012 - PTB Discusses Their Year in Review, Charlie Brown Christmas Trees and Vera Renczi

Plead The Belly

There are few details about Vera Renczi’s early life. According to some accounts she was born in Bucharest in 1903 but given the timeline of the murders it’s more likely that she was born in the late 1800’s. Her mom died when she was 13 and she moved to Northern Yugoslavia with her dad where she attended boarding school. By 15 she was unmanageable- she had a reputation of running away and going out with older boys. Her childhood friends described her as having it an ‘almost pathological desire for constant male companionship and possessing a highly jealous and suspicious nature’. First marriage was to Karl Schick, a man who was much older than her. She was under 20. She had one son, named Lorenzo. Soon she began to suspect that he was being unfaithful and she poisoned his dinner with arsenic. She told everyone that he had abandoned her and his son. After approximately a year of “mourning“, she declared that she had heard that he died in a car accident. She remarried and that husband also disappeared. She claimed to have gotten a letter that declared his intentions to leave her. The was her last marriage. She began to have affairs and those men all disappeared. The story was the same- that they were unfaithful and then abandoned her. One of the men’s wives followed him to Renczi’s house and then saw that he never came out. She called the police who went to investigate. They found 32 unburied bodies in her wine cellar in zinc-lined coffins, including her son’s body. Renczi confessed to killing them all out of the fear that they would leave her. She may not have existed. The timeline doesn’t match up and the details are sketchy.