When the Dead aren't Dead Yet

Back in the day, there was a Hangman’s Dynasty in Hungary.

They were a family of grim reapers who were shunned and feared by all. Shopkeepers let them take whatever they pleased, as no one wanted to do business with a man who slipped a noose around another man’s neck for a living. Just take the meat, take the bread. You can have the shoes, the gloves, what have you. Just be gone, please. Their children had no playmates. And God help you if your best bet for a husband was a hangman.

France had a notorious hangman’s dynasty too, as did England. And as in those countries, Hungary’s executions were formal affairs for witnesses. Long gowns for the ladies, and top hats and tails for the men.

The Angel Makers’ hangman was Antal Kazarek, a fourth generation executioner who was called in from Budapest with his two henchmen to perform the hanging of Maria Kardos for the killing her husband and son.

Maria was the first woman to be hanged in Hungary in more than eighty years.

A generation earlier, Antal’s father had presided over just as notorious a case as Maria’s, although for different reasons. The convicted man he had hanged had been declared dead, taken down from the rope and placed in a horse-drawn cart for a short trip to the burial. The cart rattled and clattered on pitted, cobblestone roads and all the bumping and jostling got the dead man’s heart pumping again.

Antal Sr. sent a frantic telegram to both Emperor Franz Joseph and the justice minister: What do we do? Can we execute someone twice for the same crime?

The answer came back from Budapest: No. If the hanged man survived, he would have to be set free. He died in the hospital five days later.