and dying bodies of young women were strewn about the floor, some of them horribly mutilated. From the sounds upstairs they knew that a huge, drunken revelry was taking place. The raiders quietly sealed off the exits from the castle and arrested everyone inside.
On January 7, 1611, Royal Supreme Court Judge Theodosious de Szulo and 20 associate judges ordered Dorka, Iloona Joo, Janos Ujvary, and number of other witches put to death and their bodies burned. Because of her influential name, Countess Bathóry was imprisoned under house arrest and placed in a walled up set of rooms.
Investigators continued to collect testimonies from more than 300 witnesses to the horrors committed by the Countess of Blood—men and women who had seen their daughters and sisters lured or taken to the castle. Although the exact number of young women who were tortured, bled, and murdered by Elizabeth Bathóry may never be known, the most accepted total of her victims is 650.
The body of Elizabeth Bathóry was found on August 21, 1614, but the exact day of her death is unknown since several plates of food lay untouched in her cell. According to the guards and servants who brought her meals or checked in on her, not once did she ever speak a single word. Nearly 50 when she died, the Countess of Blood was still a remarkably beautiful woman.
Vincent Verzini’s crimes in Italy were committed between 1867 and 1871. The sexual nature of the 22-year-old vampire’s acts is unmistakable. It is reported that he achieved orgasm by grasping his female victim by the throat and tearing her flesh with his teeth. He then proceeded to suck the blood through the wound.
One day pretty Maria Previtali, a 19-year-old cousin of Verzini, went out into the fields to work. Suddenly she became aware of footsteps other than her own. Frightened, she looked over her shoulder. Vincent was following.
Fingers like bands of steel closed around her throat. She started to faint, and the hasty vampire relaxed his grip on her throat.
Maria’s footsteps picked up speed as she fought back waves of fear and panic. She thought of 14-year-old Johanna Motta, who had been viciously murdered the preceding December as she traveled on foot to a nearby village.
She remembered how she had lain awake that night, too frightened to sleep, and listened to Papa as he told her mother of the incident. “Si, Mama,” he had said, his voice filled with emotion, “her throat was black and blue, and her mouth was full of dirt. All of her clothes were ripped off and her thighs were bloody with teeth marks. Her belly was cut wide open, and her insides were pulled out. And the parts that make her a woman had been torn out.” With such a memory to goad her, Maria shuddered and began to run.
Maria recalled Mrs. Frigeni, who had gone out to work in the fields one morning, and by nightfall, had still not returned. When her husband had gone out to look for her, he found her naked and mutilated body. She had been strangled with a leather thong and flesh had been torn from her abdomen.
Maria was almost breathless now. She could run no more. Her footsteps faltered, and two powerful hands grabbed her. She felt herself thrown to the ground. Fingers like bands of steel closed around her throat. She started to faint, and the hasty vampire relaxed his grip on her throat. Drawing in her breath, the courageous girl brought up her knee and kicked her insane cousin in the stomach. Maria’s blow had temporarily drained the vampire of his blood lust. He muttered obscenities, then walked off across the field.
Maria ran home, told her horrified mother of the attack by her cousin, and she was taken at once to the village prefect. Verzini was immediately arrested, and after being questioned at length, made a full and detailed confession. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Verzini’s vampirism was the expression of deep derangement and sexual perversion. In Verzini’s own words:
I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating.
I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me great pleasure to pull the hairpins out of the hair of my victims.
It never occurred to me to touch or to look at the genitals….It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood.
Vera Renczi’s trouble had begun very early in life. Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1903 to a wealthy family with ancestral links to Hungarian nobility, she had no trouble obtaining everything she wanted. Her mother died when Vera was only a child, and her father had the chore of turning a temperamental and spoiled young girl into a mature woman. He had no idea what a job that could be. Before her fifteenth birthday young Vera had been chased from a boys’ dormitory after midnight.
Vera’s father’s attempts to curb her radical social life were not very successful at first, but he congratulated himself when Vera presented the man whom she said she wanted to marry. Her father quickly agreed, even though the bridegroom-to-be was much older than Vera.
Vera bore the man a son, Lorenzo, but shortly after the child’s birth, she told the neighbors that she feared that her husband had left her for another woman. The neighbors scoffed at Vera’s suspicions. Her husband was known as a pillar of the community.
Vera stuck to her story, and after a few months without the presence of the husband to deny his infidelity, everyone believed that the lovely young mother had been deserted. No one suspected that the man lay in coffin number one in the cellar of the house. Before Vera had ended her bizarre collection, there would be 35 coffins neatly arranged in rows for her to admire as evidence of her powerful sex appeal to men.
Without a mate to keep her home, Vera roamed the streets of the city of Berkerekul, loving dozens of men, until she finally settled upon Josef Renczi. It was shortly after she had chosen Renczi as her next husband that she told friends and relatives that she had received word that her first husband had died in an automobile accident, and that she was now free to remarry.
Renczi had sought thrills, women, and excitement all over Europe, and it was not long before he tired of the ordinary world in Berkerekul. Sensing his wandering spirit, Vera made sure that Josef would never leave her side—or at least her cellar. She fed him a dose of poison and watched him die an agonizing death.
Inspectors found a grisly sight in Vera Renczi’s basement (Fortean Picture Library).
From then on, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Vera Renczi did not bother to marry her victims. If she had made her choice of temporary mates from any other strata of society, she most surely would have been discovered sooner. But she was content to have and to hold and to kill only those whose presence would not be missed by the permanent residents of the town. It was, in fact, when she changed her choice of man of a higher caliber that she was discovered.
Invited to a party in town, Vera noticed a young banker, who was obviously very much in love with his new wife. With jealousy flashing through Vera’s brain, she knew she had to possess that man. After being introduced to the handsome banker, her sophisticated good looks quickly gained his interest. It was not very long thereafter that he was learning the techniques of love from a very experienced mistress.
To Vera’s dismay, the banker had a very strong sense of guilt. When his wife announced to him that she was pregnant, he knew he could no longer see his demanding mistress. He paid her one last visit to tell her that their affair had ended. The visit was fatal. Vera already had a coffin inscribed for him in the basement. But Vera Renczi had never before had to contend with a determined wife. The banker’s bride explained to the police that the young man was missing and that he had confessed