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Béla Kiss: The 'Monster of Cinkota'

Jun 5
4 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Most serial killer stories end with a capture, a trial, a verdict. The story of Béla Kiss ends with a shrug and a question mark. In a town near Budapest in the early years of the twentieth century, this affable tinsmith murdered at least two dozen people and hid their bodies in metal drums around his home — and by the time anyone discovered what he had done, he had already disappeared into the chaos of the First World War. He was never caught, never tried, and never reliably found again. That open ending is exactly why the 'Monster of Cinkota' still unsettles people more than a century later.

It is one thing to be horrified by a killer who is behind bars. It is another to be left wondering whether he simply walked away and lived out an ordinary life under another name.

A respected tinsmith

Kiss was born around 1877 and settled in Cinkota, a town on the outskirts of Budapest, where he worked as a tinsmith and was regarded as a personable, well-liked bachelor. Neighbours saw a courteous craftsman who kept to himself; there was nothing in his manner to suggest the methodical predator underneath. That ordinary, trusted exterior was precisely what allowed him to run an elaborate and deadly scheme for years without drawing suspicion.

Like several killers of his era, Kiss understood that respectability is a kind of armour. A friendly, hardworking neighbour is the last person a community suspects, and he exploited that assumption ruthlessly.

The lonely-hearts trap

Kiss placed matrimonial advertisements and carried on correspondence with a remarkable number of women, receiving marriage proposals and, crucially, sums of money from women hoping to secure a husband. He lured numerous women to Cinkota with promises of marriage, and several who travelled to meet him were never seen again. The scheme combined romance fraud with murder: he relieved his victims of their savings before killing them.

Among the dead were also reportedly his own wife and the man she had been involved with — killed, it seems, after an affair — suggesting that personal rage and cold financial calculation both played their part in his crimes.

Crime poster of a stern man beside police near a house at sunset, with title BELA KISS and text about Hungary’s serial killer.

The metal drums

To conceal what he was doing, Kiss preserved his victims' bodies in large metal drums filled with wood alcohol, methanol. When neighbours grew curious about the growing collection of drums stacked around his property, he told them he was hoarding petrol in anticipation of wartime shortages — a plausible enough story in those uncertain years that it kept the questions at bay.

It is a detail that lingers: an entire community living beside a row of sealed drums, accepting a tidy explanation, while inside them lay the evidence of a mass murderer.

War intervenes

In 1914, before his secret was uncovered, Kiss was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army to fight in the First World War. His house stood largely undisturbed, watched over by an elderly housekeeper, while he was away at the front. It was only in 1916 — when his landlord, believing Kiss might be dead, moved to re-let the property and the drums were finally examined — that the horror came to light.

The grisly discovery

Inside the drums, authorities found the preserved bodies of numerous strangled women, at least twenty-four victims in all. Correspondence recovered from the house showed that Kiss had been in contact with dozens of women and had defrauded many of them, building a paper trail of romance and theft that pointed to an even wider net of potential victims. The discovery caused a sensation, and a frantic search for the missing soldier began.

Grungy true-crime poster of Bela Kiss, a stern man’s portrait with blood-red text about Hungary’s notorious serial killer.

The killer who vanished

By the time his crimes were known, reports suggested Kiss had died in the war — but doubt set in almost immediately, and it never fully lifted. Over the following decades, rumoured sightings surfaced across Europe and even, it was claimed, in America. Because 'Béla Kiss' was a common Hungarian name and wartime records were chaotic and incomplete, his true fate could never be confirmed, and no later identification ever stuck.

The Monster of Cinkota endures as one of the great unsolved disappearances in criminal history — a predator who exploited trust and loneliness, then slipped through the seams of a continent at war. His victims, women who answered an advertisement hoping for love and security, and the eerie, unfinished ending of his story, continue to fascinate and disturb in equal measure.