Free CRIMINAL MASTERMINDS (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Vivian Head, Sebastian Prooth

a bedpost in one of his cells. It was published, despite earlier restrictions imposed by the Catholic Church, and the Marquis de Sade was declared as being a man who was ‘ahead of his time’.

Part Two: Female Fiends

Countess Bathory

     
    Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Bathory was a Hungarian countess who was purported to be a witch, a vampire, a werewolf and supposedly bathed in the blood of young virgins to maintain her youthful appearance. She is certainly one of the first women ever recorded to be motivated by bloodlust and is believed to have murdered as many as 600 young women in an effort to maintain her failing grasp on youthfulness.
     
    TRAINING IN SORCERY
    Elizabeth Bathory was born in 1560 in Hungary, approximately 100 years after Vlad the Impaler. In fact one of her ancestors, Prince Steven Bathory, was a commanding officer in Vlad’s army. Her parents George and Anna Bathory, stemmed from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the country. Elizabeth’s cousin was the Hungarian prime minister, another relative was a cardinal, while her uncle Stephen became king of Poland. However, despite being rich and famous, the Bathory family had a dark and sinister side. Inter-marriage within the family led to some major problems including psychoses, evil geniuses and an uncle who was a known devil-worshipper. Insanity and perversion ran in the Bathory blood, and Elizabeth was no exception.
    Elizabeth was a fit and active child raised as Magyar royalty. She was a beautiful girl with delicate features, a creamy complexion and a slender build, but her nature did not match her appearance. From a young age she started to experience seizures and she had an uncontrollable temper revealing a vindictive side to her nature.
    At the age of eleven, Elizabeth was betrothed to Count Ferencz Nadasdy, and in the spring of 1575 they married when he was twenty-five and she was still only fifteen. This was not an uncommon practice in the sixteenth century, as the life expectancy then was only thirty-five to forty years. The wedding ceremony was a lavish affair, which joined together two Protestant families, and was held at Varanno Castle. Although Nadasdy added Elizabeth’s name to his, she defiantly chose to keep the name Bathory, claiming that her family name was older and therefore more illustrious than his own.
    After the ceremony the couple went to live in the Count’s remote, mountain-top Csejthe Castle, which overlooked the village of Csejthe in Transylvania. Count Nadasdy was a sadistic man with a love of the occult. Elizabeth shared his passion and was a willing pupil in her husband’s lessons on how to ‘discipline’ the servants. He showed her how to beat them to within an inch of their life, or to cover their bodies with honey and leave them tied up outside to the mercy of the bugs.
    However, Elizabeth was to experience much loneliness as her husband thrived on conflict and war, preferring the battlefield to his life of domesticity in the castle. Her home was deep within the Carpathian Mountains and deprived of any urban activity, life in the gloomy, dank castle became dull. While her husband was away fulfilling his passion, Elizabeth started to find ways of amusing herself.
    She started to take young peasant men into her castle as lovers and sat for many hours in front of the mirror admiring her own beauty. She carried the disciplining of her servants so far that today it would be classed as sadism. According to accounts, she beat her servants with a heavy club, inflicted pain by sticking pins under their nails, and her harshest, and most favoured punishment was to drag girls out into the snow, pour cold water on them and leave them to freeze to death.
    For the first ten years of their marriage, Elizabeth bore no children, which was hardly surprising as her husband rarely returned to the castle. Then around 1585, his visits became more frequent and she bore him a girl named Anna. Over the period of the next nine