Why did so many women in a tiny Hungarian village poison their husbands?
By investigating what happened in Nagyrév in 1929, we come closer to understanding what ails our society today
by: Hope Reese
16 Aug 2025
Suspects in the poisoning case at Szolnok prison. Eight were sentenced to life imprisonment and six received the death penalty, of whom three were executed
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It was Friday 13 December – Luca Day in Hungary. The village of Nagyrév, steeped in customs and superstitions, viewed Luca Day as an opportunity to ward off evil forces and manifest plentiful crops. On this day, villagers would perform harvesting rituals, craft, tell fortunes – predicting who would marry and how the weather would turn out.
They spread home-made bread, cabbage and sweet poppy-seed rolls across long, wooden tables. All to honour Saint Lucy, a centuries-old Christian martyr who brought light into darkness.
Luca Day was known as the ‘day of witches’. Women were the focus of this folk holiday: seen as both the evil force to guard against, and the ripe source of a healthy harvest. On the Great Hungarian Plain where Nagyrév is situated, witches were deemed responsible for the success or failure of crops, of cows’ milk yield, of the survival or death of livestock.
But on this winter’s day in 1929, the focus in Nagyrév and beyond was not the farm: it was Szolnok’s regional courthouse, roughly 40km from the village. There, four women from Nagyrév were standing trial, all accused of murder by poison. The penalty: death.
These women were the first to be tried, but they were by no means the only suspects from the region. In total, 28 defendants were accused of killing 101 local people over the course of nearly two decades. The victims, whose corpses were found to contain arsenic – procured by boiling flypaper and dropped into their stews, brandy and porridge – were mostly men. It was the greatest female-led murder-by-poison in modern times.
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The women of Nagyrév were desperate. In this small Hungarian village, under the shadow of World War I, many women were struggling to survive. They were suffering at the hands of their husbands – some of whom were veterans with PTSD, some addicted to alcohol, and many of whom were violent. Many of the women saw no way out.
But, over time, encouraged by some elder women in the village, a possible solution began to be whispered between the women – one that seemed to promise change. It started with rumours of a few terrible deeds, but it eventually spread as a message of hope among a network of women who realised they did possess some power, after all. They rose into this power, forever changing their lives and the trajectory of history.
In the spring of 2018, I first visited Budapest. A chance encounter led me to the story of these women, and soon I began a quest that came to absorb me for years – leading me to the village of Nagyrév, to the courthouse where the women stood trial, to the very home of one of the poison-makers. The question of why possessed me. What had it taken for these women to kill?
The story flipped the script on domestic homicide. Statistically, men make up 90% of the perpetrators of partner violence, and the reasons men and women kill are fundamentally different. Men kill to punish a partner, or control a situation; and while women may kill in self-interest or for financial gain, the greatest motivator for women to kill is an impulse to survive.
The Women Are Not Fine is the true story of the women of Nagyrév. It is also a story about what happens when women are abused and when they are living on the edge of poverty. It is a story of what happens when women search for an escape, and what happens when they come together to do so.
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The facts of the story are violent, but our society tends to hide stories of women’s violence. We simply don’t want to consider that women are capable of murder. The story of what happened in Nagyrév is a piece of history that still brings shame to the Hungarian village where it is set; it is a story many have wanted to deny.
But face this story we must – because in investigating the reverberations of these events, and their parallels to current events, we come closer to understanding what ails our society today.
The problems these women faced are not so far from our own. Beyond feeling stuck in difficult marriages, they had limited reproductive rights and control over their bodies. While we’ve seen progress – access to healthcare, economic equity and protection from violence – there have been setbacks as well. Reproductive choice, equal pay and protections against abuse are under threat.
Marginalised groups bear the brunt of inequality – reminding us that hard-won rights must be defended.
While there is no single explanation for the murders, we can draw inferences from the circumstances these women lived in and the hardships they shared; such were the forces that culminated in one of the greatest poisoning scandals in modern history. The women of Nagyrév lived in another time. Yet their stories – of poverty, isolation, abuse – resonate powerfully to this day.
