On 10 January 1914, at 7:45 in the morning, two coachmen found, partly in the water of the Danube, a large, white, woven wicker travelling basket on the bottom step of the lower quay of the Margaret Embankment in Buda.
The story begins with a body in a basket.Footnote 1 It was written by Dr Eugen Balogh (Jenő Balogh), the Hungarian Minister of Justice, with one reader in mind: Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.Footnote 2 It came in the form of a lengthy report detailing the murder, in Budapest, of Emilia Turcsán (Emilia Turcsányi), whose body was found in the basket, as well as the identification, conviction and death sentence of Turcsán’s killers.Footnote 3 The story had a purpose that was neither the simple provision of information nor grim entertainment: it was designed to allow the ruler to decide whether the death sentence would be carried out or commuted to a prison term. This was the final step in a protracted legal process repeated thousands of times across Franz Joseph’s sixty-eight-year reign; it was required every time any of his subjects was sentenced to death.
Turcsán’s murder was among the most sensational crimes across the Habsburg Empire in the early twentieth century. Hungarian historians have studied it closely, and in 2015 the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest organised an exhibition titled The Corpse in the Traveling Basket: The Mystery of Elza the Magnate.Footnote 4 The exhibition catalogue reprinted primary sources along with scholarly essays exploring the case.Footnote 5 Such studies have illuminated the innovations in policing that helped make possible the rapid apprehension of the prime suspects.Footnote 6 They have underscored the role played by the ‘boulevard press’ in turning the killing into a citywide sensation followed by hundreds of thousands of readers. Finally, they have demonstrated how the killing of Turcsán, a glamorous Budapest resident born into relative poverty in a provincial Slovak-speaking family, awakened deep anxieties in pre-war Hungary about gender, sex, social mobility and ethnicity.
Balogh’s report adds no new facts to the case. But in presenting the case in its entirety, from the discovery of the body to the appellate review, his report allows us to go ‘beyond the verdict’. The report shifts our focus from the victim to her killers, from the opening to the later stages of the legal process and from Budapest to Vienna, where Franz Joseph read the file. Today there are, tucked away in the House, Court and State Archive (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv) in Vienna, over five thousand reports like this.Footnote 7 A testament to the ruler’s long reign and pivotal role in the legal system, they come from all corners of the empire and record cases of murder, arson, robbery and treason. As in other states, legal reforms had transformed the handling of civilian death penalty cases across the Habsburg Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century by clearly defining (and limiting) what constituted a capital crime, instituting panels to weigh sentences when juries found defendants guilty and strengthening appellate courts.Footnote 8 The new criminal codes left one thing untouched: the final say on whether someone would live or die still belonged to the ruler. Almost without fail, Franz Joseph let the condemned live, commuting nearly all of these thousands of cases into life sentences in prison.
That Balogh’s report also resulted in clemency for the two defendants is not surprising. In 1878 Hungary had enacted a landmark criminal code, known as the Csemegi Codex (after its principal author, the jurist Károly Csemegi), that would remain in effect until 1950.Footnote 9 In debating its adoption, legislators had accepted the necessity of the death penalty with reluctance and expressed the wish that ‘death be pronounced only for the rarest and truly heinous crimes’.Footnote 10 In the decades that followed, the number of capital cases and executions dropped sharply. Between 1880 and 1918, Hungary executed just forty-three civilians, an average of 1.10 per year (out of a total population of nearly seventeen million).Footnote 11 Similarly, in Austria approximately fifty-two were executed between 1888 and 1918, at a comparable rate (an average of 1.6 per year in a population of roughly twenty-six million).Footnote 12 In this, Austria-Hungary was part of a wider trend across Europe, which saw fewer death sentences and even fewer executions, notably in states with divergent political cultures, legal traditions and constitutional structures.Footnote 13
What then can we learn from looking at just one report, given that clemency was an almost foreordained conclusion? Most obviously, it allows us to see the pivotal role the justice minister could play in what happened ‘beyond the verdict’. While in office from 1913 to 1917, Balogh nearly always endorsed the majority recommendation sent to him by the Hungarian Royal Curia, the highest court in Hungary. The curia usually called for clemency, but Balogh supported its findings even when it had advocated the death penalty in a double murder case from 1914.Footnote 14 In the killing of Emilia Turcsán, however, Balogh set aside the curia’s verdict, which meant also dismissing those reached by juries and judges earlier in the legal process. This step makes this case both rare and important. It may also explain the report’s unusual length – thirty-five typewritten pages – and its powerful narrative, which relies less on legal theory or relevant case law than on the reconstruction and arrangement of minor details and judgements of character.
This article closely analyses Balogh’s report on the 1914 murder case. We argue that it served two seemingly contradictory purposes. On the one hand, the story Balogh told strongly upheld the integrity of the institutions involved in every step of this case, from the police to the jury trials to the Hungarian Royal Curia. Reading the report, Franz Joseph could feel confident in the mechanisms of justice in his empire. On the other hand, Balogh used his narrative to place himself above the detectives, juries and judges who had considered the case. The justice minister, while ostensibly presenting the facts of the case in an objective and detached manner, in fact selected and arranged them both to affirm the workings of the police and courts and, at the same time, to establish his own role in evaluating, weighing and judging everything that had happened. This allowed him to dismiss their findings and substitute his own. The result, given Franz Joseph’s deference to his ministers of justice, was the commutation of both death sentences into life in prison. In this way, Balogh’s report allows us to pull back the curtain and see how a skilled jurist approached death penalty cases and, importantly, what presentation of facts and lines of argumentation he considered most effective at this crucial but largely unexplored stage of the judicial process. The report is just one among thousands, but it can help us understand the near disappearance of the death penalty in Austria-Hungary in the early twentieth century.
