Béla Kiss

Béla Kiss
Sketch of Béla Kiss
Born	Kiss Béla c. 1877 Hungary
Disappeared	October 4, 1916
Died	Last seen 1932 (aged 54/55)
Conviction(s)	Never convicted
Killings
Victims	24+
Span of killings	1900–1914
Country	Hungary
Date apprehended	Never apprehended

Béla Kiss (1877 – ?) (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːlɒ ˈkiʃ]) was a Hungarian serial killer. He is thought to have murdered at least twenty-three young women and one man, and attempted to pickle them in giant metal drums that he kept on his property.

Béla Kiss was a tinsmith who had lived in Cinkota (then a town near Budapest, now a neighborhood within the city itself) since 1900. He was an amateur astrologer and allegedly fond of occult practices. In 1912 Kiss hired a housekeeper, Mrs. Jakubec, and began to correspond with a number of women and sometimes took them to his home in Cinkota. However, his housekeeper never really got to know any of them and Kiss was never on intimate terms with his neighbors even though he was well-liked.

Townsfolk also noticed that Kiss had collected a number of metal drums. He had told the town police who questioned him that he filled them with gasoline in order to prepare for the rationing of the oncoming war. When World War I began in 1914, he was conscripted and left his house in Jakubec's care.

In July 1916, Budapest police received a call from a Cinkota landlord who had found seven large metal drums. The town constable had remembered Kiss' stockpile of gasoline, and led needy soldiers to them. Upon attempting to open the drums, a suspicious odour was noted. Detective Chief Károly Nagy took over the investigation and opened one of the drums, against the protests of Mrs. Jakubec. There they discovered the body of a strangled woman. The other drums yielded similarly gruesome content. A search of Kiss' house resulted in a total of 24 bodies.

Nagy informed the military that they should arrest Béla Kiss immediately, if he was still alive – there was also a possibility that he was a prisoner of war. The name, unfortunately, was very common. Nagy also arrested the housekeeper, Mrs Jakubec and asked the postal service to hold any possible letters to Kiss, in case he had an accomplice that could warn him. Nagy initially suspected that Jakubec might have had something to do with the murders, especially when Kiss had left her money in his will.