huge scandal. But she couldn’t go unpunished, either. Eventually, they reached a compromise, that Elizabeth would be placed under permanent house-arrest.

With these decisions made, Thurzo, Magyari and the soldiers moved in the for the kill. Or at least, the trap. This was a difficult thing to do. Castles, by their very nature and design, are hard to enter discreetly. Thurzo and his men didn’t want to raise any alarms and they wanted to capture Elizabeth alive and in the act. If Thurzo and his men were spotted, it could become awkward in a hurry. Not least because Thurzo, second-in-command to the King of Hungary, was Elizabeth’s…cousin! See? I told you she was well-connected!

Well you can bet that made things awkward. A family feud and a national crisis all rolled in one.

Eventually, Thurzo and the soldiers did get into the castle. Thurzo successfully trapped his bloodthirsty cousin in a room and locked the door on her, while the soldiers secured the castle. A message was sent to the king and King Matthias started organising a trial.

Of course, to have a trial, you need to have evidence. So King Matthias told his good man Thurzo, to start looking for some. Thurzo and his men didn’t have to look very far.

Buried all over the castle grounds, and even hidden inside the castle itself, were dozens, hundreds of corpses and skeletons, all bearing horrific injuries. Soldiers recalled corpses with no eyes, no arms or legs. Clothing and personal effects of the kidnapped girls were also found, and several graves were found, dug hastily around the castle grounds.

Even more damning evidence was given by the victims of Elizabeth who had survived, and who were found imprisoned in the castle. Elizabeth’s band of assistants: men and women who helped her in her grisly work, were all fighting with each other, all trying to be the first to spill the beans. Telling everything they knew was the only way to escape a sentence of death for being an accomplice to murder, or escaping painful interrogation under torture. By assisting the royal authorities in their investigation, they hoped against hope to gain clemency from the king, even if King Matthias was in no mood for being merciful at the moment.

The trial started on the 2nd of January, 1611. You can bet it wasn’t a happy start to the new year. Elizabeth’s family begged that she not be brought forth to give evidence and the king obliged, keeping her locked in her room in the castle, under house-arrest.

Amongst the people who testified and gave evidence in court were Elizabeth’s unfortunate servants, and her assistants in her torturous doings. The judges (21 in all) who sat in on these hearings were ruthless in their examination and cross-examination. They fired questions at everyone. Who were they? What did they do? Who did they kill? How? Who were they? Where were they from? What did the Countess do? How many did she kill? The questions went on and on for days.

One of Elizabeth’s servants, a dwarf named Ficzko, was asked to describe how the women were killed. He stated that:

“They tied the hands and arms very tightly with Viennese cord, they were beaten to death until the whole body was black as charcoal and their skin was rent and torn. One girl suffered more than two hundred blows before dying”

Elizabeth’s nurse from childhood was brought forth to testify against her mistress. She stated that Elizabeth or her fellow torturers, used red hot pincers or pokers on her victims, breaking their victims jaws, burning their flesh, ripping skin off with burning pincers, slicing off their fingers, slicing away the webbing between their fingers, biting off their flesh or ripping their flesh off with their bare hands. And this was just the start.

As the trial continued and the judges continued listening to testimonies, they were soon appalled by what they heard. Letters between Palatine Thurzo and King Matthias indicated that Elizabeth’s bodycount was grusomely impressive. While officially, she was only tried for the murder of a mere eighty (that’s 80) victims, Thurzo and his companions believed, based on the evidence they’d found at the castle, that Elizabeth could have killed anywhere from three hundred to six hundred to even seven hundred young women.

Ultimately, the fate of the Blood Countess came down to that of King Matthias of Hungary, and you can bet that old Matty didn’t have an easy job to do. As king, he could, of course, do whatever he wanted. But he had to tread carefully. Do the wrong thing, and he could have a national disaster on his hands. Personally, he wanted to have Elizabeth executed and done with. He would not let such a butcher live in his country and destroy his terrified subjects like this. But as was pointed out by his advisors, having the Blood Countess executed would mean a whole heap of paperwork. Her royal immunity would have to be removed from her and they would need a special law enacted just to have her executed. Elizabeth’s cousin Thurzo begged with his liege that Elizabeth was not in full possession of her faculties and would his Majesty consider acquittal on the grounds of insanity? The king refused, citing the evidence that Elizabeth had deliberately kept several implements of torture near at hand and that she clearly enjoyed her sadistic little games. She had to be punished…somehow.

Crime and Punishment

If Elizabeth was executed, if she was stripped of her noble title and her rights, it meant that her fortune, her estate, her titles and everything else that went with them, became the property of the king. Ordinarily, this would have suited King Matthias just fine. However, it was brought to the king’s attention that Elizabeth had children. If she was executed, her children would inherit nothing. Her husband died in 1604, so he wouldn’t get anything. It either all went to Elizabeth’s children, or it all went to the king.

Matthias decided that Elizabeth’s children had nothing to do with this and were therefore innocent. Plus, they surely had families of their own to provide for. It was decreed that Elizabeth therefore be placed under house-arrest for an indefinite length of time. She was bricked up in a small suite of rooms in her castle, with all the windows bricked up and the doors locked. One small hole was permitted, for the passage of food and drink, but that was it.

Paul Bathory, Elizabeth’s son, wrote to the king begging for mercy, but Matthias refused. On the other hand, Paul’s older sister and Elizabeth’s daughter, Anna, was appalled at her mother’s crimes. She vowed never to see or speak to her mother ever again. And she forbad her children from ever visiting or speaking about their grandmother.

As for Elizabeth herself, she remained confined in her small suite of rooms in her castle, never to be released. She eventually died on the 21st of August, 1614, at the age of fifty-four. Throughout her life, from her arrest to her death, she insisted that she was innocent of her crimes and that her victims died of various ailments and accidents and certainly NOT by her own hands. These protestations fell on deaf ears. King Matthias was in no mood to listen and her family had all but deserted her. King Matthias eventually died in 1619, at the age of 62.

King Matthias of Hungary, the man who finally ordered for Elizabeth Bathory to be held accountable for her crimes against his people