Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed is remembered by history as the most prolific female serial killer and a real piece of work.
She was an extremely rich noblewoman from 16th century Hungary who was found guilty of torturing and murdering hundreds(?) of girls and young women. In the court people said they witnessed (among other things) her flaying girls alive, mutilating their hands and genitals and creating special torture chambers. Supposedly she did not just do this to punish the girls (most of whom were her servants or students), but because she was into it.
The trial was super damning, but it was held by The King of Hungary who was significantly in debt to Bathory. All Bathory's servants were forced to testify against her and the only servant who didn't testify against her "had her eyes gouged out and her breasts removed before being burned at the stake." After Bathory was found guilty all the debts the King owed her were cancelled.
That doesn't seem very impartial. Is it possible the whole thing was fabricated or greatly exaggerated? Why do historians trust the trial evidence?
She was a protestant countess I believe in a very Catholic kingdom, that alone might have been incentive to remove her from any position of power.
I don't know how the mods of /r/AskHistorians feel about Ben Thompson or his blog but on his post about Bathory he concluded with
Of course, as a final note, it also bears mentioning that these stories about her could all be bullshit, and the downfall of Elizabeth Bathory could all just have been a wildly-elaborate conspiracy by the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty to discredit and shame the Protestant rulers of Transylvania. For example, that whole "bathing in human blood" story doesn't appear in history until some French dude wrote about it nearly 100 years after Elizabeth's death (it wasn't even mentioned at her trial), and a lot of the gore-intensive accusations made against her were only confessed under Spanish Inquisition-style torture. So who knows. I guess I'd argue that it doesn't matter – that Bathory's legacy is probably way more badass than any of the insane fucked-up shit she did during her actual life anyways.
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/bathory.html
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