288: The Angel Makers of Nagyrév w/ Patti McCracken - A True Crime History Podcast

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From World War I through the 1920s a midwife known as Auntie Suzy readily supplied arsenic to women in a small Hungarian village. The women, who would become known as "the Angel Makers", used the poison to murder their husbands and other relatives. As the years passed and no punishment followed the killers became more emboldened, leaving hundreds of victims in their wake before they were finally caught and their crimes brought to light in 1929.

My guest is award-winning journalist Patti McCracken, author of "The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History's Most Astonishing Murder Ring."

The author's website: https://www.pattimccracken.com/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome everyone to another episode of the most notorious
0:29.6	podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes. Great to have you with me. Hope you're having a wonderful day on
0:37.1	to today's interview. It is so great to have Patty McCracken with me today. She is an award-winning
0:43.3	journalist whose work has been featured in the Smithsonian Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism
0:49.8	Review, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications. She formerly worked as an assistant editor
0:58.0	at the Chicago Tribune and is twice a night international press fellow. And she is the author of
1:07.6	The Angel Makers, Arseneck, a midwife, and modern histories most astonishing murder ring.
1:16.1	Thank you for joining me. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
1:21.1	Yes. So how did you first learn about this group of killers in early 20th century Hungary?
1:28.5	Yeah. Well, I was living in Austria at the time in a small village that bordered Slovakia and
1:36.8	also was near the border of Hungary. But I was just, you know, driving down the backroads of the
1:42.3	internet one day and saw this strange piece, this article about this strange thing that happened
1:50.4	in this small village in Hungary. And my neighbor at the time was a guy named Harold and he was an
1:58.3	amateur photographer. So I went knocking on his door and I said, Harold, do you want to take a road trip?
2:05.2	And so he was gay and we, I got it secured an interpreter. And off we went to the village to
2:13.6	find out a bit more. And then the rest is history. So what kinds of conversations did you have in
2:23.3	the village? And was this something the people there were eager to talk about? Is there a tourism
2:30.0	industry built up around it? And well, it was interesting. When I went there, it was, it was very
2:39.0	typical central or east European small, small village. Rather poor, rather tight-knit community.
2:48.0	And the first thing that you do as a journalist is usually go to the local pub or local cafe if you
2:53.3	don't really, there's no roadmaps saying here's Auntie Susie's house and here's this or that. No,
2:58.2	I mean, this for them, it's their daily life. So I went to the local pub and spoke with, we,
	...

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