Story Crime-part 2

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Back to the story. So, like I said, you died—you were poisoned with cyanide. People now believe you were murdered by your lover, who is not the same man you wanted to marry. Your lover is a wealthy man, very well regarded in society.

After your father goes to the police and demands an inquiry, a lawsuit begins, with your lover as the prime suspect. So… was it really him? I know you don’t know who murdered you yet—but let’s see what he has to say.

Your lover, besides being wealthy, was a married man with two children—one of whom would later become famous. He says he met you in 1930, and that your brother-in-law helped arrange the meeting. For six months, the two of you were just flirting. You made him fall in love with you, but even so, it seemed you kept your old friendships with other men.

Like many men, he began to want to reshape you—to change you, to make you love what he loved, to turn you into a lady he could not only desire, but also admire. His influence wasn’t entirely bad: you started reading more, becoming more refined, more of a “lady.”

By 1934, your adventure was at its peak. Even so, you wanted to marry another man. You wanted someone free—you didn’t want to be just an affair. You met a man who was a clerk, maybe not the brightest, but someone accepted by your family as well, since he played bridge with them as the fourth player (I don’t know the game, but you probably do).

Anyway, he wasn’t a jealous man when it came to money. He agreed that you could still meet your lover, as long as he could provide money—for you, for your family, and even a little for him. Bad guy, this future husband of yours—he didn’t even come to your funeral. Honestly, you could haunt him. I know I would.

But let’s get back to your lover, now accused of your death.The lawsuit begins in 1936, on September 18th. The inquiry takes time and takes place in the Palace of Justice—which still stands today (maybe I’ll show you some pictures). I wonder—were you present at your own trial? If I had died and could become a ghost, I definitely would. I’d want to know who the hell killed me.

Let’s imagine you’re there. The lawyers involved are big names: Istrate Micescu, Paul Iliescu, Dimitrie Cioc, Emil Nicolau, and Oswald Dunăreanu. More than 150 witnesses are heard—that’s a lot. For over 12 days, the trial is the biggest event in town. The courtroom is packed with people who just want to see what happens.

The prosecution claims your lover felt abandoned. After everything he did for you—buying you an apartment, jewelry, giving you money—you still wanted to marry another man. Do you believe that after five years of loving you, he could become so furious that he would poison you? He was married, with two children—did that count for nothing? He was highly respected in society—would he really throw all that away?

He might still have loved you, even if you were going to marry, especially since your future husband seemed to love money more than you, or at least that’s how it looked. Still, this was the picture the prosecution painted.

Your father was brought in as a witness. He didn’t seem very affected by your death. He said your lover had promised to marry you, that he was jealous, and that although at first he didn’t think your lover was capable of killing you, after thinking more about his character, he changed his mind.

Your mother and sister were also heard, but they didn’t seem to be on your level, and the public didn’t react well to them. Next came your brother-in-law, a lawyer. He said that, considering the situation and your lover’s character, it was likely he did it.

Of course, your future husband was there too. He said he loved you. He didn’t know whether you loved him, but he still wanted to marry you.

The defense argued that your lover was not guilty, since the prosecution couldn’t prove it. They also said that you had eaten bitter almonds that night, and that the substance found could have come from that—but the prosecution didn’t take this into account.

In the end, your lover was found not guilty. Even so, as you can imagine, his reputation suffered damage.

But you’re still wondering: who killed you?

You’ll never guess.

The killer is known—but it took 35 years, and the truth came out in the most unexpected way. The killer felt remorse and confessed while dying. Yes, you heard that right.

In the 1970s, a priest revealed what he had heard as a deathbed confession, after that person passed away. It turns out it was the maid who put poison in your candies—jealous of your beauty, or something like that.

Almost like in so many crime stories where “the butler did it”…

Here, it was the maid.

Story crime

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On my search for a crime to fit my story, I found another interesting one. Again, it is not really fitting my story, but it is still interesting.

So imagine we are in 1935. You are a beautiful lady, the first one to win the title of Miss Romania, plus some other beauty contests in Germany. You would like to be an actress. Your father is a Communist activist, quite prominent at that time. Because of your beauty, every door opens for you and you move in high circles. You even have an affair with Liviu Ciulei, who at that time was a prominent engineer.

