The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (2 page)

“liberated,” frequently dissatisfied with one man in the demned for the murder of “boring” husbands; Lydia marriage bed.

Csery, convicted of killing her parents; Maria Varga, who As wives began to voice complaints of boredom and confessed to buying poison from Fazekas to kill her hus-abuse, midwife Fazekas offered them relief: supplies of band—a blind war hero—when he complained about her arsenic obtained by boiling flypaper and skimming off bringing lovers home; Juliane Lipke, whose seven victims the lethal residue. Peter Hegedus was the first known included her stepmother, an aunt, a brother, a sister-in-victim, in 1914, and other husbands followed over time law, and the husband she poisoned on Christmas Eve; before the poisoning became a fad, the casualty list and Maria Szendi, a true liberationist who told the court expanding to include parents, children, aunts, uncles, she killed her husband because “he always had his way.

and neighbors.

It’s terrible the way men have all the power.”

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.

“ANGELS of Death”

Julia Fazekas was the closest thing the village had to a Built in 1839, Lainz General Hospital is the fourth physician, and her cousin was the clerk who filed all largest medical facility in Vienna, Austria, with some death certificates, thereby subverting homicide investi-2,000 persons on staff. Pavilion 5 at Lainz is typically gations in the embryonic stage. The final toll of victims reserved for problem cases—patients in their seventies is still unknown, but most reports suggest 300 as a rea-and older, many of them terminally ill. In such a setting, sonable estimate for 15 years of wholesale murder.

death is no surprise. If anything, it sometimes comes as The “angel makers” saw their world unravel in July a relief . . . but there are limits, even so. Beginning in the of 1929, when a choir master from neighboring Tisza-spring of 1983 and lasting through the early weeks of kurt accused Mrs. Ladislaus Szabo of serving him poi-1989, Death got a helping hand at Lainz. Officially, the soned wine. A stomach pump saved his life, and body count stands at 42, but educated guesses put the detectives were still pondering the charge when a sec-final tally closer to 300 victims for the hospital’s hard-ond victim complained of being poisoned by his working “Angels of Death.”

“nurse”—the same Mrs. Szabo. In custody, seeking Waltraud Wagner, a nurse’s aide on the graveyard leniency for herself, Szabo fingered a friend, Mrs.

shift at Pavilion 5, was 23 years old when she claimed Bukenoveski, as a fellow practitioner. Bukenoveski, in her first victim in 1983. As later reconstructed for turn, was the first to name Julia Fazekas. In 1924, she authorities, she got the notion of eliminating patients said, Fazekas had provided the arsenic used to kill when a 77-year-old woman asked Wagner to “end her Bukenoveski’s 77-year-old mother, after which the old misery.” Waltraud obliged the lady with a morphine woman was dumped in the Tisza to simulate an acci-overdose, discovering in the process that she enjoyed dental drowning.

playing God and holding the power of life and death in Fazekas was hauled in for questioning and staunchly her hands. It was too much fun to quit, too nice to keep denied everything. Without solid evidence, police were from sharing with her special friends.

forced to release her, but they mounted a roving surveil-Over time, Wagner recruited three accomplices, all lance, trailing Fazekas around Nagyrev as she cautioned working the night shift in Pavilion 5. Maria Gruber, her various clients, arresting each woman in turn. Thirty-born in 1964, was a nursing school dropout and unwed eight were jailed on suspicion of murder, and police mother. Irene Leidolf, two years older than Gruber, had descended on the Fazekas home to seize the ringleader.

a husband at home but preferred hanging out with the They found her dead from a dose of her own medicine, girls. Stephanija Mayer, a divorced grandmother 20

surrounded by pots of flypaper soaking in water.

years Waltraud’s senior, emigrated from Yugoslavia in Twenty-six of the Nagyrev suspects were held for trial 1987 and wound up at Lainz, soon joining ranks with at Szolnok, where eight were sentenced to death, seven to Wagner and her murderous cronies.

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ARCHER-GILLIGAN, Amy

As described by prosecutors at her trial, Wagner was Stephanija Mayer admitted helping Wagner out on sev-the sadistic Svengali of the group, instructing her discieral homicides that Waltraud managed to forget.

ples on the proper techniques of lethal injection, teach-Indeed, as the case progressed to trial, Wagner ing them “the water cure”—wherein a patient’s nose became increasingly reluctant to discuss her role in the was pinched, the tongue depressed, and water was murders. By late 1990, she had backed off her original poured down the throat. The victim’s death, while slow boast of 39 victims, claiming a maximum of 10 patients and agonizing, appeared “natural” on a ward where killed “to ease their pain.” Chancellor Franz Vranitzky elderly patients frequently die with fluid in their lungs.

was unimpressed with the turnabout, calling the Lainz In the police view, “Wagner awakened their sadistic murder spree “the most brutal and gruesome crime in instincts. Soon they were running a concentration Austria’s history.”

camp, not a hospital ward. At the slightest sign of Nor were judge and jury sympathetic when the four annoyance or complaint from a patient, they’d plan the defendants went to trial in March of 1991. Prosecutors patient’s murder for the following night.”

failed to sell their case on 42 counts of murder, but they

“Annoyances,” in Waltraud’s book, included snor-proved enough to do the job. Waltraud Wagner was con-ing, soiling sheets, refusing medication, or buzzing the victed of 15 murders, 17 attempted murders, and two nurse’s station for help at inconvenient times. In such counts of aggravated assault, drawing a sentence of life cases, Wagner would proclaim, “This one gets a ticket imprisonment. Irene Leidolf also got life, on conviction to God,” executing the murder herself or with help of five murders and two bungled attempts. Stephanija from one of her accomplices.

