Countess Elizabeth Bathory
When Countess Elizabeth Bathory, aged 15, married Count Nadasdy in around 1576, it was an alliance between two of the greatest dynasties in Hungary. For Nadasdy, the master of Castle Csejthe in the Carpathians, came from a line of warriors, and Elizabeth’s family was even more distinguished: It had produced generals and governors, high princes and cardinals – her cousin was the country’s Prime Minister. Long after they’ve been forgotten, though, she will be remembered. For she was an alchemist, a bather in blood – and one of the models for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
She was beautiful, voluptuous, savage – a fine match for her twenty-one-year-old husband, the so-called ‘Black Warrior’. But he was forever off campaigning, and she remained childless. More and more, then, she gave in to the constant cajolings of her old nurse, Ilona Joo, who was a black witch, a satanist. She began to surround herself with alchemists and sorcerers; and when she conceived – she eventually had four children – she may have been finally convinced of their efficacy. For when her husband died, when she was about 41, she surrendered to the black arts completely.
There had long been rumors around the castle of lesbian orgies, of the kidnappings of young peasant women, of flagellation, of torture. But one day after her husband’s death, Elizabeth Bathory slapped the face of a servant girl and drew blood; and she noticed that, where it had fallen on her hand, the skin seemed to grow smoother and more supple. She was soon convinced that bathing in and drinking the blood of young virgins would keep her young forever. Her entourage of witches and magicians – who were now calling for human sacrifice to make their magic work – agreed enthusiastically.
Elizabeth and her cronies, then, began scouring the countryside for children and young girls, who were either lured to the castle or kidnapped. They were then hung in chains in the dungeons, fattened and milked for their blood before being tortured to death and their bones used in alchemical experiments. The countess, it was said later, kept some of them alive to lick the blood from her body when she emerged from her baths, but had them, in turn, brutally killed if they either failed to arouse her or showed the slightest signs of displeasure.
Peasant girls, however, failed to stay the signs of ageing, and after five years Elizabeth decided to set up an academy for young noblewomen. Now she bathed in blue blood, the blood of her own class. But this time, inevitably, news of her depravities reached the royal court; and her cousin, the prime minister, was forced to investigate. A surprise raid on the castle found the Countess in midorgy; bodies lying strewn, drained of blood; and dozens of girls – some flayed and vein-milked, some fattened like Strasburg geese awaiting their turn – in the dungeons.
Countess Bathory pursued a grisly beauty regime
Elizabeth’s grisly entourage was taken into custody and then tortured to obtain confessions. At the subsequent trial for the murder of the eighty victims who were actually found dead at the castle, her old nurse, Ilona Joo, and one of the Countess’s procurers of young girls were sentenced to be burned at the stake after having their fingers torn out; many of the rest were beheaded. The Countess, who as an aristocrat could not be arrested or executed, was given a separate hearing in her absence at which she was accused of murdering more than 600 women and children. She was then bricked up in a tiny room in her castle, with holes left only for ventilation and the passing of food. Still relatively young and curiously youthful, she was never seen alive again. She is presumed to have died – since the food was from then on left uneaten – four years later, on August 21st 1614.
Jean Bedel Bokassa
To the French who’d once ruled the Central African Republic, Colonel Jean Bedel Bokassa must at first have seemed a good bet. For it was soon clear, after he seized power in 1966, that he longed to be more French than they. He worshipped De Gaulle and Napoleon and tried to set up in his capital of Bangui the sort of art, ballet and opera societies characteristic of a French provincial town. He made concessions to French companies; allowed the French army a base; and entertained French president Giscard D’Estaing several times on his own private game reserve, which occupied most of the eastern half of the country. He was also extremely generous with gifts – particularly of diamonds, one of the few commodities his dirt-poor country produced.
By 1977, though, even the French must have begun to suspect that this ugly, violent little man was beginning to lose touch with reality. For, spurred on by constant viewings of a film of the coronation of British Queen Elizabeth, he’d decided to emulate his hero Napoleon and have himself crowned Emperor. He’d even ordered a dozen prisoners held in Bangui Jail to be released from the general prison population and given exercise and proper rations in the run-up to the $20 million show.
French diplomats and businessmen, for all this, were among those who gratefully accepted invitations, and they were welcomed by brand-new Mercedes limousines paid for via a French government credit. They attended the comic-opera coronation and after the ceremonial parade – in which Bokassa rode in a gold carriage drawn by eight white horses over the only two miles of paved road in his capital – they assembled at his palace for a banquet, little knowing that among the delicacies served up to them on specially-ordered Limoges porcelain were what remained of the Bangui-Jail prisoners…
It still took the French two years to move against Bokassa, who by that time had run mad. He’d become obsessed, for example, by the fact that the barefoot children of Bangui’s only high school had no ‘civilized’ French-style uniforms. So he jailed them and then had them one by one beaten to death when they failed to show up at ‘uniform inspections’ properly dressed. When news of this reached the French Embassy, they were finally forced to act. As Bokassa was leaving his ‘Empire’ for a state visit to Libya, an opposition politician was shaken awake in Paris and bundled on a plane to Bangui, where he called upon the French Foreign Legion troops who were hard upon his heels to ‘aid the people’ in Bokassa’s overthrow.
The legionnaires soon uncovered the mass grave where the schoolchildren had been buried in the grounds of Bangui Jail. The bones of another thirty-seven were found at the bottom of the swimming pool in Bokassa’s palace – they’d been fed to his four pet crocodiles. In the palace kitchen were the half-eaten remains of another dozen victims who’d been on the Emperor’s menu in the days before his departure.
Jean Bedel Bokassa’s crimes are still being uncovered
Bokassa first took refuge in the Ivory Coast in West Africa. But he soon showed up in a chateau in a Parisian suburb, where he entered a new career as a supplier of safari suits to African boutiques. President Giscard d’Estaing of France, meanwhile, made a personal donation to a Bangui charity school of $20,000 – which he said was the value of the diamonds Bokassa had given him.
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