Episode 123: Bela Kiss, the Butcher of Cinkota

In the early 1900s, in the quiet Hungarian town of Cinkota just outside Budapest, a man named Béla Kiss lived an unassuming life. He was a tinsmith by trade, known for his striking blue eyes, pleasant manners, and quiet demeanor. Neighbors described him as generous and intelligent, a bachelor who entertained the occasional out-of-town lady caller. No one suspected that behind his charm and quiet reputation, Kiss was orchestrating a series of chilling crimes that would go unsolved for over a century.

Kiss rented a modest home at 9 Kossuth Street, where he lived with his housekeeper, Mrs. Jakubec. Around 1912, his neighbors noticed something strange—Kiss had begun stockpiling large metal drums. When asked, he claimed they contained gasoline, a precaution for the looming war. The explanation seemed reasonable enough, and no one gave the barrels a second thought. Meanwhile, a steady stream of women came and went from his home, their visits brief and their identities unknown to anyone in town. None of them were ever seen again.

What the townspeople didn’t know was that Kiss had crafted a meticulous and deadly scheme. He placed carefully worded ads in the matrimonial sections of newspapers, presenting himself as a lonely widower or fortune teller looking for companionship. He was particularly interested in middle-aged women without close relatives. Kiss exchanged letters with at least 74 women, often persuading them to send money—or even to relocate and marry him. Some women sued him for fraud, but when they failed to appear in court, their cases were dismissed. In reality, they had vanished.

When Kiss was conscripted to fight in World War I in 1914, he left the house—and the mysterious barrels—in the care of Mrs. Jakubec. Two years later, the property’s landlord came to inspect the home and prepare it for new tenants. With a neighbor’s help, he opened one of the sealed barrels and was immediately overcome by the stench of death. Inside was the preserved corpse of a woman, strangled and pickled in methanol. Police arrived and uncovered six more barrels just like it, each containing the body of a young woman. A deeper search of the property revealed even more drums hidden around the grounds, bringing the total body count to at least 24.

Inside the house, investigators found a locked room that Kiss had ordered Mrs. Jakubec never to enter. Inside were shelves of books on poison and strangulation, a desk filled with correspondence from dozens of women, and a photo album filled with portraits of his victims. Some of the women were identified, including Katherine Varga, a wealthy dressmaker who sold her business to marry Kiss and was never seen again, and Margaret Toth, who was forced to write a farewell letter to her mother before she, too, was murdered.

Police quickly alerted the military, but Kiss had vanished. On October 4, 1916, authorities received word that he was recovering from typhoid in a Serbian hospital. Detective Chief Charles Nagy raced to the hospital, but when he arrived, the man in Kiss’s bed was dead—and it wasn’t Bela Kiss. The killer had faked his identity once again and disappeared.

Over the following decades, reports of sightings flooded in. Someone claimed to see him in Budapest in 1919. Another said he had joined the French Foreign Legion under the name “Hoffman,” one of the aliases he had used in his letters. This Hoffman, who bragged about using a garrote, deserted before police could question him. In 1932, a New York City detective with a photographic memory was sure he spotted Kiss exiting the Times Square subway station. In 1936, police investigated rumors that Kiss was working as a janitor in New York—only to find that he had disappeared once again. Each lead ended the same way: no arrests, no justice, just whispers in the dark.

Despite the numerous sightings and investigations, Bela Kiss was never captured. His eventual fate remains one of the great mysteries of historical true crime. Did he die during the war? Was he hiding under an assumed identity for the rest of his life? Or did he continue killing, careful to avoid the mistakes that led police to his doorstep the first time?

His story has endured not only because of the sheer horror of his crimes, but because of the questions he left behind. Kiss has since inspired surrealist literature, radio dramas, metal bands, and comic books. He has been transformed from a real killer into a dark figure of folklore, always lurking just out of reach.

The legacy of Bela Kiss is a haunting one. He was a man who used charm as a weapon, who preyed on hope and loneliness, and who vanished without a trace. More than a century later, the barrels have long been emptied, but the mystery still lingers.