The Mystery of the “Suitcase Murderer”
Just before dawn on March 11th, 1931, a train pulled into Budapest’s Keleti Railway Station from Hatvan for a quick stop before its final destination in Szolnok. As the air brakes hissed, a man hurriedly got off and headed directly for a pub on nearby Baross Square. Drinking through sunrise, he then stepped back outside, only to decide to visit another pub, his eyes focused squarely on the sidewalk before each nervous step. He clearly had a lot on his mind...
Meanwhile, the same train continued eastbound to the Szolnok station. When all the passengers left, the conductors gazed through the carriages to make sure everything was all right. In one of the third-class compartments, they found a sizable suitcase that was apparently abandoned, and decided to take it to the cloakroom – but when they attempted to hoist it by its leather strap, they discovered that the suitcase was oddly heavy. After reporting this slightly uncanny situation to the head of the railway station, who immediately notified the police, a curious crowd stood around the mysterious trunk as it was opened. Immediately the air froze, and jaws were dropping, as what was hidden inside would make even the hardest man humble: the hog-tied dead body of a woman.
Back in Budapest, the nervous man left the second pub at around 10am, staggering over to his apartment on Hernád Street. Opening the door, he immediately started destroying letters, pictures, and a silk handkerchief – all of it obviously belonging to a girl, although the handkerchief had been given to him as a gift. Every memento of her was thrown on the fire; he wanted to erase every piece of her memory from his heart, and all that was left behind. When the last fragment of remembrance was but an ember, he left his apartment; he had to think.
By this time, tension was high at the Szolnok train station; the police and detectives were on the spot as the pursuit for the “suitcase murderer” had begun. They soon determined that the body belonged to a girl around 16-20 years of age, who was 156 centimeters tall, and possibly very pretty – as judged by her figure and “other circumstances”, it seemed she had an intense love life. She appeared to be the victim of a crime of passion.
Any passion once felt by the peculiar man back in Pest had now turned to apprehension, as he walked and thought with no apparent purpose, stopping at a random apartment at Izabella Street 33. Introducing himself as Dr. Kiss, the man asked if he could store his belongings there for awhile. Unencumbered, he headed downtown to meet a friend on Kecskeméti Street, asking his shady pal to pretend to be his brother-in-law and go check out his flat, explaining that he had not paid his rent and wanted to sneak out for good if the landlord was not around... but in reality, he wanted to find out if the police were after him already.
Indeed, the police were on his trail. The Szolnok authorities discovered that severalstrings of the suitcase mystery led to the capital,and so the Budapest police joined the investigation. It wasn’t long before the press caught wind of the fresh murder case, and when afternoon editions of the papers were hot off the presses, the whole country burned with desire to find the “suitcase murderer”, as police forces of all three cities on that fateful train line investigated the case.
Although all eyes were on Budapest, they hadn’t yet focused on Hernád Street – the fake brother-in-law let the man know that the scene was clear, and so the mysterious fellow furtively collected his belongings and left his home forever, carrying his luggage to the flat on Izabella Street where the clueless collaborators let him pile all his possessions there while his friend waited outside. They then had dinner on Wesselényi Street, and parted ways. “Dr. Kiss” drank away the whole night in another pub on Nefelejts Street, staying there until noon the next day. Only alcohol could erase the vivid memory burning his brain. After leaving the pub, he stumbled all the way to the Buda side to take out a room on Szász Károly Street under the pseudonym Jenő Jankovics.
The cruel murder case was now in the headlines of almost every magazine nationwide, exhorting everyone to catch the monster. However, first the victim needed to be identified. Fingerprints were taken from her – as dactiloscopia was invented in 1904, this was already possible at the time – and as a national database was being set up back then, they could compare the results. The cause of death turned out to be suffocation. “The death was preceded by a short struggle,” stated the coroner’s notes. Due to the incredible talent of detectives of that time, the girl was soon identified as 23-year-old Mária Nagy, who had an intensely wild relationship with Tamás József Schreiber, a 31-year-old civil servant. The second autopsy revealed that she was first hit on the head and then strangled. She was killed one or two days before the suitcase was found.
