Research archive
Sources
Documents. Records. Testimonies. Research.
Explore the sources behind the investigations. Books, archival records, newspapers, academic research, documentaries and web sources. Because history deserves more than a single story.
“A claim is a story. A source is a starting point.”
Results
Web
ČT24, ČTK
Used in1 case
Web
iROZHLAS.cz, Český rozhlas
Used in1 case
Web
iROZHLAS.cz, Český rozhlas
On the twenty-eighth of August 2026 Czech Radio reported that the police would open the grave.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Biskupstvi brnenske (Diocese of Brno)
On the sixth of June 2026, on the exhibition grounds in Brno, more than thirteen thousand people stood before an altar draped in red, the color of martyrs' blood.
Newspaper
DC Thomson
The last trace of the man himself is a Scottish reporter's line from February 2026: the one-time hitman, it says, is living out his days quietly in Italy, at the age of eighty-two.
Documentary
Ceska televize, reporter Karel Vrana
Documentary
TV Noe
Web
RIA Novosti
Documentary
gyilkoslevelek
The long interview with Balint Barna, the prosecutor who is still alive to tell it.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Tycs Criminal Set
A Hungarian case retelling, used for the period trial and town photographs it reproduces.
Used in1 case
Web
Hrvatska radiotelevizija
In March 2025, Croatian state prosecutors closed a twelve-year investigation into whether Sindichich had lied under oath about Perkovich and Mustach.
Web
Badatelé (badatele.net), with Václava Jandečková
Used in1 case
Web
ČT24, ČTK
On the tenth of January 2025 the ÚDV opened a criminal inquiry on suspicion of murder, with a team of three investigators and two researchers, one of them the former head of what Prague calls the murder squad.
Used in1 case
Web
Nacional
Two weeks later, from inside Glina prison, Perkovich and Mustach filed to take over the prosecution themselves, as private parties.
Web
szoljon.hu, with Peter Dulai
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.
Used in1 case
Web
Český rozhlas
By August about a hundred and fifty pages had arrived. Among them was a report written by an American military-intelligence officer in Prague in the days after the death.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Realitatea Morbida
The Romanian video account whose interviews with the Stei hospital staff carry the years in the locked wards, the transfer to Nucet and the burial without a priest.
Web
Sputnik Belarus
The men who made the arrest remembered finding him at a relative's house, his family around him and the suitcases already packed: tickets south, to Odessa.
Web
Aktuálně.cz
Used in1 case
Book
Frantisek Kolouch
The third is where current scholarship leans: a psychically ill adventurer, in the words of the case's most recent historian, a man who invented a captain because being Ladislav Maly had become unbearable, and whom State Security exploited with a cynicism so total it looked, forever after, like authorship.
Documentary
Kaye Adams
In 2024 the BBC gave it six podcast episodes. The reporter narrating them, Kaye Adams, had covered the Dunfermline verdict as a young journalist in 1989.
Documentary
University of Chicago Divinity School
Lincoln discussing the 2024 book inside the Divinity School; the source of the episode's Swift Hall interior frames.
Used in1 case
Academic
Psychiatria Danubina, volume 36, number 2
In 2024, a peer-reviewed psychiatry journal published a psychobiography of Vera Renczi, building a clinical model of her jealousy from, its own references show, the 1925 Hearst texts and the anthologies downstream of them.
Book
Bruce Lincoln
Because inside the folder were English translations of articles Mircea Eliade had published in Romania's far-right newspapers in the late 1930s. Most of them, Lincoln writes, voiced support for the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Iron Guard, Romania's mystical and violently antisemitic brand of fascism.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Blikk
The interview in which doctor Endre Vegh, who was Janos Kirjak's physician, gives his account of how Kirjak died.
Used in1 case
Web
SB.by (Belarus Segodnya)
Documentary
Jaroslav Mareš
In 2023 a team at the Museum of the Police of the Czech Republic carried the cartons out of storage and read the whole file again, from the first page.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
photographs Petr Holakovský
The Museum's case exhibits, documents and lecture slides, photographed at the Museum in 2023.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Sasha Sulim
General Grib has shown television crews what became of that welded handcuff. It was found, years later, eaten through with rust.
Newspaper
Fife Today
Newspaper
Belgrade
He put his conclusion on the record in the Belgrade daily Danas, in one sentence. Vera Renczi is invented. In no relevant source, he said, is there a single letter about her.
Web
Fakti.bg, Sofia
The pathologist's only interview on the subject: no stroke, water in the lungs, and a single word for the immediate cause of death.
Used in1 case
Web
Konstantin Katanyan, fparf.ru
It was a photograph of a puppy. A small dog, photographed and entered into the case file over the caption: a dog of the German Shepherd type.
Archive
Pavel Hlavaty, Cesky rozhlas Plus
Web
Kata Beke, Magyar Nemzet
His old prison physician remembered compensation of about two million forints, and remembered him quietly giving it away among his relatives. The same account carries the detective Laszlo Kaszab's thread and Kirjak's one surviving sentence.
Used in1 case
Book
Alexandra Arkhipova and Anna Kirziuk
The study of Soviet rumour that preserves the 1963 diary entry the episode quotes: one Muscovite wrote the street version into a private diary that winter, and the entry survives.
Web
Lenta.ru
She lived. She is the only person known to have survived him. She went to the militia, and the militia decided the matter was not serious enough to register.
