[citation needed] In Hungarian society at that time, the future husband of a teenage bride was selected by her family and she was forced to accept her parents' choice.

At this time, Fazekas began secretly persuading women who wished to escape this situation to poison their husbands using arsenic made by boiling flypaper and skimming off the lethal residue.

She was the closest thing to a doctor the village had, and her cousin was the clerk who filed all the death certificates, allowing the murders to go undetected.

In another account, a medical student in a neighbouring town found high arsenic levels in a body that washed up on the riverbank, leading to an investigation.

However, according to Béla Bodó, a Hungarian-American historian and author of the first scholarly book on the subject, the murders were finally made public in 1929 when an anonymous letter to the editor of a small local newspaper accused women from the Tiszazug region of the country of poisoning family members.

While the case was investigated in detail, with 12 trials held between 1929 and 1931, no precise figures for the number of victims are available, as other sources estimated them at around 300.