Balogh’s report points to a new way of approaching high profile murder cases by exploring what happens after the verdict. In our analysis, we draw attention to what Natalie Zemon Davis called the ‘fiction in the archives’, particularly as the minister shaped the murder, confessions and trials into a coherent and compelling narrative.Footnote 15 We first mine it for details about everyday life in Budapest and argue that the credibility of those details was critical to underwriting the legitimacy of the legal process that produced the ultimate verdicts; Balogh’s report had to be grounded in social reality to be believable (or believed). We then take up his account of the trials and the courts’ verdicts, exploring the legal basis and reasoning behind them. This leads to the final and pivotal section, in which we investigate Balogh’s summation and sentencing recommendation to the ruler. The focus throughout is on one document, but our analysis of it draws on the reading of seven hundred cases across the monarchy, including dozens of similar reports involving capital cases from Hungary, and five others written by Balogh.
The Detectives
Immediately notified, the police led the investigation, which first and foremost aimed to establish the personal identity of the woman. Footnote 16
After opening his report with the dramatic discovery of a corpse in a basket, Balogh moved to an account of the police investigation that would leave no doubts about its efficiency and integrity. Following the model of other large cities, Budapest had established a detective bureau in 1885 and steadily increased its members’ numbers and qualifications. In this case they used photographs and films of the deceased to speed the identification of the corpse.Footnote 17 After more than twenty-four hours, they came upon the caretaker of an apartment building in Buda who thought she recognised the body as Emilia Turcsán, a thirty-three-year-old woman who lived nearby.Footnote 18 The detectives went to her residence, where they found Turcsán’s stepbrother, Michael Zvara (Mihály Zwara), and the housekeeper, Rosa Kóbori (Rózsi Kóbori). After both noted a similarity between the photograph and Turcsán, they were taken to the hospital morgue but were unable to identify the body with certainty. The next morning, however, both confirmed that the dead woman was Turcsán.Footnote 19
Balogh next described how the police ascertained what had happened to Turcsán. It was clear from the start that her death was homicide: no one accidentally falls into a basket and then tumbles into the Danube. Kóbori claimed that Turcsán had gone on ‘an automobile tour’ with ‘two gentlemen and a lady’, but the detectives noted that there were ‘no outer garments missing from her wardrobe’ and that she ‘could hardly travel in the winter without outerwear’.Footnote 20 Moreover, the white wicker travelling basket that was usually in Turcsán’s bathroom was missing, which indicated that she had been placed in the basket inside her own apartment. Under the weight of what Balogh referred to as ‘incriminating evidence’, Kóbori confessed that her lover, the baker’s assistant Gustav Nick (Gusztáv Nick), had strangled Turcsán and that they had put her body in the basket.Footnote 21
Due to another effective police action, Nick was already in custody. The police had alerted pawnbrokers to watch out for stolen jewels, and when one in Pest was offered a valuable bracelet, he notified the police. They soon traced the bracelet back to Nick, who was then apprehended. ‘The weight of the evidence’, wrote Balogh, led Nick to confess as well.Footnote 22 In the absence of other forms of evidence, confessions were critical to capital cases in the early twentieth century; with two confessions, the detectives could call the case closed.
Balogh’s account of the police investigation allowed him to highlight both the admirable old-fashioned legwork and the modern methodologies that enhanced the effectiveness of the police and the reliability of their conclusions. Franz Joseph was no enthusiast of modern technology (he refused to use elevators), but he supported advances that improved bureaucratic efficiency (he tolerated typewriters).Footnote 23 Balogh provided ample evidence that the police deserved his confidence. Interspersed with statements of fact, Balogh offered evidence that was relevant only because of the interpretive possibilities it implied. For example, Balogh emphasised that on the second visit to the morgue, Kóbori had shown ‘astonishing calm’ and had ‘betrayed absolutely no discomposure’.Footnote 24 Balogh did not explicitly mention that the observation of a witness’s reaction to a body was a tried-and-true method of ascertaining potential guilt, but Elwin Hofman’s work has shown that investigators in the Netherlands confronted suspects ‘with the corpses of their supposed victims’ in order ‘to provoke feelings of shock, shame, guilt, and remorse’ that would ‘reveal guilty consciences’.Footnote 25 The reliability of detective work was again visible in Balogh’s description of how Kóbori’s explanation for her employer’s absence was dismissed (by a careful inventory of the wardrobe and the deduction that without a winter coat, no woman would set off on an automobile tour in January) and how this became such a weighty and incriminating piece of evidence that Kóbori immediately confessed her guilt.
That the police had cracked the case so quickly following the discovery of the body was a remarkable achievement.Footnote 26 But Balogh’s account smooths out an investigation that, as the lead investigators later admitted, had its share of false leads, missed opportunities and dead ends.Footnote 27 In the report, the police appear efficient, speedy and unerring. From this portion of Balogh’s report it is clear that the monarch was invited to determine the proper penalty for the crime that had been committed, but that there was absolutely no cause for him to doubt the defendants’ guilt or the integrity of the process that led to their prosecution in the first place.
The Defendants
Before proceeding to the presentation of Gustav Nick and Rosa Kóbori’s confessions, I consider it necessary to humbly depict the personal information and past lives of the before-mentioned persons. Footnote 28
Unlike the press, which described in detail Turcsán’s appearance, habits and possessions, Balogh had little to say about the victim. He noted that she was renowned for her ‘splendid toilette and expensive jewels’, that she was the ‘girlfriend of a rich furniture producer’ and that she had previously been a ‘woman with a health certificate, who was registered with the police’, in other words, a prostitute.Footnote 29 Prostitution was legal in Budapest for women who registered this occupation with the police and underwent biweekly health checks to prevent the spread of venereal diseases.Footnote 30 The words used to describe Turcsán – in German Magnaten-Elsa, Private and Frauenzimmer, in Hungarian Mágnás Elza, magánzónő and kokott – are difficult to translate without endorsing contemporary male authors’ assumptions about her sexuality, gender, labour and social station.Footnote 31 Balogh, however, had no need to judge Turcsán’s character or provide the monarch with detailed information about her. Much of what could be learned about Turcsán in the press – that she was born in 1880 in a village of 332 people, that her mother was a washerwoman, that she had previously worked as a servant, that the furniture magnate provided her with an apartment and a monthly allowance of 400 crowns – was absent from the report.Footnote 32 Balogh instead focused on the two defendants, since their very lives rested on assessing their credibility.