Web
Eva Kézrová, Český rozhlas Plus
In July 2019 the tape reached a researcher, Václava Jandečková, and in October Czech Radio broadcast it.
Used in1 case
Web
Andrey Sidorchik, aif.ru
In the entire affair, exactly one official went to prison: Valery Soroko, the prosecutor who had forged the report that broke Oleg Adamov. He served four years.
Web
Peter Dulai, Bors
The prosecutor's own account of the beaten confession, the retrial motion, the scrapped cab tracked to the breaker's yard, and the hope of a madness finding that bought the fourth confession.
Used in1 case
Web
Chicago Magazine
The long American retelling of the investigation and its dead ends, used for the Chicago reporting of the case.
Used in1 case
Web
Geza Meszaros, szoljon.hu
Within weeks the investigators, men of a force the county archive's own series would later describe with the words dilettantism and violence, had pulled in three local men and gone to work on them.
Used in1 case
Web
evz.ro
The profile of Dumitru Ceacanica, citing his own 1980 book: his methods, the Cluj case, and the February 1973 hospitalisation.
Documentary
TV Happy
In 2018 Serbian television sat him down for nearly three hours, one million views and counting, and he gave the performance of his life, denying everything with a showman's wink.
Web
RIA Novosti
Valery Kovalyov, one of the three men convicted over the photograph of a dog, was sentenced to fifteen years and served twelve, and he has told interviewers what the state's arithmetic of apology came to: three thousand seven hundred rubles, from which the accountants deducted the tax the Soviet Union charged its childless men.
Documentary
RTL Klub
The programme in which the retired prosecutor Balint Barna says it was proven that Janos Kirjak was beaten.
Used in1 case
Academic
FIDH and the Human Rights Centre Viasna
In his memoirs, Grib set down what he believed the case had been made of: corruption, and the merciless demand that investigators solve every case, at any cost.
Documentary
Torcida Films
The courtroom record of the day the sentences were read, including the court list and the Federal Court of Justice decision that followed.
Documentary
KARISMA ROMANIA
The 2016 television segment on Ceacanica and the case, a third carrier of the identification photographs and the check the case used to verify the portrait.
Documentary
Osjecka TV
In his last big television interview, in 2016, the host asked him for a closing thought: so, the old secret police still rules? Stedul answered with three words. So it seems.
Web
The Chicago Maroon
Decades later one of those students, Greg Spinner, was still telling audiences: we were asked to perform them. Seriously.
Used in1 case
Web
Magyar Nemzet
The interview in which Barna says it was proven that Kirjak was beaten, and describes how the prosecutors took the case from the police.
Used in1 case
Book
Michal Stehlik
In 2016 the historian Michal Stehlik, who had reconstructed the case document by document, published the finding that broke the theory's spine.
Documentary
The award-winning 2016 feature drawn from the case.
Academic
Marketa Devata
The academic journal of the Czech Academy of Sciences gave its review of Stehlik's work a title that reads like a tombstone for a seventy-year certainty: The End of the Myth of Secret-Police Provocation in Babice.
Book
Frantisek Kolouch
In his death cell he had painted little pictures and traded them for cigarettes; on his last night he wrote farewell letters that survive to this day.
Documentary
Al Jazeera Balkans
The verdict day report from Munich, with the statement of the German federal prosecutor outside the court.
Book
Przemysław Semczuk
It took a different Poland to answer it: a documentary in 1998, an award-winning feature in 2016, and a journalist's book that finally assembled the second file.
Web
actualdecluj.ro
The investigation with Colonel Augustin Nona and prosecutor Iuliu Andrei, which carries the militia identification photographs, the investigators' marked map, the victim's house and the correction that there was never proof of a hammer.
Newspaper
Igor Lensky
The boy witness grew up to be an engineer at a Moscow maternity hospital, and his real name reached print only in 2015, in an article written by his own nephew, the ten-month-old who had been asleep in the far room while a killer stood in the kitchen deciding.
Academic
Mădălin Hodor
Based on the CNSAS (Securitate-archive) investigation of historian Mădălin Hodor.
Used in1 case
Book
Václava Jandečková
A researcher in 2015 read the confession as real, and a journalist who ran his own experiments in the window called it nonsense from beginning to end.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Al Jazeera Balkans
Josip Perkovich was extradited on the twenty-fourth of January, on a scheduled flight to Munich.
Documentary
DW News
The English language report on the extradition of January 2014.
Web
Lumea Justiției (luju.ro)
In 2014 a Bucharest court looked at what had been done to her father and awarded the family half a million euros.
Documentary
Philipp Gruell and Frank Hofmann, BR and DW
The German television documentary on the Yugoslav service's killings abroad, which filmed the case files, the print shop footage and an interview with Josip Perković before his trial.
Newspaper
Florina Pop
The press piece that carries the Huedin station answer, the two demons Bere and Puiu, the wardrobe arranged as a place of prayer, and the three quotations the episode uses.
Book
Boze Vukusic
Years later the Croatian journalist Boze Vukusic, himself a veteran of the emigre movement, published it, letter by letter, facsimile by facsimile, and nobody involved has ever managed to make it go away.
Newspaper
Grażyna Kuźnik
Wampir z Zagłębia. Zdzisław Marchwicki najchętniej polował na będzinianki: the feature and its reader comments on the contested Gierek kinship.
Newspaper
London
In 2012, a British tabloid printed a supplement on women who kill, and the photograph it ran for Vera Renczi was a self-portrait that a living fashion model, Patricia Belda Martinez, had posted online in 2004. The paper printed an apology to her.
