The Martfu Case

A man was behind her. By the narrow-gauge track he picked up a length of scrap iron, and past the last lights he closed the distance and struck her down. He dragged her off the road into the corn. He beat her, he pulled the clothes from her, he choked her until she stopped moving, and then he put her, unconscious, face down into the water of the roadside drainage canal, a ditch the files call the Csesz-arok, and the water finished what his hands had started. The next morning her brother-in-law, out searching, found her there by the little wood. She had been perhaps four hundred meters from her door.

When the detectives came asking where he had been that Monday night, he panicked and reached for the nearest respectable answer: he had eaten dinner at his mother's. They walked to his mother's farmhouse and asked her. The old woman told them the truth. My son rarely comes to see me, she said. I have not seen him in two weeks. It was an honest sentence, and it closed on her son like a trap. What happened next in that building stayed officially unsaid for sixty years, until the prosecutor who eventually reopened everything put it in one sentence: it was proven, he said, that they beat him. A woman who lived with Kirjak as his wife told the interrogators he had come home at dawn. His alibi was gone, his face was marked, and at the end of it Janos Kirjak signed a confession in the first person, rich in detail, and wrong in almost every particular that could later be checked. The scrap iron was gone. In its place was the axe from the newspaper's guess, carried to the murder in his waistband, prepared in advance.

And around the whole performance, at the edge of the field, stood the onlookers. Villages this size turn out for everything; a murderer demonstrating his murder was the event of the decade. The retellings of this case, the prosecutor's among them, agree on who else was standing at that canal. In the crowd of onlookers, unremarkable among his neighbors, stood Peter Kovacs, twenty-three years old, watching another man confess to his murder. The researcher who has spent the most years in these files, Peter Dulai, draws one straight line through everything that followed: Kovacs could become a serial killer, he concluded, because after his first murder an innocent man was convicted. It emboldened him.

The county paper, to its credit, printed what the room saw: to the astonishment of the audience, the defendant could give no adequate account of his own crime, so much so that the court itself found the confession unfounded. He only stammered, the reporter wrote. Asked why he had walked the wrong way at the reconstruction, he answered like a man reading his own case file for the first time: I do not know which way to go, I do not know what to do, because I was asleep at home. The paper's next headline said it outright: Janos Kirjak has retracted his confession. And under it, a question the whole county would have done well to sit with: is it conceivable that he is not the murderer, when the evidence still speaks against him?

The Supreme Court looked at the file and blinked. The verdict was quashed; the case went back down with instructions to gather every piece of evidence that could be found. The county court heard it all again, and sentenced him to death again. Under the shadow of the rope, Kirjak confessed once more; the law of the day counted a sincere confession toward mercy, and one retelling of this case puts the arithmetic plainly: by confessing to a murder he did not commit, he fought for his life, and won. The final sentence was life. The record preserved of that last panel has the judges doubting his guilt outright, and leaving the conviction standing anyway. Janos Kirjak went to the Csillag at Szeged as a man who had violated and murdered a girl, and the prison yard has its own law for that kind. Eleven years. The file shows no visitor and no letter.

She was a lively girl; she knew how to laugh with men and how to shrug them off, and a court file of that era would hold even that against her. Her family went to the police. Whoever took the report never opened a file. There is no protocol of it at all.

The file says she did it to herself. It says that about a woman who went into the river gagged with a piece of her own clothing and weighted like a sack. The file says she did it to herself, and for years, whenever the crime-scene photographs might have said otherwise, they could not be consulted, because a laboratory technician had destroyed the negatives. One more line in the record of that spring. Among the people questioned and released was a truck driver from her own town who had sometimes given her rides on his motorbike. His name went back into the drawer with everything else.

For nearly a month there was nothing, and then the flat country began to give up its pieces: her bicycle and her clothes near the water in mid-April, and on the twenty-second, far downstream at Tiszakecske, the river let her go. She had been offered a lift in a truck by a man she knew. Everyone knew everyone. Her wristwatch had stopped when the water reached it. A technician destroyed the watch itself, this case keeps doing that, but the position of its hands had been written into the file first, and that one reading survived, waiting. The official ruling on Eva Mehesz, fourteen, found in a river a month after she vanished, was that suicide could not be excluded. The file closed.

The machine did produce one thing that year: a list of thirty-eight local men worth a look. One of the thirty-eight was a truck driver from Tiszafoldvar. Married, a small daughter, building his own house, well spoken of at the depot. He had been questioned when Ilona Sipos went into the river, and let go. He was looked at now, and let go now. The analysts' phrase for men like him, preserved in the record, was orderly circumstances.