Kóbori, he informed Franz Joseph, was Unitarian and had been born on 2 December 1880 in the mining town of Abrudbánya (today Abrud, Romania). She attended four years of middle school, marking her as among the most educated people sentenced to death in Hungary between 1848 and 1918, and then worked as a waitress and cashier in various provincial towns. She came to Budapest in 1903 and worked as a housekeeper for one family for ten years before leaving with good recommendations as ‘hardworking and punctilious’, despite the fact that she had had an affair with a ‘male member’ of this household. Kóbori returned home in July 1913, but headed back to Budapest after three months. ‘She couldn’t stand country life any longer’, Balogh explained. Six weeks later, on 10 December 1913, she began working as Turcsán’s housekeeper for a monthly salary of fifty crowns.Footnote 33 By highlighting her education, commitment to hard work, voluntary independence and previous good behaviour (despite an implication of sexual indiscipline), Balogh set up Kóbori as a more sympathetic character than the press, which dismissed her as a ‘typical kind of dissolute servant’: cagey, self-interested and amoral.Footnote 34
Balogh made no such excuses for Gustav Nick. A Roman Catholic, Nick had been born on 21 July 1885 in Budapest. He attended just six years of elementary school. At the age of fourteen, he became a waiter in a hotel but after two years he turned to carpentry and then, after only a few months, became a baker’s apprentice. He had also done military service, and most newspaper photographs showed him in uniform.Footnote 35 For Balogh, however, what mattered most was that Nick was a passionate cardplayer who could not hold a job and ‘whenever he lacked work and money, he turned to Rosa Kóbori, who gave him sometimes smaller and sometimes larger sums’. In December 1913, Nick was in one of his frequent unemployed spells. When he stopped by on 5 January 1914, she invited him back on the 8th, promising that her employer would be out and they could be alone.Footnote 36
In his report, Balogh had to sort through the contents of two largely incompatible testimonies describing the events starting with Nick’s visit on the 8th and ending with the disposal of Turcsán’s body less than thirty-six hours later. Balogh presented their two statements in turn, and his summary of each included reported speech, direct quotations, parenthetical remarks and a host of small details. For all their differences, the two defendants agreed that Nick had come back to the apartment on the evening of 9 January and waited in Kóbori’s room while she put her mistress to bed. Soon after 9pm Kóbori returned and led him to Turcsán’s bedroom, where Turcsán was reading a newspaper. She did not notice Nick’s approach until he was next to the bed. She screamed, but he wrapped his hands around her throat and strangled her. Kóbori and Nick next removed Turcsán’s monogrammed nightshirt, dressed her body in a plain shirt and placed it in the wicker travelling basket. They opened the safe and took out jewels, cash and a bottle of Tokaj wine, which Nick drank. Kóbori prepared a meal, although Nick stated that ‘neither of them could eat’. They arose early the next morning and at 5:30am Kóbori checked to see whether the apartment building’s gate was unlocked (it was) and whether any other residents were on the stairs (they were not). They slowly carried the travelling basket down the steps, along the street and to the Danube. Other people saw them, and one later reported hearing Kóbori curse, ‘The devil take it, is this ever heavy!’ They did not put the basket into the Danube, but left it on the river’s edge.Footnote 37
Their accounts diverged, however, in describing the preceding days. Their meeting on 8 January was pivotal because it could show the presence or absence of premeditation, a requirement for a murder charge. Nick claimed that Kóbori ‘complained that her mistress gave her lots of work, but too little to eat’, that Turcsán ‘wrote everything down’ and gave her an ‘iron [key]chain instead of a gold one’. According to Nick, Kóbori bridled at being treated as an inferior by a woman who had been born into circumstances no more elevated than her own. He then reported that Kóbori had shown him ‘the expensive furnishings’ in the salon, including the piano, where the key to the safe was hidden. According to Nick’s testimony, when they returned to Kóbori’s room, she told him that ‘if she were a man, she would have gotten rid of Emilia Turcsán long ago’ and ‘challenged him directly to do it himself’. Nick claimed to have refused, saying he ‘shuddered’ at the sight of blood. Either taking him at his literal word or mocking him for his weakness, Kóbori retorted that if he strangled Turcsán, there would not be any blood. Kóbori, in turn, recounted a different version of these events that highlighted Nick’s, rather than her own, dissatisfaction with his life.Footnote 38
Balogh’s extended presentation of Nick and Kóbori’s testimonies served multiple purposes beyond exposing contradictions. When summarising their claims, Balogh included small and, at first glance, insignificant details about the material circumstances and daily lives of servants and employers in pre-war Budapest. In this way, Franz Joseph learned that Turcsán lived on the third floor; that her apartment comprised a hall, salon, bedroom, bathroom, servant’s room and kitchen with a backdoor; and that her furnishings included a piano, strongbox, portable screen (literally ‘a Spanish wall’), wardrobe, chandelier, electric light, nightstand and, of course, wicker travelling basket. He learned that Turcsán wore jewels, read the newspaper in bed and slept in a monogrammed nightshirt. He learned that Turcsán called in Kóbori to put her to bed at 8:45pm; that the moon was so bright on 9 January that it lit up the room even after the light was switched off; that the tobacconist closed by 9:30pm but that cigarettes could still be procured from a nearby tavern; and that Kóbori would not go to the tavern herself at that hour but could send the caretaker’s son. He learned that a housekeeper could invite her boyfriend into her own room through the kitchen door without her mistress noticing. He learned that Kóbori’s workday ended with thirty minutes of duties at her mistress’s bedside, including a presentation of receipts documenting her day’s spending.
