Unknown Gender History: Frau Sivacky, “Charged with Wholesale Slaughter”

FULL TEXT: Twelve women were arrested in Zenta, Hungary, charged with poisoning their husbands.

The wholesale plot was discovered by a man who suspected that his wife was trying to kill him. Believing she had placed poison in his soup, he compelled his wife to drink it, and she died.

This started an investigation, and the police found an old woman named Sivacky, who confessed that she had sold poison to several women. She gave the names of a number, who are charged with killing their husbands to marry other men.

The authorities have ordered that the bodies of several men believed to have been poisoned by their wives be exhumed and examined.

Nine husbands are now critically ill from the effects of poison.

[“Husbands Poisoned. - Hungarian Women Charged With Wholesale Slaughter.” The Star (Reynoldsville, Pa.), Sep. 13, 1905, p. 7]

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FULL TEXT: A farmer of Zenta, Hungary, named Kandin, noticed a suspicious taste in the soup his wife had given him, and as he had reason to believe she wished him out of the way, he forced her to eat it. Later in the day the woman was found drowned in the river, and in a letter written to her husband she confessed that she had really poisoned his soup, and now preferred drowning to a slow and painful death. The police then searched the house of an old woman named Sivacki, who was suspected of selling poison. Here they found a quantity of corrosive sublimate and arsenic, and papers and accounts compromising twelve women of the place, who had lost their husbands during recent years, and in most cases married again. These twelve women have now been arrested, and have confessed to having poisoned their husbands.

[Untitled, The Narracan Shire Advocate (Narracan Shire, Victoria, Australia), Oct. 24, 1905, P. 3]

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Senta (Serbian Cyrillic: Сента Hungarian: Zenta Romanian: Zenta; German: Senta or formerly Zenta; Turkish: Zenta) is a town and municipality on the bank of the Tisa river in the Vojvodina province, Serbia. Although geographically located in Bačka, it is part of the North Banat District. The town has a population of 18,704, whilst the Senta municipality has 23,316 inhabitants (2011 census).

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