FULL TEXT: In one sense the kisses of a vampire are poison for her victims, but in actual fact those of Josephine Tzany, a beautiful woman of the Budapest underworld, were morally and physically poisoned, for after poisoning the soul of the victim they brought death as well.
The woman is known as the world’s worst real life vamp with
justice, if only half the charges made against her are true. It is stated that
for some years now her love affairs have been notorious, and always ended with
violent death for the male victims.
At least a dozen lovers have died in her arms in as many
years, but she has always come out of the death pact ordeals unharmed.
It is now suggested against her by the prosecution that she
has deliberately brought her victims to the point of mad passion for her in
which they readily assented to her suggestion of a death pact, out of which she
backed after her victim had taken poison. It is declared that in at least one instance she passed the
poison from her own lips to the mouth of her victim in the act of passionately
kissing him.
~ “I Am Dying.” ~
The drama was enacted in public In one of the restaurants of
the city. She entered the building with her latest lover, a well-known military
officer, whom she had taken from his young wife. When she had talked to him for
some time she .rose to her feet with a cry and swayed as though about to faint.
Her companion rushed to her aid.
“Kiss me, darling, I am dying,” she said in tragic tones.
When the lover made to obey she flung her arms about him and kissed him
passionately. Locked in a passionate embrace, the two fell on the floor, and
when the startled onlookers went to them the woman was sobbing hysterically and
the man was dead. He had absorbed the poison the woman had carried on her lips.
The woman herself suffered no ill effects on this or any of
the other occasions when she was supposed to have taken poison or administered it in this way to victims.
The accused woman defies the authorities to bring home to
her the charge of murder
“I am an enemy of the male sex,” she declares. “Years ago a
man wronged me deeply and broke my girl’s heart. I vowed to be revenged on him
and his sex. I have kept my word, for I have made men suffer something of what
I have suffered. They may say I am responsible for the death of these men, and
they may even take my life for what they call my crime. If they do I shall be
glad to die with the knowledge that I have paid my debt in full.
“I do not deny that I have derived pleasure from the
sufferings of the men they call my victims. I have enjoyed every pang they suffered, every agony they
endured. Pangs and agony have been balm to my wounded and bruised heart. My one
regret is that I was not able to strike directly at the man who wronged me.”
~ A Home-Breaker. ~
Something of the hatred Josephine Tzany had for men she
manifested towards her own sex, for in every case she chose as her lovers men
who were happily married to young and beautiful wives.
“When my heart was breaking they had no sympathy, no word of
comfort for me,” she declares. I will show them that I have the power to master
the souls and bodies of men, that the strongest are weaker than children in my
hands.”
“I glory in the fact that I have broken up homes that should
have been happy. The fact that the man who blighted my life was married happily
did not weigh with him. The wife from whom he came laughed at me when my misery
was greatest. I have paid her back in full, and have made others suffer, too.
My debt against Society is paid, and I have no further interest in the world.”
~ Gloating Words. ~
She might have added that she had struck at the wife of the
man who had wronged her a greater blow than he had dealt, greatly as she may
have been wronged. Learning that this wife had a lover she made it her business
to find the man out, and once she had him in the toils she did not release her
bold until the infatuated man had provided the first victim In the series of
strange deaths that have been associated with her love affairs.
After that she waited patiently until the idolised son of
the wife had reached the threshold of manhood, when she cast her spell over
him, and the boy figured in yet another of the dramas of passion and death.
When he lay dead in her arms she caused the mother to be admitted to see the
havoc she had wrought, and when she came the vampire spoke gloating words that
stung. The mother was subsequently taken away hopelessly insane. The accused
woman discusses frankly the different affairs with which she has been
associated. She has preserved diaries in which she records with amazing details
the facts of each case, describing the sufferings of the victims as each in turn lay writhing in her arms in
his death throes.
“I had no compunction about it at all,” she says, “for was I
not merely viewing the death throes of the viper that had stung me and killed
my soul just when it was at its best?”
Since the facts came out she has been the object of one of
the most amazing demonstrations of hostility that any woman could be subjected
to. Wives and children of some of the victims have turned up at the courts and
in public places to denounce her as murderess and home-wrecker, but so far from
being moved by their anger, she has laughed at them and taunted them with the
fact that she made the man they mourned her abject slave before he passed out
of the world.
The latest sensation is that the daughter of one of her
victims has challenged the woman to a duel with pistols or swords, and declares
that if the challenge is not accepted and the vampire escapes legal punishment
she will shoot her dead on sight.
[“Vampire’s Poisoned Kisses. - Men As Victims. - Her Thirst For Vengeance.” The Auckland Star (New Zealand), Sep. 25,
1926, p. 23]
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