Web
The paper printed an apology to her.
Documentary
Channel One
The 2012 programme with the later interviews and the museum material, including Sofia Fainshtein on camera and the gas service exhibits.
Newspaper
Irina Kozlik
The letter to the Vitebsk Worker printed in full, with interviews with General Grib and with Oleg Adamov.
Newspaper
Clive Leviev-Sawyer
The profile that carries the remark the British historian R.J. Crampton records, that the Bulgarians had made a terrible historical mistake when they aligned themselves with what she called the most uncivilized country in the world.
Used in1 case
Web
Focus.pl
The Brussel report and its suppression, the trial dialogue, the purged officers and the coercion of the young witness.
Web
Lumea Justiției (luju.ro)
The full Securitate note, with its facsimiles, reached the public in 2010. The note itself was classified, and went into the dark for thirty years.
Newspaper
The Scotsman Publications
A Scottish paper checked in on him in 2010 and found him working for a private security firm, giving newspaper interviews, and reportedly owning a fine house back in Rijeka with hair salons and a dry cleaner on the ground floor.
Newspaper
When it sentenced Prates to life, the Munich judgment spelled out, in writing, why the old hitman had turned: because Perkovic had abandoned him during and after the Scottish sentence, and had embezzled the assets entrusted to him in 1988.
Documentary
Deutsche Welle
The interview filmed after his conviction, in which his face is kept in silhouette and he is named only as Krunoslav P.
Book
Ludek Navara and Miroslav Kasacek
A 2008 bestseller about the case, written with the family of one of the hanged men, put it on the cover in so many words: today it is well known that this was a targeted provocation of State Security.
Book
Klaus Bästlein
The state study's author, Klaus Bästlein, closed on one sentence: whatever one makes of his entanglement, it had nothing to do with his abduction.
Web
Sergey Golesnik, SB.by
An expert named Tatyana Yerofeyeva set the disguised note beside the Patriots letter and read straight through the costume to the writer.
Book
Bogdana Lazarova and Nikolay Hristov
The book in which the investigation into the antiquities trade was published, by the Darik Radio crime reporter and her colleague.
Used in1 case
Documentary
NTV
Web
On the English Wikipedia, after fifteen years of editors fighting over her, the article now sits in a category reserved for a special kind of person: people whose existence is disputed.
Documentary
Slovenská televízia (STV)
Used in1 case
Book
Úřad dokumentace a vyšetřování zločinů komunismu (ÚDV), Czech Police
The police volume on the case. Later writers strung these deaths into one chain. One telling counts twenty dead in ten years. The police volume on the case dates each of them and stops there.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Bulgarian National Television
The densest period footage of her: the palace of culture, the Banner of Peace, the podium, the archive shelves and the typed decision ordering a trial behind closed doors.
Used in1 case
Documentary
directed by Alexandru Solomon
Decades later, a Romanian filmmaker named Alexandru Solomon built his own documentary around that footage, and called it what it was: a documentary about a documentary of lies; a reconstruction that, in his words, conceals far more than it shows.
Documentary
Titus Muntean
A film called Examen, drawn from the case, played in cinemas in 2003.
Book
Adolf Razek
In the 1990s, the office created to document the crimes of the communist era went through the files, and what it found reads like an indictment.
Web
Igor Lensky
The KGB's first deputy chairman, Filipp Bobkov, would recall those letters decades later in an interview. The letters demanded worse than a bullet: public hanging, quartering on the old execution ground of Red Square.
Documentary
Maciej Pieprzyca
The 1998 documentary that put the case for the condemned man's innocence.
Web
Umberto Eco
Six years after the murder, Umberto Eco, who had traded letters with Culianu and admired him, weighed the case in the New York Review of Books.
Used in1 case
Book
Ted Anton
And yet the same small caliber had one more constituency. It was, Ted Anton reports, a weapon favored in Chicago's Romanian underworld.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Petre Mihai Băcanu
A newspaper printed the secret report in 1996.
Newspaper
The New York Times
The truth about the insurance was simpler and sadder, and it reached the New York Times through Wiesner herself: in his frightened final weeks, Culianu had changed his locks and bought a life insurance policy.
Used in1 case
Book
Then the wall came down, and in 1993 she crossed back over: a Prague daily introduced Czech readers to Vera Renczi the same year a British paperback anthology carried her to a new generation.
Book
Valery Soroko
He served four years, and years later he published a book justifying himself.
Web
Ted Anton
The article Ted Anton expanded into the 1996 book; the case's verbatim source for the Chicago reporting of 1991 and 1992.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
In February 1992, in the pages of Romania Mare, the nationalist weekly Culianu had said could not exist after a real revolution, a signed article celebrated his murder.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Three days later the government-aligned paper Libertatea printed what it said was a Chicago police report concluding that no foreign intelligence service was involved. The Chicago police had issued no report at all.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Grupul pentru Dialog Social, Bucharest
On April 5, 1991, the Bucharest magazine 22 published the conversation, and Romania got to read, inside its own borders, exactly what its most brilliant exile thought of it.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Library of Congress catalogue record; the paper survives on microfilm
Through 1990, Culianu wrote a column for Lumea Libera, a Romanian exile weekly in New York, under the title Scoptophilia, the guilty pleasure of watching lurid things.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Documentary
ITN
Documentary
Viktor Dashuk
The primary footage of the case: the interrogations, the investigative experiments, the handwriting exhibits and the wrongly convicted on camera.