What are electric lights, Spanish walls and monogrammed nightshirts doing in this report? These details allow Franz Joseph to see inside the apartment of a woman living in moderate luxury and to inventory the items that marked that luxury in the eyes of her peers. Franz Joseph was famously disinterested in fiction; the vast majority of his personal library was related to military discipline and he would rather read a manual about soldiers’ uniforms than a detective story.Footnote 39 For the monarch, these files represented work, not reading for pleasure. So, what work did these details do? A few, like the white wicker basket missing from Turcsán’s bathroom, were relevant to proving the identity of the deceased or the guilt of the accused. Others served to validate the reliability and hence the authority of the judicial process. Like the thorough account of the detectives’ identification of the victim and the perpetrators, they offer reassurance that the process was based on a full understanding of the facts and their context. Moreover, through these details Balogh’s report also demonstrates a thorough familiarity with all that had come before – a move essential to the report’s ability to ‘position itself above the other materials through its authoritative claims to objectivity’, as Carolyn Strange has noted of documents produced by similarly placed officials in the Canadian judicial system.Footnote 40
Perhaps most importantly, these details represent the justice minister’s – and subsequently the monarch’s – understanding of the multidimensionality of people’s lives and, by extension, his claim to be able to determine interior motives, ascertain who was truthful and who lied, predict who could be rehabilitated and who was irredeemable. In this case, where Balogh’s interpretation of motive hinged on a complex psychological connection between two women from the provinces, one who had achieved a life of luxury and leisure, and one who had to present her receipts every evening, the physical surroundings explained the interior workings of Kóbori’s mind. Balogh would next turn his gaze on Hungary’s juries and judges, who proved to be far from unanimous in their assessment of the case and the culpability of its defendants.
The Juries
Based on the jury’s verdict, the Budapest Criminal Court with its judgment 40611/1914 of 30 May 1914, found Gustav Nick and Rosa Kóbori guilty of the crimes of intentional homicide under §279 of the Hungarian Criminal code – with Rosa Kóbori as an instigator to homicide – and the crime of robbery under §344 of the Criminal Code, and both were therefore sentenced to life imprisonment.Footnote 41
With this detached language, Balogh summed up the findings of the first jury trial, conducted on 28 and 29 May 1914. By that time, lay juries were no longer a novelty in Europe; they had been extended to criminal trials in Hungary in 1899.Footnote 42 By allowing twelve regular citizens to make ‘a decision concerning the issues of fact and law in the case under the chairmanship and leadership of [three] trained judges’, the jury system in Hungary represented a kind of hybrid between the democratisation of legal interpretation and the reliance on expertise.Footnote 43 Contemporary legal experts disagreed about its desirability: some praised it as an ‘embodiment of the . . . independent administration of justice’, whereas others ‘considered it an almost diabolical institution that spoiled the judicature and subverted the gravity of criminal proceedings’.Footnote 44 While many lawyers practicing in Hungary considered jurors to be incompetent, Balogh takes a more moderate stance. On the one hand, his report matter-of-factly describes the outcomes of the two jury trials and their review by the Hungarian Royal Curia, indicating the importance of those procedures to the legitimacy of Hungary’s judicial system. On the other hand, it brings to light their contradictory findings, the dissenting opinions they produced and, less explicitly, the inconclusiveness of their sentences and recommendations.
In a case where there was no dispute about the identity of the perpetrators, one of the most important questions that the jury had to answer was the nature of the crime that had been committed: was it intentional homicide or murder? This was a distinction specific to criminal law in Hungary. Unlike in Austria, where killing someone intentionally was considered murder and lack of premeditation was acknowledged only as a mitigating circumstance, Hungarian law distinguished between killing that was both premeditated and intentional (‘murder’, gyilkosság, Mord) and killing that was intentional but lacked premeditation (‘intentional homicide’, szándékos emberölés, vorsätzliche Tötung). In Hungary, only the former was a capital offence.Footnote 45 As a result, Hungary imposed death sentences far less frequently than other European states, including Austria.Footnote 46 Although the difference between murder and intentional homicide was the difference between a death sentence and a prison term, the grounds for distinguishing between the two were subjective. The critical question was ‘the perpetrator’s state of mind’ and specifically the length of time during which the killing was contemplated.Footnote 47
In describing the first jury’s deliberations, Balogh’s report focuses not on what was most convincing to them, but rather on what was most convincing to him. At the first trial, Nick and Kóbori were both convicted of intentional homicide and sentenced to life in prison. This verdict implies that the jury believed the defendants’ claims that they had never discussed a murder before 8 January, that their discussions that day focused on robbery and that their aims were relatively vague. Balogh’s description of the first trial, however, includes multiple statements and quotations that suggested ‘the drafting of a plan’, that is, premeditation as well as intent.Footnote 48 On the third day after Kóbori began working for Turcsán, she and the maid helped Turcsán dress for the theatre. Balogh wrote that Kóbori ‘was visibly extremely surprised’ by Turcsán’s ‘expensive jewellery’ and afterward said to the maid that Turcsán ‘wouldn’t find a good end, because someone would murder her because of her many jewels and valuables’.Footnote 49 On the day before the murder, Kóbori testified, Nick had complained about his lack of suitable employment. The sight of a coal man carrying his heavy load had redoubled his anger and resentment. When the coal man complained that his work was so difficult and his pay so low that ‘it hardly surprised [him] that so many people rob and murder’, Nick had allegedly responded that ‘I would really like to break in here [into Turcsán’s apartment] and to rob, today I would especially like to do that’.Footnote 50 These details make the first jury’s verdict, intentional homicide but not murder, surprising. They foreshadow a more sinister interpretation of Nick and Kóbori’s intentions that would prevail after the first trial was concluded. For reasons that Balogh does not specify, the first verdict was rejected by the curia on technical grounds.Footnote 51 Only with the second trial, held on 26 and 27 November 1914, did this become a capital case.
