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

more and more girls of noble birth disappeared, Elizabeth started to become careless and suspicions were aroused. During one particular frenzy of lust, her accomplices threw four blood-drained bodies from the castle turrets. Added to this, a Lutheran pastor of Csejthe named Reverand Andras Berthoni had been commanded by Elizabeth to bury the bloodless corpses in secret graves. However, just before he died he left a note regarding his suspicions about the countess. Local villagers who had seen the bodies of the girls outside the castle, took their bodies for identification and started adding two and two together. Countess Bathory’s secret was out.
     
    THE GRIM DISCOVERY
    As the rumours became more and more widespread it wasn’t long before they reached the ears of the Hungarian emperor. When he heard of the atrocities that had been taking place at Csejthe Castle, he ordered Elizabeth’s own cousin, Count Cuyorgy Thurzo, who was governor of the province, to organise a raid of the castle.
    On December 30, 1610, a group of soldiers, led by Count Thurzo, raided the castle at night. Nothing could have prepared them for the sights they encountered when they went entered the sinister Csejthe Castle. Lying in the main hall was a body of a young girl who had been completely drained of her blood. In another room they found a girl who was still alive, but had been pierced through the abdomen.
    As they went down into the dungeon, they heard the cries of young girls who were imprisoned, some of whom had been unbelievably mutilated and tortured. When they came across Elizabeth’s torture chamber, not only did they find the countess herself but also the bodies of some fifty girls.
     
    A FITTING END
    Elizabeth Bathory never attended her own trial in 1611, partly due to political reasons, but mainly due to her nobility. The trail was mainly for show, and to make it even more official, a transcript was made of the whole proceedings, which still survives in Hungary today. All of Elizabeth’s four accomplices were made to stand trial and a register of over 650 victims written in Elizabeth’s own handwriting was produced as evidence. As the accounts of her tortures were revealed, even the judges blanched at the macabre and sadistic behaviour of a once beautiful woman.
    While Elizabeth remained confined to her castle, her four cohorts were charged with vampirism, witchcraft and performing pagan rituals, and were sentenced to death. Two of the torturers were beheaded while Iloona Joo and Dorothea Szentes had their fingers pulled off before being buried alive. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was found to be criminally insane, received her own form of fitting punishment. The emperor condemned her to lifelong imprisonment in her own castle, and ordered that stonemasons wall up the windows and doors of her bedchamber with Elizabeth still inside. The only light that permeated the room was a small opening through which her guards passed her food. As her sentence was read out, Count Thurzo stood up and said of Elizabeth:
     
    You, Elizabeth, are like a wild animal . . . You do not deserve to breathe the air on earth, nor to see the light of the Lord. You shall disappear from this world and shall never reappear in it again. The shadows will envelop you and you will find time to repent your bestial life. I condemn you, Lady of Csejthe, to lifelong imprisonment in your own castle.
     
    In 1614, four years after her room was sealed up, one of her guards discovered that Elizabeth hadn’t touched her food. When he peered through the small hatch, he noticed a haggard looking Elizabeth Bathory lying face down on the floor. The famous ‘Countess of Blood’ was dead at the age of fifty-four. During her years of confinement, Elizabeth Bathory never uttered one single word of remorse.

Lucretia Borgia

     
    Lucretia Borgia was probably Italy’s most notorious female Renaissance villain with a passion for incest, murder and corruption. She was born