Jessica

When asked about the type of torture used, he said (as recorded by Penrose), "They tied the hands and arms very tightly with Viennese cord, they were beaten to death until the whole body was black as charcoal and their skin was rent and torn. One girl suffered more than two hundred blows before dying. Dorko [another accomplice and procurer] cut their fingers one by one with shears and then slit the veins with scissors." Erzsébet's childhood nurse, Ilona Joo, admitting that she had killed about 50, said that she had applied red-hot pokers from the fire, shoving them into the mouth of some hapless girl, or up her nose. The mistress herself, she testified, had placed her fingers into the mouth of one girl and pulled hard until the sides split open. She had also stabbed them all over with needles, making them bleed, or had torn open their flesh with sharp pincers. She liked to slit open the skin between their fingers. The hearing grew more gruesome by the day, as more people added their own tales of horror and how many dead bodies they had witnessed. Finally, it was over. Based on the skeletons and cadaver parts found, as well as witness reports, Countess Báthory and her cronies were convicted on 80 counts of murder. In a second part of the trial, a newly discovered register was entered as evidence that included in Erzsébet's handwriting the names of, and small details about, more than 650 females, according to some accounts. The suggestion, which could not be proven, was that she had kept track of her victims and had actually killed that many. The formal charges remained at 80, although Penrose says that King Mathias indicated in a letter to Thurzo during the hearing that he knew of at least 300 victims. (BAD ASS)