Mayer earned 15 years for a manslaughter conviction Even with four killers working the ward, it took and seven counts of attempted murder, while Maria Gru-some time for the deadly game to accelerate. Most of ber received an identical term for two murder attempts.

the homicides linked to Wagner and company occurred
See also
MEDICAL MURDERS

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.”

ARCHER-GILLIGAN, Amy

Rumors of a killer at large on Pavilion 5 were wide-Little is known about the early life of the woman who spread by 1988, and Dr. Xavier Pesendorfer, in charge would later commit, in the words of her prosecutor, of the ward, was suspended in April 1989 for failure to commit “the biggest crime that ever shocked New En-launch a timely investigation.

gland.” Born in 1873 and married to James Archer in Ultimately negligence among the killers led to their her early twenties, Amy Archer produced her only downfall. Wagner and her cohorts liked to have a few child—a daughter, Mary—in 1898. Three years later, drinks after work, reliving special cases that amused billing herself as a nurse, without apparent qualifica-them, chuckling over one victim’s dying expression or tions, she opened a nursing home for the elderly in another’s convulsions. In February 1989, they were gig-Newington, Connecticut. Despite “Sister Amy’s” rela-gling over the death of elderly Julia Drapal—treated to tive lack of experience, there were no complaints from the “water cure” for refusing medication and calling her clients, and Newington was sad to see her go in Wagner a “common slut”—when a doctor seated

1907, when she moved to Windsor, 10 miles north, and nearby picked up snatches of their conversation. Horri-opened the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm.

fied, he went to police, and a six-week investigation led For the first three years, it was business as usual in to the arrest of all four suspects on April 7.

Windsor. Twelve of Amy’s clients died between 1907

In custody, the “death angels” confessed to 49 spe-and 1910, a predictable mortality rate that brought her cific murders, Wagner allegedly claiming 39 as her own.

no unusual profit. The surprise casualty of 1910 was

“The ones who got on my nerves,” she explained, James Archer, his death ascribed to natural causes. Amy

“were dispatched directly to a free bed with the good waited three years before she remarried, to Michael Lord.” It was not always simple, she allowed: “Of Gilligan, and her second husband lasted a mere 12

course the patients resisted, but we were stronger. We months. The family physician, Dr. Howard King, saw could decide whether these old fogies lived or died.

no reason for alarm, nor was he concerned by the Their ticket to God was long overdue in any case.”

deaths of 48 clients at Amy’s rest home, lost between There was immediate speculation on a much higher 1911 and 1916. The number might have seemed exces-body count, and Wagner’s accomplices pointed fingers sive for a home with only 14 beds, but Dr. King at their mentor in a bid to save themselves. Alois accepted Sister Amy’s diagnoses in the deaths, his negli-Stacher, head of Vienna’s health department, quoted gence and senility combining to short-circuit suspicion.

Irene Leidolf as being “convinced that 100 patients In fact, Amy had devised what seemed to be the per-were killed by Wagner in each of the past two years.”

fect get-rich scheme, inducing new clients to pay $1,000

3

ARCHERD, William Dale

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
forty-eight.)

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 William Dale Archerd talks to journalists in court. (Wide returned the same verdict, leaving her caged in Weath-World API)

ersfield 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.

On July 27, 1967, Archerd was arrested in Los

Angeles and charged with three counts of first-degree murder. The victims included his fourth wife, Zella,
ARCHERD, William Dale

who collapsed two months after their marriage, on July Born in 1912, William Archerd cherished a lifelong fas-25, 1956; a teenaged nephew, Burney Archerd, dead at cination with medicine. Lacking the cash and self-disci-Long Beach on September 2, 1961; and wife number pline required for medical school, he sought work as a seven, author Mary Brinker Arden, who died on

hospital attendant, learning what he could of drugs and November 3, 1966. As charged in the indictment, their effects through practical experience. During 1940

Archerd was suspected of injecting each victim with an and ’41, Archerd worked at Camarillo State Hospital, overdose of insulin, thereby producing lethal attacks of in California, serving in departments where insulin hypoglycemia.

shock therapy was used to treat mental illness. In 1950, At least three other victims were suspected in the he pled guilty to illegal possession of morphine in San murder series. Archerd’s first known victim, according Francisco, receiving five years’ probation. A second to police, was a friend named William Jones, who died offense revoked his probation, and Archerd was con-in Fontana, California, on October 12, 1947. Archerd’s fined to the minimum-security prison at Chino; escap-fifth wife, Juanita, had also displayed classic symptoms ing in 1951, he was quickly recaptured and transferred of hypoglycemia at her death, in a Las Vegas hospital, to San Quentin. By October 1953, he was free on on March 13, 1958. Another of Archerd’s friends, parole.

Frank Stewart, died in the same hospital two years later, Archerd’s “bad luck” extended into other aspects of on March 17, 1960.

his life, as well. Married seven times in 15 years, he lost On March 6, 1968, William Archerd was convicted three wives to mysterious illnesses between 1958 and on three counts of murder, the first American defendant 1966. If that were not enough, his friends and relatives convicted of using insulin as a murder weapon. His were also dying under unusual circumstances.

death sentence was affirmed by California’s state
4

ARTWORK and Memorabilia Related to Serial Murder supreme court in December 1970, then reduced to life whole families with his favorite shotgun, then burned imprisonment two years later, when the US Supreme their houses down in an attempt to destroy evidence.