Newspaper
Andrew C. Revkin, with reporting in Spain by Karen Polk
The reported account of the last days in Spain, the hotel on the paseo de la Habana, the drivers, the gate and the search.
Newspaper
ABC newspaper archive
The Spanish reports of the disappearance: the police confirmation of July 1985, room 614 and the bingo hall, the two drivers, and the December 1985 exchange between Moscow and Madrid.
Archive
Director of Central Intelligence
In 1983 he was put at the head of a group of about twenty scientists modelling what a nuclear war would do to the weather.
Academic
F. L. Carsten
A historian printed Dixon's telegram in 1983. Its last line reads: "My guess is that he will not be with us long."
Used in1 case
Documentary
directed by Janusz Kidawa
The state told the story once more, on film. In 1981 a feature called Anna and the Vampire reached the cinemas: the militia's version, a heroic captain against a degenerate.
Documentary
Bulgarian National Television
In the summer of 1981, more than a hundred thousand people filled the streets of Sofia to bury a woman of thirty-eight.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Kratky film Praha
Web
Lumea Justiției (luju.ro)
One of the senior investigating officers later wrote that in those first days he proposed releasing Samoilescu and watching him, because the case against him would not hold.
Documentary
Bulgarian National Television
Newsreel of the 1979 visit, used in the episode for the world stage beats.
Used in1 case
Archive
National Center for Atmospheric Research
NCAR is host to two Soviet scientists: the captioned news photograph of Vladimir Sergin and Vladimir Aleksandrov, and the record of the 1978 visit.
Documentary
Československá televize (ČST)
On the desk of its fictional detective it placed the real file, labelled Vražda Vranské, the murder of Vranská, so that he could read the older case while he solved the new one.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Nevena Tosheva
The 1976 documentary on the oracle, the only film of Vanga the case could find.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Czechoslovak Television
In 1975 state television dramatized Babice as an episode of its flagship propaganda crime series, Major Zeman, under the title The Murderer Hides in the Field, the village renamed, the priests written as conspirators.
Documentary
archival reel via YouTube
Katowice in 1974 in colour: the streets, the red trams, the miners, the smokestacks and the city panorama.
Documentary
archival reel via YouTube
Silesia in 1974 in colour: women walking, the street by the station.
Book
N. T. Sizov
The militia chief of that Moscow, in his own published memoir, records one more detail: under interrogation, the failed tenor tried to talk about Raskolnikov.
Documentary
Corina Chiriac
The festival was called Cerbul de Aur, the Golden Stag.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Romanian Television
Trial footage (1971) and case photographs: Romanian Television and Romanian press archives, used for commentary.
Documentary
archival reel via YouTube
The roundabout and the trams of Katowice in 1970, in black and white.
Newspaper
A party paper revealed that the Spiegel author had been paid a thousand dollars, roughly ten thousand today.
Used in1 case
Book
Claire Sterling
An American reporter, Claire Sterling, had been in Prague through the inquiry, and in November 1969 she published the book that made the case in English. She concluded, in her words, that Jan Masaryk was murdered, although it wasn't a perfect crime.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Its headline filed him, as the era always had, under the town he came from: the Tiszafoldvar quadruple murderer has been executed.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Its little house paper, the Party committee's mimeographed organ, reported between production items that the trial of Peter Kovacs was under way in Budapest, and noted, in the deadpan of company news, the verdict will not be delivered today.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
After all, he was not the murderer. The notice began, without any visible flinch, with the paper citing its own decade-old coverage: as we reported in detail more than ten years ago.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
In June Kotlář told the press that of the three versions, murder, suicide or accident, none could be preferred and none entirely ruled out, and that he was not considering opening the grave: there were no legal grounds, and there was the question of respect for the dead.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
At ten past seven the head of the Prague criminal police arrived, Dr Zdeněk Borkovec, the same detective who had chased the Vranská suitcase murders in 1933.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
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Newspaper
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Newspaper
On the sixth of April a Bratislava paper printed the night clerk's story.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
On the third of April the philosopher Ivan Sviták published an open letter in the student paper listing fourteen points that did not fit a suicide.
Used in1 case
Archive
CNSAS, Bucharest
The party's own 1968 report on the Foris case: the isolation chronology, the finding that the treason charge was unfounded, and the page on the disappearance of Stefan Foris's mother.
Documentary
Vederi din trecut
The 1968 newsreel of a Cluj restaurant opening, used for period faces and interiors.
Documentary
Czechoslovak Television, directed by Vlastimil Vávra
Czechoslovak Television made a four-part series called In Aid of the Prosecutor General, and put the household in front of the camera.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
The headline in a Pest county paper counted them plainly: testimony of two attacked women.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
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.
Used in1 case
Book
Marcia Davenport
In her memoir, published in 1967, she wrote that he said many times, in a careless tone, "One day they'll kill me."
Used in1 case
Academic
Zoltan Szabo, head of the investigation office of the Szolnok county prosecution
In early 1967 Zoltan Szabo put his conclusion in writing, in a study that would later run in the interior ministry's own restricted journal, a publication ordinary Hungarians could not so much as borrow. The words on the paper were these: Janos Kirjak is innocent. A serial killer is taking victims around Tiszafoldvar.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
It claimed to rest on sworn statements by seventy policemen from the secret files of the Prague interior ministry, and it gave five men in the palace, a puncture behind the right ear, and a bunch of violets in the coffin to hide it.
