Unknown Gender History: Lydia Olah, Professional Serial Killer

EXCERPT: The most evil of the lot was chief accomplice and disciple of Mrs. Fazekas, Susanna Olah, called Susi, or Aunt Susi, by her clients. She operated in Nagyrev a sort of franchise of the Fazekas murder business, dispensing arsenic, which her patrons called “Aunt Susi’s Inheritance Powders.” The women purchasing arsenic from Aunt Susi expressed genuine fear at her presence in court, claiming that her eyes “glowed ruby red at night,” and telling the jury that she kept scores of poisonous snakes and lizards in her hut and these she had trained to creep into their beds of those who might inform on her.

Susi’s sister, Lydia Olah, a misshapen crone of seventy, defied the charges of the court. According to Posslyednia Novosti, a Russian daily published in Paris, Lydia cried out during her trial, “We are not assassins! We did not stab our husbands. We did not hang them or drown them either! They died from poison and this was a pleasant death for them!” She was later condemned to death.

[Jay Robert Nash, Look for the Woman, A Narrative Encyclopedia of Female Poisoners, Kidnappers, Thieves, Extortionists, Swindlers and Spies From Elizabethan Times to the Present, Evans, 1981, pp. 158-9.]

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