Unlike in the first trial, the second jury found enough evidence of premeditation to demand a murder conviction for both defendants, although the question of their relative responsibility remained contentious. Murder trials in Hungary commonly involved multiple defendants. Often only one of the defendants would have laid hands on the victim; co-defendants who ‘instigated’ a murder, however, were considered guilty of a capital crime even if they played no part in its physical execution.Footnote 52 There was no disagreement that Nick had strangled Turcsán, whereas Kóbori was either out of the apartment or witnessed the murder without physical involvement in it. But who was more responsible for Turcsán’s death? In the second trial, the jury concluded that only Kóbori, the true mastermind behind the killing, was guilty of the more serious crime of murder. Nick was convicted only of intentional homicide. As a result, Nick was again sentenced to life in prison, but Kóbori was sentenced to death.Footnote 53
Balogh’s description of the second trial emphasised one point in particular: that Kóbori had dramatically changed her testimony. She now denied ever having spoken to Nick about killing Turcsán and claimed that she had tried to dissuade him from robbery: ‘I told him that he should go and find work’.Footnote 54 Nick, she asserted, had killed Turcsán only when she had stepped out for cigarettes. Kóbori’s account of these events persuaded no one. That Balogh chose to highlight Kóbori’s sudden about-face and contrast it with the constancy of Nick reveals that, in weighing the question of clemency, what mattered to him was less the facts of the case than the character and comportment of the defendants, which could be used to ascertain their intentions, reliability, and culpability.Footnote 55
The Hungarian Royal Curia
At the subsequent hearing, held in camera after the pronouncement of the Hungarian Royal Curia’s verdict, the representative of the Crown Prosecutor’s Office stated that nothing – neither their character, nor their motive, nor even the circumstances of the crime – could be found to justify recommending a pardon for the accused.Footnote 56
Up until this point, Balogh’s report had reconstructed events that would have been familiar to anyone who had followed the case in the newspapers. In its last dozen pages, however, it carefully reconstructed and critically assessed what had happened after the jury had reached its verdict. Either party, the prosecution or the defence, could file an appeal to reject the verdict with the Hungarian Royal Curia, which acted as an appellate and supervisory court. Whenever death sentences were imposed, Hungarian law required multiple additional hearings to consider potential clemency recommendations. Making the case for or against clemency was required of the lower court, the curia and the justice minister himself even if the defendant did not file a clemency petition.Footnote 57 Since these deliberations took place after the verdict and out of the public eye, they were not reported in the press. Balogh’s report, therefore, offers a rare view into this part of the judicial process and reveals an unusually high degree of internal disagreement.Footnote 58
In cases where the curia confirmed the jury’s verdict and mirrored the lower court’s sentencing recommendations, the process could reinforce the integrity of the original trial and the authority of the jury. In this case, however, disagreement only heightened the sense of indecision and uncertainty. The curia rejected the first (May 1914) trial verdict (both defendants guilty of intentional homicide) on technical grounds. The jury in the second (November 1914) trial looked at the same evidence and produced a different verdict (one defendant guilty of murder, the other of intentional homicide). The lower court’s sentencing recommendations for Kóbori, which were discussed immediately following the November trial, were not unanimous – the majority recommended against mercy, calling Kóbori ‘degenerate and cynical’ while one lone voice found it peculiar that she should receive a more severe penalty than the man who actually carried out the killing.Footnote 59 These recommendations, along with appeals to amend the verdict from both the prosecution and the defence, then proceeded to the curia. In its position as appellate court, the curia rejected the defendants’ pleas to be acquitted but accepted the prosecutor’s appeal requesting that Nick be convicted of murder rather than intentional homicide. In April 1915, the curia changed Nick’s conviction and sentenced him too to death.
Balogh did not hide the intensity of the disagreement within the curia. Whereas one member described Nick as a ‘work-shy idler, who led a dissolute life and for the most part lived on money he had obtained from his lover’, another pointed to his lack of a previous criminal record and affirmed that Nick was ‘under the influence of Rosa Kóbori, and was only, so to speak, her blind tool’.Footnote 60 Members of the curia were equally divided on Kóbori’s character and on the possibility of her eventual rehabilitation. By committing a crime against her employer, Kóbori had violated a moral obligation that grew from the loyalty a servant owed her employer, a bond succinctly expressed in the German word Diensttreue. To the representative of the prosecution, Kóbori was simply a ‘depraved, immoral woman who no longer has any prospect of improvement’. In contrast, the second president of the curia offered a different perspective. As a woman, he argued, Kóbori had difficulty resisting the allure of the ‘glittering jewels’ and rich furnishings that surrounded her in Turcsán’s apartment. He felt that ‘her improvement could be hoped for’, presumably once she had been placed in a different environment. In the end, Balogh reported, two members of the curia voted for two executions, one for one execution (Kóbori’s) and one for zero executions. The curia’s conclusions were anything but conclusive; it remained for the justice minister himself to weigh in.
Balogh subtly steered the monarch through an assessment of the characters of the two defendants. The focus on ‘personalities’ even over ‘crimes’ was typical of the machinery of justice across Europe in the early twentieth century; in France, James Donovan has identified a ‘move away from a criminal justice system meant to try the crime to one that tried the criminal’.Footnote 61 In Balogh’s telling, the power dynamic between Nick and Kóbori was at the heart of the case. Both prosecutors and newspapers had characterised Nick as a ‘wretched slave’ to Kóbori, who was depicted as smarter, slyer and more socially ambitious.Footnote 62 This perspective is subtly present in Balogh’s report. Moreover, although her initial behaviour had stood out for being cold (she did not flinch upon viewing Turcsán’s dead body), her behaviour during the trials was described as overwrought. She ‘wept’, she ‘sobbed’, she contradicted herself.Footnote 63 Balogh included Kóbori’s testimony that she had ‘begged and pleaded’ Nick not to do anything or she would ‘throw herself out the window’; that she had asked Nick to think of her ‘mother and siblings’ and ‘not to harm’ her employer; that she had claimed to ‘fear him more than the law’.Footnote 64 Echoing stereotypes of feminine weakness, his report took seriously Kóbori’s claims to be the subordinate member of their relationship and the victim of Nick’s insincere promises to marry her.