Used in1 case
Archive
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
What happened next stayed sealed for half a century, and it is the part no legend improved on. The memoranda, the endorsements and the interrogation protocol the episode reads are from this file.
Documentary
Andrei Olanescu
The 1964 film of the city's streets, squares and shops, used as period footage.
Documentary
NFI Filmarchivum
A newsreel story shot inside the Martfu plant in December 1961, quoted in three short silent excerpts under the user's fair-use ruling.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Studioul Alexandru Sahia, directed by Virgil Calotescu
In 1960, in a country where gangster films were banned, the secret police made one.
Newspaper
The paper's next headline said it outright: Janos Kirjak has retracted his confession.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
The Martfu murderer has been caught, ran the headline. The article knew everything. The page also carries the portrait of Margit Szegedi and the prosecutor's own byline.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
A young Martfu girl has fallen victim to a depraved murder, said the report, and it guessed at the weapon: a sharp object, probably an axe. The editorial on the same page named the human beast and the dregs of society.
Used in1 case
Archive
Office of the US High Commissioner for Germany
Pages 21 and 22, Kidnaping of Dr. Walter Linse: the statement of West Berlin's police president on the abduction of 8 July 1952 and the men the police identified.
Archive
Hansard, UK Parliament
In October the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, told the House of Commons that there was no information available as to the fate of Dr Linse.
Newspaper
Time Inc.
The captioned portrait of Walter Linse, the shoe left on the street, the rally, and the East German party newspaper's line that an agent had got lost.
Documentary
British Movietone / AP Archive
The newsreel of July 1952: Gerichtsstrasse, the sector boundary, and the rally in front of the Schöneberg town hall.
Newspaper
The Choc trial. A student named Miloslav Choc was tried for it, and told the court more than once that Schramm had murdered Jan Masaryk.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
"Jan Masaryk dead": the report of the morning after.
Used in1 case
Archive
Digital Repository of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament (psp.cz)
At three minutes past two Nosek stood up in parliament and said that Jan Masaryk had voluntarily ended his life, that in his own nation he had no enemies, and that the telegrams from the West had driven him to it.
Used in1 case
Documentary
via Czechoslovak Television, 1968, part 2
A newsreel camera was there. It filmed the villa, the Polish flag beside the Czechoslovak one, the salon, and Masaryk laughing in an armchair. It is the last film of him alive.
Used in1 case
Archive
Office of the Historian, US Department of State (history.state.gov)
The American ambassador's telegrams of March and April 1948, as printed in the State Department's published record.
Used in1 case
Documentary
British Pathé
Used in1 case
Documentary
British Pathé
Used in1 case
Documentary
British Pathé
Used in1 case
Documentary
British Pathé
Used in1 case
Documentary
British Pathé
Used in1 case
Documentary
J. J. Vágner
Used in1 case
Documentary
Otakar Vávra
Used in1 case
Newspaper
In the middle of November a man telephoned Dr Borkovec at the Four and said, in German: but you will not get me.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
In October the Austrian papers printed something else: that the Prague police had identified the murderer and were keeping him under observation, without naming him and without arresting him.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
For a few days at the end of September the Moravian papers had the gendarmes closing a ring around a gang of degenerates who had used the girl and disposed of her.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
The next day's Venkov gave his explanation. / Venkov reported that three people followed her to the grave: her mother and two sisters.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
On the twelfth of September the Prague afternoon paper Polední list printed a letter. Its writer signed himself the Phantom of the Street, and he said he had killed Otýlie Vranská.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Prazsky list, 6 September 1933: 'The man who saw the murderer'.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Nedelni list: the funeral at Olsany.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Used in1 case
Newspaper
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Newspaper
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Newspaper
A newspaper's idea of the Phantom, 1933.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Polona / Biblioteka Narodowa; Arcanum Digital Science Library
Between the eleventh and the twenty-ninth of August thirteen editions of Warsaw newspapers were confiscated for asking about a cherry-coloured Cadillac.
Newspaper
Subotica; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
Principal sources: the Hungarian-language regional press, 1924-1935 (Bacsmegyei Naplo, Hirlap and others, via the Arcanum Digital Theca).
Newspaper
Narodni listy, 1926: the Kocova murder.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
Hearst Sunday supplement, seen in the San Antonio Light; via The Portal to Texas History
The American Weekly was Hearst's Sunday magazine, folded into newspapers from coast to coast, a full-page factory of marvels.
Newspaper
Danville, Virginia
Three days later a fuller version ran, datelined Berlin, and this one carried a byline: O. B. Tolischus, of Hearst's Berlin bureau, a reporter whose name would one day sit under journalism's Pulitzer Prize.
Newspaper
Utica, New York; via NYS Historic Newspapers
In Utica, New York, the evening paper headlined it: woman is held for poisoning of thirty-five persons.
Newspaper
Czernowitz; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
On the fourteenth of May, 1925, five days before America, a German-language daily in Czernowitz printed the finished legend, in an item datelined Temesvar.
Newspaper
Austria; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
And on the third of May, a small Austrian paper completed the transformation in a single sentence: the Remic finally confessed to all the poison murders.
Newspaper
Villach; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
On April the eighteenth, a dispatch datelined Prague announced Julie Remic, held in Beckerek, and credited her with at least thirty poison murders.
Newspaper
Graz; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
A daily in Graz, Austria, printed a sober dispatch written from Beckerek itself, dated April the ninth.
