The nefarious activities of Bela Kiss started with his wife's infidelity. In Czinkota, Hungary, Bela Kiss married a pretty woman 15 years his junior. She took up with a neighbor, and in 1912 they both disappeared. Kiss said that she'd run away.

Then other women turned up missing around Budapest, many of them who told others before they disappeared that they were meeting a man by the name of Hoffman. Yet the police could never locate such a person for questioning. Rumors floated around Kiss's town, but no one linked them to him.

When Kiss was drafted in 1914, he went to war and never came back. Neighbors believed that he'd died from wounds at the front.

Since he'd bought a number of metal drums, allegedly to store petrol, the army confiscated seven of them for supplies. When the drums were opened each one was found to be the preserved body of a naked woman. Autopsies indicated that they'd been strangled but there was something more. Each had wounds on her neck and had been drained of blood.

A search turned up at least 17 more barrels (other reports give the number as 19 and 24 on the property, including those containing Kiss's wife and her boyfriend). Yet authorities believed he was dead, so they closed the cases.

A vampiric turn of events occurred when they heard from the nurse who supposedly had attended to the fatally wounded Kiss at the battlefront. Her description of the dying man failed to match the real Kiss. Then reports of Kiss surfaced in Budapest. Each time the police checked out the rumors of a sighting, Kiss had vanished. He was never caught.

At around the same time in nearby Germany, another man was busy earning himself a sinister nickname.

Written by Katherine Ramsland.
Originally published online at The Crime Library.
Reproduced with the permission of the author.

Posted by Vladimir Fri, 07/06/2007 - 20:49

 

Lost In The Moonlight

A dark kiss upon my neck
A soul forever young
Whispers forgotten upon the wind
Of past ages being sung
A moonlit night with clouds concealing
The face upon the land
That moves with swift intentions
Into the realm of man

Beshackled by superstitious lore
Hunted by fools and fears
Forever alone in a world of many
To wipe one's own blood-red tears

One day to find one to share
An eternal state of grace
For now lost in the moonlight
Another hidden face

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Creeping sliding eventually into every vein
Tongue darting tasting the easy kill

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Paying with diamonds not dollar bills
Ice touch then head rush
In corner no longer bleeding she cried

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She woke up in a whirlwind
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She had blessed and made clean again
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