Free The Widow Killer by Pavel Kohout

track down his address) was by trade a room painter with the firm Valnoha and Son, which had branches all over the region. Prosecuted several times for sexual deviance, he climaxed without having sexual relations with women. He had tied two prostitutes up with a clothesline, silenced them with a gag, and masturbated in front of them while jabbing them in the chest with pins. His alibi for the fateful moment seemed airtight: he had been working for his firm in Kosice, two hundred miles to the east, and the train connections between times when his coworkers had seen him would have allowed him a scant twenty minutes for a complex crime in Brno. Given the low volume of traffic on Slovakian roads, the investigators decided he would not have had time to hitchhike to Brno and back.
    Alfons Hunyady was born 16 December 1915 in what was then the north bank of the Hungarian city Komarom. An illiterate Gypsy, he lived off earnings as a day laborer and more often as a petty thief. Among other crimes, he was convicted of rape in 1931 as a juvenile and in 1935 sent to prison for the same offense. In both cases he had tied his victims with wire and cut their breasts to lessen their resistance. Only a miracle stopped the second woman from bleeding to death. Hunyady’s alibi for the October night when someone tortured Maruska Kubilkova to death was curious. He spent it in jail in the town of Ivancice near Brno; a notorious and therefore oft-imprisoned local criminal would lend out the master key for a small payment. Although other witnesses corroborated the fact, the director of the police station denied the charge vehemently, calling it slander, and for public interest reasons neither the judge nor the prosecutor wanted to risk a perjury trial involving a government official. Alfons Hunyady was tracked until 1941 as the political situation allowed; then the file ended with an ominous note of his disappearance from the personnel register.
    The third suspect was therefore of exceptional interest.
    Jakub Malatinsky, born 6 April 1905 in Mikulov in south Moravia, was the son of a vintner who worked his way up to cellar master in the fabled Valtice vintners’ school. His career ended overnight in 1926 when he stabbed his young wife, whom he suspected—probably correctly—of infidelity. What was more, he cut off both the dead woman’s breasts, which in court he explained as insane jealousy that another man had been allowed to touch them. The prosecutor asked for life, but after an evidently outstanding defense counsel’s fiery closing argument, the court was persuaded that the defendant had acted in a moment of passion and capped the sentence at fifteen years. In spring 1937 he was released for good behavior and sincere repentance and was hired as a custodian for the court building. He was the only one resident in Brno on the day of the murder, albeit as an appendectomy patient. At the time of the crime he was already ambulatory and sharing a room with a demented patient, but even so it was highly improbable that he could have obtained clothing, latched onto the young widow— where there was no evidence that he even knew her—brutally murdered her, and returned to his hospital bed by midnight, when the duty nurse spoke with him. The year before last, he had decided to return to his home county, where his good commendations helped him regain the post of cellar master.
    Bruno Thaler rounded out the foursome of potential perpetrators. Born 12 August 1913 in Jihlava of German descent, this trained butcher was sent for psychological treatment when, after repeated vivisections of animals (for instance, disembowling pigs before slaughtering them), he threatened a female coworker with the same fate if she reported him. His statement that on the day of the murder he had been in Austria as an agent of Henlein’s storm troopers was supported by the regional leader’s stamp. After the country’s annexation, no one dared reopen the