Newspaper
Temesvar; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
Three days after that, a paper in Temesvar, in Romania, ran it with the fresh twist of the first husband's exhumation, and there she is Belics for good.
Newspaper
Miskolc; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
Two days later a paper in Miskolc, Hungary, reprinted the item, and in that single reprint her name appears spelled two different ways, Relic and Belics, in the same text.
Newspaper
Subotica; via the Arcanum Digital Theca
What happened around her over the next decade is not a legend. It is a court file, covered day by day by the regional press, and it is dark enough on its own.
Documentary
Národní filmový archiv
Used in1 case
Archive
Archive of the City of Prague, matrika MCH N49 (Michle, births 1893 to 1894), scan 188, entry 108
The police registration slips of the city and the personnel file of the army both record where Josef Pěkný lived: at Táborská street in Michle from 1931 until 1934.
Used in1 case
Web
Horațiu Damian, agerkult.ro
The four part series built on Ceacanica's memoir and on interviews with the surviving investigators, and the earliest online carrier of the case file photographs. Part II carries the hand stencilled warning letter from the dossier, part IV the identification photographs.
Web
Adevarul (adevarul.ro)
The regime that interrogated Gheorghe Samoilescu kept records, and because of those records we know how it was done.
Web
aktual24.ro
Ten years, of which he served a fraction. He outlived nearly everyone in this story.
Web
Antikvarijat Biblos, Zagreb
The antiquarian bookshop listing for one of the eight books, and the source of its cover.
Archive
Arcanum, the digitized Hungarian language press
A full-text search of the region's digitized Hungarian-language press returns two thousand two hundred and seventy-eight articles about poisoners between 1925 and 1930. The Banat's newspapers could not get enough of poisoners. The name Vera Renczi appears in none of them.
Used in5 cases
Archive
Arcanum Adatbazis Kft.
Told from the primary documents: the county and national press of 1957 to 1968, the court record, and the words of the men who reopened the case.
Used in5 cases
Archive
The collection credited on the archival case photographs published by Sputnik and RIA Novosti.
Archive
Public-domain images: Nicholas Roerich; Bulgarian Archives State Agency; and others.
Used in1 case
Archive
The 1963 photographs of Khrushchev at the party congress in Berlin, credited in the published description to Peter Heinz Junge and Walter Heilig.
Web
Romanian Wikipedia
And Romca later claimed one thing more: that on the afternoon Anca died, his father was in the apartment, in the next room.
Web
erori-judiciare.ro
A Romanian aggregator of the documented judicial errors, used to cross check the dates of the case.
Archive
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency had read the proofs three months earlier, and its confidential memorandum sits in the released files today.
Used in1 case
Archive
It is the testimony from that purge, locked for decades in the secret police's own archives, that finally tells us what really happened on the Bradul slope.
Used in1 case
Web
comentator.ro
For three years and eight months of his life, the state paid him seventy thousand lei. Then it deducted thirty thousand for his food and lodging in prison.
Documentary
In October 1978, the most famous Croatian emigre in Europe, a journalist named Bruno Busic, was shot dead late in the evening on a Paris street, returning to his flat.
Web
crodex.net
Red Managers, about the elite he had belonged to.
Web
croexpress.eu
The emigre paper's memorial piece, and the source of the photograph of the family stone at Mirogoj.
Archive
Československá obec legionářská, with data of the Military Central Archive, Prague
His army file, which the Police Museum would read ninety years later, told the rest: taken prisoner in the Carpathians in April 1915, enrolled in the legion in 1916, the first battle at Zborov, Bachmač, Tarnopol, guard duty along the Trans-Siberian railway, a machine-gun company, and a spell as a scout.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Tsentralnoe Televidenie
The programme that reproduces the case paperwork: the personal file pages, the ministry's covering letter to the Central Committee, the interrogation extract, the inventory of stolen property and the printed arrest notice.
Web
Denis Kuljiš
The journalist Denis Kuljish, who later reconstructed his life, described a man flush with money, drinking hard, in a marriage that had gone quiet.
Web
Muzeum Historii Polski / PAP, dzieje.pl
Dariusz Fabisz says every theory rests on circumstance.
Web
Ceacanica's dates, his death in 1987 and the posthumous promotion to general.
Documentary
Filmtett
Transylvania through the lens of amateur film makers, Kolozsvar in the eighties: the 8mm footage of the housing estates and streets, used as period footage.
Archive
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The FBI eventually released more than a thousand pages of its Culianu file, black with redactions, crowded with dead ends.
Used in1 case
Web
Evenimentul Zilei (evz.ro)
The militiamen who entered the small flat on the twenty-seventh of November 1980 found the scene where this story began.
Newspaper
Fife Free Press, via fifetoday.co.uk
Martin had been reading his local paper, the Fife Free Press, which that autumn was full of a spate of break-ins.
Archive
In the Croatian State Archives, and reproduced in print, is the report of the Rijeka office of the secret police, dated the fifth of April 1968, on the recruitment of Vinko Sindicic.
Web
There is even a memorial page for her on a gravesite database, born nineteen-oh-three, died nineteen sixty, cause of death filled in. It was created by a user, for a woman with no grave.
Archive
In Britain, the Foreign Office opened file after file on the case between 2021 and 2025, eight of them in the public catalogue now, and three still shut, one of them until 2044, and one closed extract, thirty-six pages, sealed until the year 2071.
