An African American serial killer with a taste for elderly victims, Howard Allen never strayed far from hometown Indianapolis in his search for prey. In August 1974, at age 24, he invaded the home of 85-year-old Opal Cooper, beating her to death in the course of a petty robbery. Convicted on a reduced charge of manslaughter, Allen received a term of two to 21 years in state prison. Paroled in January 1985, he returned to Indianapolis and found work in a car wash, biding his time before he resumed the hunt. On May 18, 1987, a 73-year-old Indianapolis woman narrowly escaped death when a prowler choked and beat her in her home. Two days later, Laverne Hale, 87, was attacked in a similar fashion, dying of her injuries on May 29.
The raids continued on June 2, when a burglar ransacked the home of an elderly man five blocks from the Hale murder scene. This time, the tenant was absent. The prowler vented his anger by setting the house on fire. On July 14, Ernestine Griffin, age 73, was murdered in her Indianapolis home, stabbed eight times with a 10-inch butcher knife, a kitchen toaster smashed repeatedly against her skull. Grieving relatives estimated that the killer had escaped with $15 and a camera belonging to his victim. The case broke on August 4, 1987, with Howard Allen’s arrest on multiple charges. Witnesses linked him to the May 18 attack, leading to Allen’s indictment on charges of burglary, battery, and unlawful confinement. He was also charged with arson and burglary (from the June 2 incident), as well as the murder of Ernestine Griffin.
Police were not finished with their suspect, however. As it happened, Laverne Hale had been a neighbor of Allen’s, living directly behind his house, and he became a suspect in her murder, based on her killer’s modus operandi. In early August, detectives announced that Allen was a prime suspect in eleven other cases, each involving robbery or assault of elderly victims in their homes around Indianapolis. In the spring of 1988, Allen was convicted of burglary and felony battery in the May 18 assault, plus an additional count of habitual criminal behavior. He was sentenced to 88 years on those charges, but the worst was yet to come. On June 11, 1988, he was convicted of murder and robbery in the slaying of Ernestine Griffin, with the jury recommending CAPITAL PUNISHMENT. At this writing, Allen awaits execution on Indiana’s death row.
“ANGEL Makers of Nagyrev”
Little is known of Julia Fazekas before 1911, when she suddenly appeared in the Hungarian village of Nagyrev, 60 miles southeast of Budapest on the River Tisza. She was pushing middle age, a widow by her own account, but no one seemed to know exactly what had happened to her husband. Between 1911 and 1921, midwife Fazekas was jailed 10 times for performing illegal abortions, but sympathetic judges acquitted her in each case. Meanwhile, apparently unnoticed by police, she had inaugurated one of Europe’s most bizarre and deadly murder sprees.
The rash of homicides is traceable to World War I, when able-bodied men from Nagyrev were drafted to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the same time, rural Nagyrev was deemed an ideal site for camps containing Allied prisoners of war—a circumstance that catered to the wildest fantasies of women suddenly deprived of men. The prisoners most likely enjoyed a limited freedom within the village, and it soon became a point of pride for lonely wives in Nagyrev to boast a foreign lover, sometimes three or four. An atmosphere of rampant promiscuity prevailed, and husbands straggling home from combat found their women strangely “liberated,” frequently dissatisfied with one man in the marriage bed.
As wives began to voice complaints of boredom and abuse, midwife Fazekas offered them relief: supplies of arsenic obtained by boiling flypaper and skimming off the lethal residue. Peter Hegedus was the first known victim, in 1914, and other husbands followed over time before the poisoning became a fad, the casualty list expanding to include parents, children, aunts, uncles, and neighbors.
By the mid-1920s, Nagyrev had earned its nickname as “the murder district.” During that period an estimated 50 women used arsenic to trim their family trees. Julia Fazekas was the closest thing the village had to a physician, and her cousin was the clerk who filed all death certificates, thereby subverting homicide investigations in the embryonic stage. The final toll of victims is still unknown, but most reports suggest 300 as a reasonable estimate for 15 years of wholesale murder.
The “angel makers” saw their world unravel in July of 1929, when a choir master from neighboring Tiszakurt accused Mrs. Ladislaus Szabo of serving him poisoned wine. A stomach pump saved his life, and detectives were still pondering the charge when a second victim complained of being poisoned by his “nurse”—the same Mrs. Szabo. In custody, seeking leniency for herself, Szabo fingered a friend, Mrs.Bukenoveski, as a fellow practitioner. Bukenoveski, in turn, was the first to name Julia Fazekas. In 1924, she said, Fazekas had provided the arsenic used to kill Bukenoveski’s 77-year-old mother, after which the old woman was dumped in the Tisza to simulate an accidental drowning.