The era’s social and gender norms, and the extent to which Nick and Kóbori violated them, shaped how the defendants had been viewed from the start. Balogh showed how Nick had described a relationship that turned the expected power dynamic between a man and a woman on its head. Describing the events leading up to the murder, Nick admitted that Kóbori had ‘begged and pleaded’, but for him to do as she demanded and kill Turcsán – not to spare Turcsán’s life, as she had claimed.Footnote 65 In explaining the curia’s sentencing recommendations, Balogh noted that Kóbori worked while Nick was unemployed, that he was her financial dependent and, in the words of the prosecution’s representative in the curia, her ‘blind tool’.Footnote 66 Similarly, Kóbori had accused Nick of cowardice and unmanliness if he refused to commit the murder, further emphasising her dominant role in their relationship.
In summarising and analysing this phase of the judicial process, Balogh had the task of assuring the emperor that the correct verdict had been reached and that clemency was called for, even while he truthfully and directly addressed the myriad points of disagreement that had emerged. Questions about relative responsibility, about mitigating and exacerbating factors, about relationships, power dynamics and motive were beyond the purview of the jury but had to be addressed by the curia. There was no way to hide the fact that reasonable men could look at the same evidence and disagree. The relative responsibility of the two defendants – and the degree to which Kóbori should be punished as the mastermind of the murder – remained a central issue.
The Hungarian Minister of Justice
Although, for my part, I cannot object to the decision that Rosa Kóbori was the instigator and Gustav Nick the perpetrator, I nevertheless cannot . . . set aside my own opinion, that the question of in whose head the thought of the crime first arose has not been established beyond reasonable doubt and indeed cannot be established with complete peace of mind.Footnote 67
Although it built upon the twenty-eight proceeding pages describing the investigation, the trials and the curial deliberations, Balogh’s opinion stood apart. It was distinguished by a section break in the typescript as well as a special salutation, ‘Your Most Gracious Majesty!’ that visually suggested the minister pausing and taking a deep breath before directly addressing the monarch.Footnote 68 In Balogh’s final assessment, the facts were enough to identify Nick and Kóbori as responsible for Turcsán’s death and determine that her killing was premeditated. But they left many questions open, and these were critical for determining the nature of the crime as well as the sentence. Only through his own judicious weighing of all the evidence and opinions could a balanced response be recommended.
Eugen Balogh (1864–1953) was one of Hungary’s leading jurists. Before becoming justice minister in 1913, he had served as a judge, undersecretary of state and university professor. Balogh played a leading role in the 1900 revision of Hungarian criminal procedure, which introduced the supervisory role of the Hungarian Minister of Justice and gave him the responsibility of providing the monarch with all the information and advice that a career’s worth of legal training could provide.Footnote 69 Crucially, Balogh was, in the words of a former student, ‘a deadly enemy of the death penalty’.Footnote 70 In a 1909 article in Hungary’s leading legal journal, Balogh praised the work of earlier generations and of colleagues who had fought against capital punishment. The conclusion to be drawn was obvious: ‘The Italian penal code of 1889 dispensed with the death penalty. Hungary has no need for it either’.Footnote 71 In other capital cases that came before him as justice minister, Balogh had upheld the finding of the Hungarian Royal Curia, expressing his support in a short paragraph or two composed of formulaic phrases: ‘For my part, I endorse the opinion of the majority of the Crown Prosecutor’s Office and the Hungarian Royal Curia for the reasons given above’.Footnote 72 In the Turcsán murder, however, Balogh deliberately positioned himself above the curia, juries and judges who had handled the case and laid out his own reasoning to the ruler.
The final seven pages of Balogh’s report, then, had a lot of work to do. He had to resolve unanswered questions about what exactly happened in Turcsán’s apartment. He had to determine whether the crime constituted premeditated murder or intentional homicide – and assess the exact distribution of legal and moral responsibility for that crime between the two defendants. This required understanding the relative weight of planning or ‘instigating’ a crime and of actually carrying it out, understanding the balance of power between two lovers and evaluating the credibility of competing and contradictory claims about character, actions and intent. To that end, Balogh referred back to the defendants’ confessions, direct testimony, hearsay and reported speech as well as to numerous details about the material circumstances in Turcsán’s apartment.
Ultimately, it would not be the facts of the case that could persuade the monarch whether or not executions were required, but rather a sensitive interpretation of the reliability of the two defendants. Balogh acknowledged that the trial court had good reason to find Nick’s testimony more trustworthy than Kóbori’s: he had stood by his initial testimony, whereas she had ‘fallen from one lie into another and lost all credibility’.Footnote 73 Nevertheless, Balogh did not share that assessment. Nick was a ‘slave’, he argued, not to Kóbori, as the press had claimed, but ‘to his passion for playing cards’ and was thus desperate for ‘money at any price’.Footnote 74 Kóbori did not have the power to persuade him to give up gambling and find solid work, let alone murder someone at her behest. ‘From these facts’, he continued, ‘one can correctly conclude that Rosa Kóbori to a large degree stood under Gustav Nick’s influence’.Footnote 75 The only factor that made Kóbori particularly guilty was her failure to respect the ‘loyalty of a servant’. Here, too, Balogh blamed the context in which Kóbori found herself as much as her underlying character. ‘Emilia Turcsán was a kept woman’, he noted, again referencing her earlier career as a prostitute. Knowledge of Turcsán’s past led Kóbori to disdain her employer instead of holding her in esteem. Balogh confidently reconstructed Kóbori’s emotional state: ‘When, with her weak ethical feeling, she saw the great difference between her own poverty and the wealth of her employer, the extravagant furnishings, the expensive jewels, there awoke in her, in the absence of moral discipline, first envy and then hatred, which passions unleashed in her this serious crime.’Footnote 76 In the end, only the ‘misfortune’ of meeting Turcsán had created the opportunity for Kóbori to become a criminal.