Web
FANATIK
Decades later, a former acting chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service, Silviu Predoiu, added the institutional version: in May 1991 the apparatus was in disarray, in no state to mount a clean killing in America.
Used in1 case
Archive
Fortepan (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Archive
The colour photographs of Moscow in 1963 and 1964 that carry the episode's street and terminal views: Fortepan donations by Lencse Zoltan, and the Moscow slides of Thomas Taylor Hammond.
Archive
Fortepan (CC BY-SA): Poiana Brașov 1961 and 1969; Brașov, Piața Sfatului 1968, the old town and streets 1969, the Black Church 1971.
Used in1 case
Archive
Fortepan
The archival photographs of the town, the factory, Szolnok and the rivers that the episode used for its period layer.
Archive
IICCMER
Twelve photographs, item codes 32/1944, 164/1944, 54/1945, 112/1951, 28/1952, 34/1952, 297/1967, 3/1968, 6/1968, 8/1968, 85/1968 and 163/1968.
Web
Adevarul (adevarul.ro)
Press investigations decades later counted more than a hundred and seventy prisoners dead under his command, starvation rations, barbed wire fixed inside the cells, extra hours of labor without food for missed quotas.
Archive
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-30333-0003 (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE).
Archive
gh-ursu.ong.ro
Not for Anca's file, but for a dissident beaten to death in his directorate's custody years later.
Archive
The Moscow city archive photographs of the winter of 1963 and 1964: the Taynitsky Garden slide, the GUM galleries in January 1964, the Bolshoi and the railway pictures.
Web
Historia (historia.ro)
Law students in Romania still study the file as the greatest judicial error in the country's history.
Newspaper
Arcanum Digital Science Library
The Hungarian, Yugoslav and Austrian press on the three eastern cases: the 1968 plenum, the 1952 Linse parcel returned undeliverable, and the 1985 and 1987 reports on Alexandrov.
Used in5 cases
Web
Bogdana Lazarova
According to a later investigation by the Bulgarian journalist Bogdana Lazarova, Zhivkova had come to understand that powerful men inside the Party and the security services were looting the country's archaeological treasures for private profit.
Used in1 case
Web
Bogdana Lazarova
The second instalment of the investigation into the state organised trade in antiquities and the agency she created to track where the nation's heritage was going.
Used in1 case
Web
Bogdana Lazarova
In practice, Lazarova writes, it struck at the interests of nearly every bureau of the secret services that had been feeding on that trade, and at the highest echelons of the Party.
Used in1 case
Web
Index.hr
The Croatian newsroom that obtained and read the translated judgment, the account the dossier used for the court's findings on the BND payments, the eight million dollar claim and the two guns.
Archive
Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
The finding aid for Culianu's own papers, twenty one boxes of correspondence and manuscripts, checked by the case for photographs it does not hold.
Used in1 case
Documentary
Irina Szasz
The Romanian television documentary the episode's archival frames come from: the family album, the house in Iasi, and the sister's testimony.
Used in1 case
Web
kamenjar.com
The anniversary piece that carries the identity photograph of the victim.
Documentary
DTV
The programme that carries the manhunt material: the drawn wanted portrait, the fingerprint archive, the route list page and the period street footage.
Web
Telepolis
The German account of the print shop, the chain of service decisions and the roles the court assigned to the two defendants.
Archive
Higher Regional Court, Munich
Munich in 2008 called his motive real and his account credible; Munich in 2016 called him unusable and convicted his generals without him.
Web
On the internet's biggest murder database, she is a row in the index with no page behind it. Even the completists could not build her a file.
Archive
Muzeum Policie České republiky, Prague
Case exhibits, documents and the slides of the Museum's lecture of 21 September 2023, shown via Badatelé, Tajemno a záhady and Pražský deník (photographs Petr Holakovský).
Used in1 case
Archive
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Public-domain images: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC), Polish state archives, period photographs via Wikimedia Commons.
Archive
Period newsreel compilation, brief excerpts under commentary
On the fourth of March, an earthquake had torn through southern Romania and brought whole blocks of central Bucharest down into the streets, killing around fifteen hundred people.
Archive
Nova Broadcasting Group
Archival footage (excerpts, used as fair-use commentary): Bulgarian National Television (BNT) and Nova Broadcasting Group.
Used in1 case
Archive
Urad dokumentace a vysetrovani zlocinu komunismu (UDV), Czech Police
From the twenty-ninth of April 1951 at the latest, the secret police knew with certainty, by name, that Ladislav Maly was the armed man behind the raids in the district.
Documentary
Retro Report / The New York Times
The television record of the nuclear-winter years: Carl Sagan, the disarmament demonstrations, and a model run forward.
Archive
New York State digital newspaper collection
Newspaper scans via the Arcanum Digital Theca, NYS Historic Newspapers and The Portal to Texas History.
Archive
In the entire record of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, from that day to this, the names Stedul and Sindicic do not appear once.
Academic
Hunor Kádár
The law faculty paper on the case: the mechanics of the investigation, the victims, and the Article 48 outcome.
Archive
Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965 portrait, the first Dacia 1968, the 1968 rallies, with Dubcek 1968, with Kim Il-sung 1971, the Buzau plant 1970, the 11th RCP Congress); Scînteia.
Used in1 case
Archive
Arcanum Digitheca (ADT) and the Museum's file
The Prague, Brno, Bratislava and Košice press of 1933.