Fazekas was hauled in for questioning and staunchly denied everything. Without solid evidence, police were forced to release her, but they mounted a roving surveillance, trailing Fazekas around Nagyrev as she cautioned her various clients, arresting each woman in turn. Thirtyeight were jailed on suspicion of murder, and police descended on the Fazekas home to seize the ringleader. They found her dead from a dose of her own medicine, surrounded by pots of flypaper soaking in water.
Twenty-six of the Nagyrev suspects were held for trial at Szolnok, where eight were sentenced to death, seven to life imprisonment, and the rest to lesser prison terms. The condemned included Susannah Olah, a self-styled witch who boasted of training venomous snakes to attack her victims in bed, competing with Fazekas in sales of “Aunt Susi’s inheritance powders”; Olah’s sister Lydia, a septuagenarian whose flat denials of guilt failed to impress the jury; Maria Kardos, who murdered her husband, a lover, and her sickly 23-year-old son, persuading the young man to sing her a song on his deathbed; Rosalie Sebestyen and Rose Hoyba, condemned for the murder of “boring” husbands; Lydia Csery, convicted of killing her parents; Maria Varga, who confessed to buying poison from Fazekas to kill her husband—a blind war hero—when he complained about her bringing lovers home; Juliane Lipke, whose seven victims included her stepmother, an aunt, a brother, a sister-inlaw, and the husband she poisoned on Christmas Eve; and Maria Szendi, a true liberationist who told the court she killed her husband because “he always had his way. It’s terrible the way men have all the power.”
“ANGELS of Death”
Built in 1839, Lainz General Hospital is the fourth largest medical facility in Vienna, Austria, with some 2,000 persons on staff. Pavilion 5 at Lainz is typically reserved for problem cases—patients in their seventies and older, many of them terminally ill. In such a setting, death is no surprise. If anything, it sometimes comes as a relief . . . but there are limits, even so. Beginning in the spring of 1983 and lasting through the early weeks of 1989, Death got a helping hand at Lainz. Officially, the body count stands at 42, but educated guesses put the final tally closer to 300 victims for the hospital’s hardworking “Angels of Death.”
Waltraud Wagner, a nurse’s aide on the graveyard shift at Pavilion 5, was 23 years old when she claimed her first victim in 1983. As later reconstructed for authorities, she got the notion of eliminating patients when a 77-year-old woman asked Wagner to “end her misery.” Waltraud obliged the lady with a morphine overdose, discovering in the process that she enjoyed playing God and holding the power of life and death in her hands. It was too much fun to quit, too nice to keep from sharing with her special friends.
Over time, Wagner recruited three accomplices, all working the night shift in Pavilion 5. Maria Gruber, born in 1964, was a nursing school dropout and unwed mother. Irene Leidolf, two years older than Gruber, had a husband at home but preferred hanging out with the girls. Stephanija Mayer, a divorced grandmother 20 years Waltraud’s senior, emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1987 and wound up at Lainz, soon joining ranks with Wagner and her murderous cronies.
As described by prosecutors at her trial, Wagner was the sadistic Svengali of the group, instructing her disciples on the proper techniques of lethal injection, teaching them “the water cure”—wherein a patient’s nose was pinched, the tongue depressed, and water was poured down the throat. The victim’s death, while slow and agonizing, appeared “natural” on a ward where elderly patients frequently die with fluid in their lungs. In the police view, “Wagner awakened their sadistic instincts. Soon they were running a concentration camp, not a hospital ward. At the slightest sign of annoyance or complaint from a patient, they’d plan the patient’s murder for the following night.”
“Annoyances,” in Waltraud’s book, included snoring, soiling sheets, refusing medication, or buzzing the nurse’s station for help at inconvenient times. In such cases, Wagner would proclaim, “This one gets a ticket to God,” executing the murder herself or with help from one of her accomplices. Even with four killers working the ward, it took some time for the deadly game to accelerate. Most of the homicides linked to Wagner and company occurred after early 1987, when Mayer rounded out the team, but Waltraud remained the leader and head executioner for what was soon nicknamed “the death pavilion.” Rumors of a killer at large on Pavilion 5 were widespread by 1988, and Dr. Xavier Pesendorfer, in charge of the ward, was suspended in April 1989 for failure to launch a timely investigation.
