A pastor stands in a Brussels pulpit and talks about God. Then he goes home and erases his own family.

Hungarian-born András Pándy fled after 1956, preached to fellow émigrés in Belgium, and told the world his wives and children had simply moved away — to Germany, to France, to South America. They never came back. When police asked where they were, he said it was up to justice to prove they were dead. When he was free, he promised, they would visit him.

They never did.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson traces how Pándy and his daughter Ágnes were convicted in the killings of six family members in Brussels between 1986 and 1990, how abuse and control inside the household preceded the disappearances, and how Pándy used Hungary itself as a stage set: a cottage, typed letters, even hired actors impersonating the missing. A man of the church. A shrinking family. A smile for the cameras.

Content warning: family murder, sexual abuse, and the destruction of remains.

In a quiet Hungarian village, elderly people started sleeping with the lights on. Someone was coming through the roof.

Between 1991 and 2004, Zoltán Ember murdered five people in Szentkirályszabadja—including his stepfather and his own brother. For the later killings he used a method he said he learned from the movies: a sliding noose that turned struggle into suffocation. He robbed the dead, left almost no witnesses, and later told interviewers he didn’t enjoy the killing. It just didn’t bother him.

Host Alexander Lawson traces Ember’s path from a violent childhood and a stack of early prison terms to the day he walked out of jail and committed his first murder—then the years of fear that followed, the DNA that finally stopped him, and the life sentence that ended in a prison cell in Szeged.

A story of opportunism, cruelty, and a small community that learned to dread the night.

September 2001, Szeged. A homeless man knocks on an old woman’s door, claims to be her son, and walks out with her money. Four days later her real son finds the body. That was only the first killing.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of Tibor Kruchió: a drifter who, with Lajos Kocsis, murdered four people in six weeks — including their own accomplice, dumped in a well — and once shot a widow because her wallet held only three thousand forints.

A botched gas-station robbery. A bathrobe belt. Sedatives and a rug. A pub in Kiskundorozsma. Life without parole. And a sentence people thought cancer would shorten — until it didn’t.

No manifesto. No master plan. Just desperation, a cheap gun, and how little it took.

A woman withdraws 300,000 forints for a phone deal and drives toward an isolated farm outside Balástya. She never comes back. Between 1998 and 2001, Zoltán Szabó — later known as the Balástya Monster — lured women across Hungary’s Great Plain with the promise of work, friendship, or easy money. Host Alexander Lawson traces the murders, the shallow graves fifty metres from the farmhouse, the arrest in March 2002, the life sentence without parole, and the night in 2016 when Szabó died in Szeged’s Csillag Prison. Four families never got answers they could live with. The soil did.

In the winter of 1610, men opened a castle in the Kingdom of Hungary and found girls who were still alive — and girls who were not. The owner was Countess Erzsébet Báthory, one of the most powerful women in the realm. History would call her the Blood Countess. The file never quite settled whether she was a killer, a myth, or a problem the crown needed gone.

Alexander Lawson follows the raid on Čachtice, the tortured confessions of her servants, the hearsay of six hundred and fifty names, and the blood-bath legend that does not appear in the original papers. What can be sworn in 1611, and what was written later to make a monster?

A True Crime Podcast.

In May 1916, a landlord outside Budapest opens a metal drum he thinks is full of petrol. Inside is a woman, strangled and preserved in wood alcohol. Then another drum. Then another. By the time police finish counting, twenty-four bodies lie on one tinsmith’s property — and the man who made the barrels has already vanished into the First World War.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Béla Kiss, the so-called Vampire of Cinkota: lonely-hearts ads in Budapest papers, stolen savings, a locked room of letters, and a yard of sealed drums explained away as a wartime fuel reserve. Who the victims were. How the killings worked. Why the army listed him dead in Serbia. And why no courtroom ever saw him alive.

A true crime episode about charm as a weapon, disappearance as a strategy, and the women who answered an advertisement because they wanted a life.

Just after 3:40 a.m. on 18 September 1965, a white Simca full of stolen goods is pulled over on Amager. Denmark’s police are still largely unarmed. Ten minutes later, four young officers are dead. Fifteen shots. Twelve hits.

Palle Sørensen was a career burglar who did not want another prison sentence. What he did that night ended four lives — Gert Søndergaard Harkjær, Henning Skov Hansen, Elmer Gert Jeppesen, and Aksel Dybdahl Andersen — and forced Denmark to arm its police.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the crime, the man, the sentence that lasted more than 32 years, and why this case still sits in Danish police history as the night the force lost its innocence.

A True Crime Podcast. We name the dead.

On 2 September 1920, Karoline Aagesen stood in a Copenhagen stairwell and demanded her baby back. The woman she had paid would not open the door. In the stove, police found bone.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye — Englemagersken, the Angel Maker — Denmark’s most prolific known serial killer. Between 1916 and 1920 she took infants from unmarried mothers who answered newspaper ads, then made sure those children disappeared. She confessed to sixteen murders. Østre Landsret convicted her of nine. In March 1921 she was sentenced to death; King Christian X commuted it to life. She died in prison in 1929.

This episode is about the ads, the money, the mothers who thought they were buying a future, and the 1923 law that came too late for the children already gone.

On 9 March 2019, a young man left a Copenhagen cinema after watching Captain Marvel. He had paid with a dead woman’s bank card.

In four weeks, three pensioners died in the same red-brick block on Vangehusvej in Østerbro. Two were strangled. One was cremated before police treated the death as suspicious. The money on their cards went to pizza, taxis, a strip club — and a movie ticket.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of James Schmidt, born Lual Yai Fayin Lual: the juvenile convictions, the Supreme Court decision that cut an indefinite sentence to seven years, the release, and the life term that followed when Østre Landsret convicted him of all three murders.

The victims had names. Eva Hoffmeister. Peter Jensen Olsen. Inez Hasselblad. This episode is about what happened after the keys were already in the building.

On August 10, 2017, journalist Kim Wall boarded Peter Madsen’s homemade submarine in Copenhagen harbor for an interview. By morning, Madsen had been pulled from the water. The Nautilus was sinking. Wall was gone. Host Alexander Lawson traces the rise of Denmark’s self-taught submarine builder, the last hours of a reporter days from moving to Beijing, the shifting stories Madsen told police, and the trial that ended in a rare Danish life sentence. A story about invention, control, and a woman who should have come home.