It is Christmas Eve, at the fatal hour of 23:00. Your sister comes to visit you with your friend. You are happy and you talk about the man who will soon become your husband, Cuza Hotta, with whom you had gone to the train station because he did not want you to spend a night alone on a train. That is why you returned to Bucharest in the end.

Out of the blue, your face starts to look different. You tell them you feel sick. Your sister brings you a glass of water, but you feel even worse. Your sister gets alarmed and sends your friend to her husband for help. Her husband calls several doctors, but none of them is at home. So he takes a car to bring an ambulance or a doctor, but unfortunately, when he returns, you are already dead.

Everyone is in shock: society, your family. You were very young, only 27 years old. But what was the reason for your sudden death? A classic murder weapon: potassium cyanide.

Your father, who at that time was financially supported by you, denounces your lover, claiming that he killed you. He used to be your lover, but there was no fight, no clear reason to kill you. Could it have been a crime of passion, even though you were about to marry?

The question was: crime, accident, or suicide? You were taking laxatives every night. The question then became: how did the poison get into your body? This poison is known to provoke lesions in the mouth and from the beginning to the end of the stomach. But the medical report did not show such lesions. In the report, it was evidenced that the substance from the laxative was present in the stomach, so either you took the poison with the pill or with something else.

Nobody believed you had reasons to kill yourself. You were young, beautiful, with a good future ahead. Plus, the way you acted on your last night, even taking your laxative pill, did not fit the suicide story. So they started to think that you took the poison by mistake, by accident, with your pill — or, better said, inside your pill. Maybe when the pill was made, something went wrong.

They searched how the casing of the pill was made. They figured out that just one pill could not be poisonous, so the accident theory was kind of ruled out. Crime was all that remained. But why did your father think your lover killed you?

Well, yes, it was said that he did visit your brother-in-law to find out if you really wanted to marry that man. There, it seems he found out that you indeed would marry him. Then it was supposed that he went to a metal factory, which he owned, and got the poison from one of its sections. After that, when he came to your sister’s place, he was violent, and later he went to the bathroom, where he could have poisoned your pills (which were more like powder pills).

When he was asked about that visit, he said he went to tell her what he thought about her, and in another declaration, he said he went to give her a Christmas present.

Anyway, a lawsuit started. How it ended — I will tell you tomorrow.

Hmm… I hope this story made you curious enough to want more.

Winter story-2

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Well, like I told you, I will tell you more about this story, even if it doesn’t fully fit the story from my dream. Last time I mentioned that there were two men who could have committed the crime, a crime that filled the newspapers at that time, not only because the victim was a prominent woman, but also because it happened on a famous train, perhaps.

Let’s see how the investigation went. As you can imagine, they started by researching the place of the murder and asking questions to the people who were on the train. The train conductor said he had seen a man around 25 years old, with brown hair, smoking in the aisle. He remembered that this young man had a ticket for a journey toward Hegyeshalom, on the Austrian–Hungarian border, and Buchs, on the Swiss border. So this guy became a suspect, as you can imagine.

He fit the description of a prominent Romanian guy who used to take possession of women’s belongings while they were traveling by train. He had an impressive rap sheet.

The investigation continued, and a few days later they found her hand luggage in a room in Basel. Inside those bags, however, there was no trace of her fur coat or her jewelry. At first, the police suspected the Romanian man, Teodorescu, who was known for robbing women on trains. But he was found at his parents’ house, far from the scene, like I already told you.

To gather more information, they did what you can always do: follow the goods. So they did. The investigation then shifted toward locating the missing items. What could they do? They started to look for places where the goods could be sold or transformed into money, so pawn shops were searched, places where such things might have been sold or hidden.

Well, they didn’t find much information there. But unexpectedly, the fur coat appeared in a completely different setting: during church mass in Zurich. Detective Karl Nievergelt recognized it on Johanna Wunderlich, the owner of a boarding house. It almost seemed that God had made a miracle to ease the road to finding the killer.She claimed she had received the coat from a Hungarian student boarder, Karl Strasser, 23 years old, the son of a bank teller.