Although he did not compare them explicitly, Balogh knew that the two women came from similar backgrounds: provincial girls, intelligent, independent, eager to find their way in the big city and enjoy freedom from their parents. They had both worked in restaurants and public spaces where women were vulnerable to suspicions of sexual impropriety, leading, in some cases, to women being forced to register as prostitutes simply because their employment in the hospitality industry made them seem suspect to the police.Footnote 77 Balogh, who had earlier emphasised Turcsán’s ‘jewels and toilette’, suggested that the effects of her glamorous appearance had corrupted the otherwise honest Kóbori. Absent these temptations, Balogh reasoned, Kóbori might never have broken any laws at all: ‘Rosa Kóbori is neither such a predisposed, generally dangerous, or stubborn criminal as to eliminate any hope of rehabilitation.’Footnote 78 Here he diverged from the jury and members of the curia who considered Kóbori more culpable than her co-defendant. In taking this position, Balogh dispensed with powerful stereotypes of female servants that had defined Kóbori from the outset.
The material details that Balogh includes in his report reflect a kind of legal thinking that takes socio-economic factors seriously and both perceives and is sympathetic to the heavy burdens of poverty as forcing otherwise decent people to make devastating decisions. This emphasis on environmental factors was consistent with arguments made in his 1908 treatise, Poverty and Crime.Footnote 79 In it Balogh highlighted factors that could lead people to criminal acts. He suggested that improving the social and economic conditions of the working classes could reduce the temptation and necessity of crime.Footnote 80 Yet Balogh also argued that passions (hatred, love, resentment, jealousy and fear) could have an even more powerful influence on people than their material circumstances and that actions taken under their influence were not truly ‘voluntary’.Footnote 81 This logic explains what Balogh means when he offers as a mitigating factor for Kóbori that envy and hatred – that is, passions – were as important in driving her towards the crime as ‘greed’.
Balogh’s report to Franz Joseph was not a legal treatise, nor was its purpose to explicate the underlying causes of criminality. Rather, Balogh used its final pages to reveal new sides to his by now familiar characters and to cast them in new roles in the murder of Turcsán. As Carolyn Strange has observed, authors of reports like these ‘occupied a critical position as an arbiter of truth’, in which ‘summary report-writing was a means through which many voices, often in opposition, were reduced to one voice in a coherent case narrative’.Footnote 82 Here the lone voice was Balogh’s and the narrative had but one conclusion: clemency.
The Monarch
In due consideration of a report from My Hungarian Minister of Justice, I pardon Rosa Kóbori and Gustav Nick of the death sentence imposed on them for the crimes of murder and robbery and substitute for the same the sentence of life in prison.Footnote 83
The final decision about Kóbori and Nick’s fates rested with the monarch, a man who, especially as he aged, could claim to have greater experience than anyone on his staff. Franz Joseph’s adjutant would recall that he ‘thought of everything, without gathering suggestions or requests from those around him, and precisely the smallest details were clearly reflected in his mind, because [to do so] lay in his rich experience, which far surpassed that of all his counsellors and on which he never failed to rely’.Footnote 84 The monarch’s God-given grace, not to mention his (by 1915) sixty-seven years’ experience of reading capital cases, was unparalleled anywhere in the legal offices of the empire. Even in the absence of such age and experience, however, the monarch’s claim to power over life and death was a core element of his sovereignty. And it left him solely responsible for what Austin Sarat and Karl Shoemaker describe as ‘the agonizing decision whether a human being “deserves” death for his or her crimes’.Footnote 85
In the case of Kóbori and Nick, Franz Joseph appended his signature to his formulaic decision on 18 March, at his desk in the Hofburg in Vienna’s first district. The pardon was announced to the defendants in a Budapest court on Wednesday, 7 April 1915. Addressing the defendants, the presiding judge said: ‘Thank the Almighty that you have escaped the terrible penalty that the Supreme Court had imposed on you both. The king’s mercy has made your punishment even milder than was foreseen by the lower court’s verdict. Take care that through honest labour and moral betterment you prove yourselves worthy of this act of mercy.’Footnote 86 The monarch’s decision was final, it was explained to no one, justified through no commentary. His adjutant, Albert von Margutti, saw in this complete absence of explanation or justification a clarity of purpose: ‘In addition, every directive from the monarch was clear and precise in every detail; I cannot recall a single instance that any such [directive] required supplemental inquiries’.Footnote 87
The closest historians can get to knowing the basis for the ruler’s decision is to read the minister’s report – the final and only exposition of all the previously compiled elements that might affect the outcome. In this case, as in almost all others, the justice minister’s presentation proved convincing. In over 97 per cent of Hungarian capital cases between 1900 and 1918, the monarch accepted the justice minister’s recommendation (and in all but one of those did so without question). When Franz Joseph read Balogh’s report, it had been fifteen years since he had last overruled a Hungarian Minister of Justice on a capital case, one of only two instances we uncovered since the introduction of the Csemegi Codex in 1878.Footnote 88 In 1912, he had requested an oral presentation from the Hungarian Minister of Justice Ferenc Székely, implying a report that left questions unanswered. In every other case that had come before him in the twentieth century, the monarch had simply signed the document that the justice minister presented to him with no questions at all.