Ultimately negligence among the killers led to their downfall. Wagner and her cohorts liked to have a few drinks after work, reliving special cases that amused them, chuckling over one victim’s dying expression or another’s convulsions. In February 1989, they were giggling over the death of elderly Julia Drapal—treated to the “water cure” for refusing medication and calling Wagner a “common slut”—when a doctor seated nearby picked up snatches of their conversation. Horrified, he went to police, and a six-week investigation led to the arrest of all four suspects on April 7. In custody, the “death angels” confessed to 49 specific murders, Wagner allegedly claiming 39 as her own. “The ones who got on my nerves,” she explained, “were dispatched directly to a free bed with the good Lord.” It was not always simple, she allowed: “Of course the patients resisted, but we were stronger. We could decide whether these old fogies lived or died. Their ticket to God was long overdue in any case.” There was immediate speculation on a much higher body count, and Wagner’s accomplices pointed fingers at their mentor in a bid to save themselves. Alois Stacher, head of Vienna’s health department, quoted Irene Leidolf as being “convinced that 100 patients were killed by Wagner in each of the past two years.”
Stephanija Mayer admitted helping Wagner out on several homicides that Waltraud managed to forget. Indeed, as the case progressed to trial, Wagner became increasingly reluctant to discuss her role in the murders. By late 1990, she had backed off her original boast of 39 victims, claiming a maximum of 10 patients killed “to ease their pain.” Chancellor Franz Vranitzky was unimpressed with the turnabout, calling the Lainz murder spree “the most brutal and gruesome crime in Austria’s history.”
Nor were judge and jury sympathetic when the four defendants went to trial in March of 1991. Prosecutors failed to sell their case on 42 counts of murder, but they proved enough to do the job. Waltraud Wagner was convicted of 15 murders, 17 attempted murders, and two counts of aggravated assault, drawing a sentence of life imprisonment. Irene Leidolf also got life, on conviction of five murders and two bungled attempts. Stephanija Mayer earned 15 years for a manslaughter conviction and seven counts of attempted murder, while Maria Gruber received an identical term for two murder attempts.
ARCHER-GILLIGAN, Amy
Little is known about the early life of the woman who would later commit, in the words of her prosecutor, commit “the biggest crime that ever shocked New England.” Born in 1873 and married to James Archer in her early twenties, Amy Archer produced her only child—a daughter, Mary—in 1898. Three years later, billing herself as a nurse, without apparent qualifications, she opened a nursing home for the elderly in Newington, Connecticut. Despite “Sister Amy’s” relative lack of experience, there were no complaints from her clients, and Newington was sad to see her go in 1907, when she moved to Windsor, 10 miles north, and opened the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm. For the first three years, it was business as usual in Windsor. Twelve of Amy’s clients died between 1907 and 1910, a predictable mortality rate that brought her no unusual profit. The surprise casualty of 1910 was James Archer, his death ascribed to natural causes. Amy waited three years before she remarried, to Michael Gilligan, and her second husband lasted a mere 12 months. The family physician, Dr. Howard King, saw no reason for alarm, nor was he concerned by the deaths of 48 clients at Amy’s rest home, lost between 1911 and 1916. The number might have seemed excessive for a home with only 14 beds, but Dr. King accepted Sister Amy’s diagnoses in the deaths, his negligence and senility combining to short-circuit suspicion.
In fact, Amy had devised what seemed to be the perfect get-rich scheme, inducing new clients to pay $1,000 in advance for “lifetime care,” then cutting short their days with poison or a smothering pillow, blaming each successive death on old age or disease. With Dr. King’s obliging death certificates in hand, authorities were loathe to cast aspersions, but ugly rumors began to circulate around Windsor by 1914. Two years later, surviving relatives of elderly Maude Lynch took their suspicions to police, and an undercover officer was planted in the rest home, collecting evidence that led to Sister Amy’s arrest in May 1916. Postmortem examinations found traces of poison in Michael Gilligan and five deceased patients, leaving Amy charged with six counts of murder and suspected of numerous others. (Physicians calculated a “normal” resident death toll for 1911–16 at eight patients, compared to Amy’s fortyeight.) Dr. King came out swinging, his shaky reputation on the line, describing Sister Amy as a victim of foul persecution. Poison had been planted in the several bodies, he maintained, by “ghouls to incriminate Mrs. Gilligan.”
Prosecutor Hugh Alcorn responded by calling the case “the worst poison plot this country has ever
known.” Objections from Amy’s lawyer winnowed the charges to one murder count—in the May 1914 death of patient Frank Andrews—and she was convicted in July 1917. Amy’s life sentence was successfully appealed on technical grounds, but a second jury returned the same verdict, leaving her caged in Weathersfield Prison. In 1923, a rash of “nervous fits” produced a diagnosis of insanity, and Amy was transferred to a state asylum where she died in 1962, at age 89.