There were now two suspects: the Romanian man with a long criminal record, and the student, Strasser. From the information I found, it seems that both did it, but the focus was more on the guy who was brought to justice. Even so, from what I found, both had thrown her out of the train. She was still alive when she fell, but she died because of the wounds from the impact. Teodorescu was never captured, and the case was judged without him.

Witnesses came from different countries. From Romania, there was an odd witness, more quiet. The witness was the wagon itself. The wagon in which the crime happened was brought to Leoben so the crime could be reconstructed in front of the court and the jurors. They showed the couch and the window from which she was pushed out. The time of the murder was established as 1:42 in the night of September 26–27.

The killer who was brought to justice, the student,was a small guy, looking even smaller between the big guards, around 1.80 meters. He looked like a regular guy, not someone who would stand out by his looks. More like a public worker from that time, not someone you would think could push a person and kill. He targeted Maria Farcașeanu and waited until she climbed on her seat to reach her luggage. Then he did it.

He seemed to be a man of culture. During the trial, he tried to turn it into a kind of conference, talking about the decadence of his time. Unfortunately for him, this worked against him. The prosecutor used the fact that he was educated to make his situation even worse because an educated man should have known better. The Austrian court sentenced him to death. A request for pardon was made, but it was not approved. Later, the sentence was transformed into life in prison. In the end, two lives were destroyed: the life of the woman, an intelligent businesswoman, and the life of the killer, who destroyed his own life through his deed

Winter story

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Let me tell you more about my inquiry. You already know my fascination with old, haunted houses. As you can imagine, I’ve been searching,carefully, patiently for something that feels right.

At first, I thought the answer might lie in well-known crimes from the 19th century. Visiting old houses is enjoyable, of course, but so far it has led nowhere. Without a story, a trace of darkness, a reason, a house is just a building. The only other option would be to wander through Bucharest aimlessly, hoping that chance alone would lead me to the house. But that requires a kind of luck I don’t possess. And if I did, the story would be far too simple. Maybe too easy… don’t you think?

So I began where everyone begins: with research. Hours spent searching the internet, looking for crimes that might fit, events that left something unresolved behind them. I was certain I would find more than enough material.

I was wrong.

What I believed would be an easy task turned out to be frustratingly difficult. There is surprisingly little information available, as if time itself had chosen to erase certain things. Still, during those first searches, I came across a story. It wasn’t what I had imagined, and it didn’t lead me to a house, but it lingered in my mind.

It was a crime that took place on the Orient Express.
Not Agatha Christie’s story, although it is said her novel may have been inspired by this very event.

The crime happened in 1935. The victim was a Romanian businesswoman, found outside the train, at the edge of an embankment. Her body was discovered by a brakeman from a freight train, lying in a ditch. She was barefoot. There was a deep wound near her right eye, evidence of a struggle. In her hand, she held strands of hair, hair that did not belong to her.

Along the railway, scattered over several kilometers, were her belongings: her shoes, an embroidered scarf, a hat, and a handbag containing her identification papers—Maria Fărcășeanu and her train ticket. Any suggestion of suicide was quickly dismissed. Violence was undeniable.

The autopsy revealed something even more unsettling: she was still alive when she was thrown from the train. Robbery was believed to be the motive. The last train known to have passed through that area was the Orient Express, traveling the route Istanbul–Bucharest–Paris. And so, the investigation began.

They soon discovered that Maria had been carrying considerable wealth: expensive jewelry, a diamond wristwatch, pearls, gold pieces, and a luxurious fur coat. Sometimes, it seems, elegance can be dangerous when it draws the wrong attention.

She was an extraordinary woman,a business owner, the founder of an art school, prominent in her field, officially recognized by the Ministry for her work. She owned the first artisanal shop in the country and exhibited in Paris. A pioneer. A wife. A mother. Beautiful. Independent.

And yet, her life ended violently, in the darkness between stations.

Her death caused a sensation at the time, widely discussed in both the Romanian and Austrian press, made even more shocking by the setting,a train already surrounded by legend. The investigation ultimately concluded that two men had thrown her from the moving train.

But this story doesn’t end here.
It feels like a door only slightly opened.

I’ll tell you more tomorrow.