The men who finally did the arithmetic were not policemen. Zoltan Szabo ran the investigation office of the county prosecution in Szolnok; Balint Barna was his younger colleague; and no relation, in passing, to the survivor Mrs. Szabo, the name is as common in Hungary as Smith. What they did, they did off the books, as close to a hobby as their offices allowed: they pulled every unsolved attack on a woman in the county going back years and read them as one stack. The hour, always the late shift. The ground, always the same few kilometers of dark between Martfu and Tiszafoldvar. The method, always the head, always the water. Nothing happened. No retrial opened, nobody drove to the Csillag, nobody posted a watch on the second-shift road.

That evening the truck stood waiting at gate two of the shoe factory. A known face leaned across and offered a lift home; it was dark, it was several kilometers, she climbed in. He drove her into the empty country and strangled her in the cab. What was done to her afterward gets one sentence, because one is enough: he cut away her breasts, and they were never found. Then he drove south to the bridge at Ocsod and put her over the railing into the Koros. There was blood on the pavement. There was more on the railing, dried brown, and caught in the joints of the concrete lay six fragments of shattered safety glass, none of them bigger than a pea. The river gave her up quickly, and this time the dead woman came back armed: under her fingernails and toenails the pathologists found slivers of safety glass, the same glass as the bridge, the same glass as a certain cab, and pressed under one nail, a single fiber from a truck seat.

Nothing about him was hidden. That is the point of him. He was the man from the old files: questioned in 1962 over Ilona Sipos, questioned again in 1965, one name among the thirty-eight, examined by the analysts and excluded, in the record's own words, for his orderly circumstances. The truck's cab, conveniently scrapped in the meantime, was tracked to a breaker's yard near Budapest, and inside the door panel, on the glass of the rolled-up window, there was still human blood. The bridge glass, the fingernail glass, and the cab glass agreed. The seat fiber agreed. Within days, Peter Kovacs confessed to the woman on the bridge.

Two closed files, two deaths the paperwork had explained away, had been murders all along, and the man who finally said so out loud was the man who had done them. For the police, that was the end of it: three murders, solved, a monster in a cell. The fourth murder in the county's living memory, Martfu, 1957, was not on the list, because Martfu 1957 was already solved. That December, state television's crime program Kek Feny, Blue Light, showed the country its captured monster, and the police weekly printed the studio photograph: a slight, balding, hollow-faced man under the lights. The caption called him the Martfu monster, the beastly killer of three women. Three. The state's own arithmetic, typeset under his face, while Janos Kirjak sat in the Star beginning his eleventh year.

The police were finished. Two prosecutors were not. Zoltan Szabo and Balint Barna, the men of the hobby file, took the case away, and Barna, decades later, described the maneuver with a bluntness prosecutors rarely allow themselves: we formally stole this case from the police. They had a theory ten years deep and a killer in custody who had stopped at three, and they had noticed what he was afraid of. Peter Kovacs was afraid of the rope. So they let him find a hope: that a man who had killed not three times but four, across a whole decade, might read to the doctors as mad, and the mad are not hanged. On the strength of the new confession, the chief prosecutor of Hungary petitioned the Supreme Court; the Supreme Court ordered a retrial and handed it, this time, to the Metropolitan Court in Budapest.

And it printed the court's autopsy of 1957: a confession ascribed to the accused's nervous state; witness testimony full of contradictions nobody had resolved; expert examinations that satisfied no one; physical evidence handled so loosely that the court paused on one item, in its own words, an allegedly bloody jacket. Eleven years of a man's life, and at the bottom of the file, an allegedly bloody jacket. Janos Kirjak walked out of the Star into the summer of 1968, in his early forties, with everything and nothing settled.

Laszlo Kaszab, the detective who had said one hand back when saying it cost him his place, died on the twentieth of August, 1968, ten days after the death sentence, when the sport plane he was flying went down; the inquiry ruled pilot error, the villages muttered darker and proved nothing. He lived long enough to see the acquittal and the verdict, and not long enough to see the credit, which went, as credit does, to the institutions. As for the men of 1957: the county's retrospectives record that the officers of the beaten confession were slowly phased out of the force, and that Geza Garai, the prosecutor of the printed story, left the corps. No trial, no sanction, no name ever attached, in any document, to the word responsible.

From a June acquittal to a December rope, 1968 spent six months unmaking what 1957 had built in three. The ledger of the mistake, though, is short and exact. After the wrong man was locked up, three more women were murdered and two barely lived. That is what the verdict of 1957 cost, on top of the eleven years.

A record that convicted a man twice, acquitted him once, and hanged another could not manage to agree on the year the wronged man died.