“Jenő Jankovics” was Tamás József Schreiber. He had slept well and unbothered while Mária was being identified, and snuck out of the building the next day without paying a penny. He wandered around the streets of the city starving, only able to buy some bread and sausages to subsist on. He was desperate to change his appearance, stopping into a barber shop to cut his moustache and beard, and even shaving his head bald. In the meantime, the newspapers published new personal details about Schreiber and Mária: they lived at various places together under false names, they were not married, and the man already had a criminal record. Was it possible that he could kill his own girlfriend? The whole country was after Schreiber now.
Beyond being sought by every Magyar nationwide, Schreiber had another problem – he was completely out of money. Out of desperation, he sold four shirts and some underwear to a secondhand-clothes shop on Népszínház Street. In the meantime, the investigation revealed that Mária Nagy and József Scheiber had rented the room at Hernád Street 50 under the pseudonyms Julia Zvaratkó and Henrik Hubai, and one of the residents saw the man carrying a suitcase down the steps just days before. The crime scene was finally found.
By March 18th, radio waves and gallons of ink shared lurid details about the penniless killer wandering the city streets, starving and changing his appearance at any given opportunity. Returning motifs in almost every article were a green loden coat and bone eyeglasses. He was seen in Budafok, Pest, and even at an attorney’s office, where he was looking for Dr. Ernő Fekete – but since the attorney was absent at the time, the killer could only leave a letter explaining that he was simply a victim of love. (It soon turned out that this was not true at all.) The whole country was after Schreiber, and when a prominent Magyar magazine, Az Est, announced a 1,000 Hungarian pengő reward to catch him, all eyes were peeled for men fitting his description acrossHungary.
On March 24th the man woke up so hungry that he went out of hiding, darting out into the streets early in the morning to find something to eat. He barely had any remaining possessions, so he wanted to sell his jumper, a tie, a bed sheet, and a pawn ticket for his winter coat. In his search for a haberdasher, he walked across Margaret Bridge, up the Grand Boulevard, and down Dohány Street, Szövetség Street, and Rákóczi Road, taking the twisting back streets to Teleki Square. He made a bad choice by stepping foot on that busy square – there, at a quarter past nine, three merchants recognized him from the papers, seized him, and did not let him run away.
“Schreiber was surrounded by a huge crowd, and he would have even been lynched if it wasn’t for the detectives arriving on the spot. They saved him from the anger of the people.” He was given away by his green loden coat and characteristic glasses. At first he was uneasy, but as he started to calm down, he told his tale slowly. He confessed to the murder, only changing his story once in saying that he could not shake off the girl, but later he said that he became insanely jealous. According to him, on March 10th, on the day of the malicious slaying, his girlfriend “sat on the bed kissing a photograph of another man”. Schreiber lost his mind; he attacked the girl, gripping her throat with his right hand. Her face turned as white as the wall, and she fell back limply on the bed. “I became terrified. Chills were running down my spine... I am not a murderer, I am only an impostor who is disgusted by such deeds,” murmured Schreiber.
Schreiber claimed that he tried to help her regain consciousness, and thought petrol fumes might help revive her. When that failed, feeling all was lost, he poured the fuel on the body and lit it on fire, but gripped with guilt he quickly put the fire out. He rushed out of the apartment, went to a pub and ordered wine, and in desperation came up with the idea to stuff the body in a suitcase, and bought one nearby. He said that when cramming his lover’s corpse into the trunk, he had to kneel on its lid as it just would not close… Then he took a taxi to Keleti Railway Station, and left his lover's remains on a train in the half-witted hope that it would also carry his guilt away.
The judges did not believe the tall tale about jealousy, as a graphologist found out that Schreiber was a vain and easily irritable man. Several witnesses said that he had long been wanting to get rid of his girlfriend, and hit her several times in the past. In the end he was sent to prison for 15 years for premeditated murder. But this wasn’t the end of Schreiber’s criminal career – after he was set free, he once again earned police attention for petty crimes committed during World War II.