Used in5 cases
Archive
Arcanum Digitheca (ADT) and the Blinken OSA Archivum collections
In April alone the Czechoslovak press printed a hundred and fifty-four pieces on the death, five a day.
Used in5 cases
Documentary
Polish press and TVP archive material, via YouTube
Period trial photographs and archival footage, used in the episode as excerpts under commentary.
Archive
University of North Texas Libraries
Period newspaper pages (1924-1935) and all pre-1931 US press material are in the public domain.
Web
obecbabice.eu
The village's own website keeps a page on the case, with the full register of the convicted, and it says of Ladislav Maly, in its own words, that his role remains to this day the greatest mystery.
Web
He kept a website, naturally, its name taken from that old Scottish prison classification he treasured, the Queen's Enemy, where he offered his memoirs for sale to the highest bidder.
Web
registryofexonerations.eu
That June, the Supreme Court quashed the conviction.
Web
revista 22, Bucharest
It stays shut, as the Romanian scholar Andrei Oisteanu put it, behind seven locks.
Used in1 case
Archive
The case photographs the episode used for commentary: the Militia case presentation board, the mugshots, and the only verified photograph of the father.
Web
The secondary summary the episode used for the victims and their dates, checked against its footnotes.
Web
Cesky rozhlas Plus
One had explained his career on that bench in a sentence worth remembering exactly: I did not want to go there, I knew it was about political trials.
Documentary
Period police photographs of the case, filmed at the Museum of the Police of the Czech Republic.
Used in1 case
Newspaper
When the case finally reached a courtroom decades later, a Berlin newspaper called it the longest unsolved murder series in the history of the Federal Republic.
Web
tportal.hr
The Croatian profile of the victim, and the source of the desk photograph the episode used.
Newspaper
Sibiu
The hometown paper of Sibiu: the family's funeral notice of July 1977, the watch with the photograph fitted inside it, the letterhead of the chief investigator's secret report, and the police photograph of Romca Cozmici.
Documentary
Ceska televize
Documentary
HRT
Archive
Romanian Television archive, brief excerpts under commentary
The episode's moving footage of the city, used for the streets, trams and traffic of the period.
Book
Vladimir Arapov, whom colleagues called the Black Colonel, a detective so storied he is said to have partly inspired Sharapov, the hero of the Vainer brothers' novels; one of the brothers had served alongside him.
Web
Human Rights Centre Viasna
Nikolai Terenya's rehabilitation arrived years after the state had shot him: a piece of paper recording that he had been innocent all along, addressed to a man who no longer existed.
Documentary
Viktor Dashuk
Documentary
Viktor Dashuk
Web
historykon.pl
The doubt in the case, Piotr Olszowy, and what became of the family.
Web
Wprost
The decoys, the alert, the reward and the catalogue of traits.
Archive
Period postcards and portraits via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Used in6 cases
- The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
- 4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
- He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
- The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
- Murder at the Golden Stag
- The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
Archive
The freely licensed photographs the episode used, credited file by file in the published description: A.Savin, Cybersky, Shakko, Stanislav Kozlovskiy, V. Malyshev and others.
Archive
The episode's photographs of people, places, monuments and objects are Creative Commons and public domain files from Wikimedia Commons, credited author by author in the published description.
Used in6 cases
- The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
- 4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
- The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
- He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
- Murder at the Golden Stag
- The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
Archive
Poiana Brașov 1937 and 1940s (Willy Pragher); the 1964 chairlift, the Sport-Hotel bus and the 1973 resort road (BK1950); Hotel Sport 1968; the 1963 ski races; Ion Mihai Pacepa 1975; Securitate file pages; vintage typewriters, a gold Longines watch, a razor blade, leather boots, an aged manuscript; Carpathian winter and footprints; maps of Romania.
Used in6 cases
- Murder at the Golden Stag
- 4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
- The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
- He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
- The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
- The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
Archive
Archival photographs are public domain (Wikimedia Commons) or used for commentary and criticism.
Used in6 cases
- The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
- 4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
- The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
- He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
- The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
- Murder at the Golden Stag
Archive
The free-licensed photographs listed file by file in the published description.
Used in6 cases
- 4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
- The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
- He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
- The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
- Murder at the Golden Stag
- The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
Archive
Wikimedia Commons
Image credits (via Wikimedia Commons, reused with attribution): Abraham, Adrian Tync, Ahorcado, Andrzej Otrębski, Dada1960, Felix O, Gabriel Wilk, Gennady Grachev, Hiuppo, John VanderHaagen, Kamil Czaiński, Klaumich49, Krzysztof Popławski, Mateusz Banaś, Roger W, artisan2007.
Used in6 cases
- He Never Confessed: The Vampire Trial That Hanged Two Brothers
- 4 Men Who Never Arrived: The Strangest Disappearances of Eastern Europe
- The Real Story of the Black Widow: Vera Renczi and the 35 Zinc Coffins
- The Sealed Death of the Dictator's Daughter
- Murder at the Golden Stag
- The Vampire of Bucharest and the Murders His Father Got Away With
Archive
Period photographs and documents via Wikimedia Commons, including the Fortepan donations and public domain Romanian state sources. The published credits list every author and licence, and each file page is linked from the image it belongs to.
Archive
1940s Bucharest: Willy Pragher, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (CC BY 4.0).
Web
Zerkalo.io
Count it all together and the number is this: fourteen innocent people, convicted of murders they did not commit. Thirteen men and one woman, the woman being Lyudmila Kadushkina, punished for testimony the state itself had written.
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