Conclusion
The thousands upon thousands of capital case files contained in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna allow a more penetrating answer to the questions of what a verdict means and how a trial ends than court records alone. Public coverage of trials across the Habsburg Monarchy routinely stopped at the moment of the verdict. In particularly sensational cases, such as this one, the decision to commute a sentence might also be covered; in contrast, executions, once approved, took place behind closed doors, out of the public eye.Footnote 89 Everything after the trial became what Ravit Reichman has called a ‘postscript’.Footnote 90
But a great deal happened between the moment when a person charged with a capital crime stood in a courtroom to hear their verdict and the moment they received final word about their fate. The files stored in Vienna offer a glimpse into the legal logic and moral reasoning that followed the dismissal of the jury from the courtroom. This is especially valuable because judicial records for the Habsburg Monarchy can be difficult to find or access. Where they still exist, they are spread out across multiple countries and cities, from Sarajevo to Lviv to Trieste. In many places, such as Innsbruck, they were long ago destroyed to make space for files deemed more important. In others, like Vienna, they were destroyed by fire or, in the case of Budapest, by wartime bombing. The unity of the former empire’s archives fractured with its dismemberment in 1918–19, implying a more discrete and diverse judicial system than was actually the case.
The document examined here can help us understand how death penalty cases were handled in the final years of the monarchy. Balogh’s aim was to lay out everything Franz Joseph needed to make a decision about sentences that had been the subject of extended debate and disagreement in the courts themselves. The monarch, who was presented with dozens of reports nearly every day of the year, was not to be bothered with extraneous information, but neither was he to be denied any necessary information. The report offered glimpses into the furnishings of a wealthy woman’s apartment, a servant’s favourite snacks and the hours one might reasonably expect a tobacconist to be open for business. But if such details did not relate directly to questions of guilt or innocence, why were they in these reports at all? We argue that they revealed an understanding of people’s material circumstances and everyday lives that itself justified the justice minister’s claim, on behalf of the entire judicial system, to be able to infer interior motives, to see through testimonies, confessions and missing evidence to determine who was truthful, who was deceitful, who could be rehabilitated and who was irrevocably lost.
This case also gives us the opportunity to watch – almost as if we were peering over his shoulder – the justice minister wrestle with the inner workings of two people whose lives could hardly be more different from his own. Carolyn Strange invites us to consider ‘how . . . information in the [capital] files [was] interpreted and manipulated by historical actors who wielded the power to spare or execute people sentenced to death’.Footnote 91 Balogh does this in part by using some of the same tools historians must wield, that is, by questioning the sources – not as inaccurate, but as the product of human reason and thus subject to interpretations that must themselves be questioned. Balogh drew on the information produced in earlier trials, including lower courts with popular juries. He showed respect for the importance of their reasoning and deliberations and thus encouraged confidence in the entire judicial system. Yet Balogh’s report also reflected his own independence from those earlier findings: he was, quite literally, not ‘bound’ by them.Footnote 92 In assessing the merits of arguments made earlier in the process, he drew on not only his legal training and experience but also narrative tropes that help make sense of how servants, lovers, gambling addicts and ambitious and independent provincial women think. The decision whether or not to grant clemency – unlike the verdict – relied not only on the question of what happened (there was no doubt that Nick and Kóbori planned and carried out Turcsán’s killing) but on why, on power relationships between the two defendants, on their motives and a hierarchy among them. When it came to these more subjective factors, Balogh proved himself to be a sympathetic reader as well as an authoritative author.
Balogh’s report recorded the importance of civic participation in an independent judicial process with jury trials and equal rights before the law, but it also justified the critical role of experts who could think in terms greater than any individual case. Unlike petitions on behalf of individual defendants – written by themselves, defence attorneys, family members or allies in their home communities – the justice minister’s report was not an advocacy document, and yet it argued a case. The ‘crafting [of] persuasive stories’ – so critical to the work of attorneys in capital cases, as Austin Sarat has argued – was no less essential in the report, even without a client to defend or a victim to avenge.Footnote 93 To be convincing without taking sides, the justice minister adopted a position of thinking on behalf of the state: in terms of not what the victim deserved or what the perpetrator deserved but rather what the state required. Was it necessary for someone to be executed? Did public safety in the present or the future require it? Did political or social stability or, in Balogh’s words, ‘the public interest from the perspective of the safety of society’, demand it?Footnote 94 For Balogh – as for the justice ministers before and after him – the answer was almost always no.
Even as the monarch’s pardons of Nick and Kóbori were being announced in 1915, the foundations of the legal system that supported it were crumbling.Footnote 95 During the First World War, many civil rights, including the right to trial by jury, were suspended, and the number of behaviours considered punishable by death rose sharply.Footnote 96 Ironically, where the military took jurisdiction over capital crimes, not only civilian courts but also the ministers and monarch were sidelined: the expedited process of accusation, trial, verdict and execution did not contain provisions for ministerial or imperial oversight. Although Franz Josef and his successor Karl continued to favour clemency in capital cases that arose through the civilian court system, thousands of people were executed on suspicion of desertion or treason after perfunctory military or emergency trials exempted from the ‘regular’ court system.Footnote 97
And yet, the work done in the early twentieth century had left a mark. In the decades leading up to the First World War, capital punishment had quietly changed from a common to an exceptional practice in Europe. The number of capital cases and executions steadily declined, contributing in the long run to the explicit bans on the death penalty that swept across Europe after the Second World War.Footnote 98 That many European states had already become ‘functionally abolitionist’ half a century earlier had multiple causes, including judicial reforms, lenient juries, shifting public opinion and crusading journalists. Much of this can be seen if one examines the public record. Only by going into the archives and ‘beyond the verdict’, however, can one see how officials like Balogh worked to gain clemency for the convicted even in the most difficult cases. His report shows the logic behind negating the importance of capital punishment even while doubling down on the legitimacy of the state and its system of justice.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for numerous suggestions that improved this article as well as Zebulon Erdos, Aimee Genell, Walter Johnson, Pieter Judson, Elizabeth Marlowe, Roland Perényi, Dominique Reill, Tara Zahra, Emily Greble and the participants in the Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar ‘Women and Law on the Margins of Europe’, Gerhard Gonsa at the Austrian State Archive and the librarians of their respective institutions.
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