The Mother-in-Law from Hell: The story of "Ma" Duncan

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW FROM HELL; “MA” DUNCAN

This is the story of Frank Duncan and his mother Elizabeth and how their “incestuous” relationship ended in the murder of Frank’s pregnant wife, Olga.

Elizabeth Duncan, herself, is an interesting woman. Depending on who you believe, she had from 11 to 15 husbands and 2 to 4 children, her favorite being Frank. It seems she would con younger men into marrying her by telling them she needed to be married to collect a sizable inheritance, and she would split it with them. Once they were married, she would fleece them and then leave, going on to the next man.

 Elizabeth tried to kill herself because Frank had decided to strike out on his own and get his own apartment. During Elizabeth’s confinement, Frank met Olga, one of his mother’s nurses. Olga and Frank dated in secret because every time Frank would mention dating his mother would try to kill herself. After she left the hospital, she would call Olga, threatening her and telling her she would never marry Frank.

When Olga got pregnant, Frank was forced to own up and marry her. To say the least, his mother was livid. She went so far as to hire a young man to pose as Frank and illegally had the marriage annulled. The young man certainly could have passed for Frank, but Olga as Franks young wife? The judge must have been blind or had recently come into a sum of money. She was also planning to have her son kidnapped and held hostage until he agreed to divorce his wife. None of this worked to get the pair to divorce.

To appease his mother, Frank moved out of his and his wife’s house and back in with ‘Mother.” This did not make the pregnant bride very happy.

Olga disappeared in November 1958 when she was 30 years old and 7 months pregnant. Two men who had been hired by Elizabeth came to the door and said that Frank was drunk in their back seat. When Olga came to get Frank, the pair hit her over the head and drove her to a remote location. There they tried first to strangle her. They would have shot her but the gun broke when they hit her in the head with it. They continued with their ineptitude when they realized they didn’t have any shovels to dig a grave for Olga; they ended up doing it with their hands. They didn’t bother to check to see if Olga was dead before they buried her. She ended up being buried alive.

Her body was eventually found when two men confessed that Ma Duncan had hired them to kill the girl. Olga was beaten, strangled, and then buried while she was still alive.

Police began to suspect Ma Duncan when then found out about the illegal annulment. At her trial, the nature of Frank and his mother’s relationship was called into question and it was hinted but never proven that it was an incestuous one. It did not take long for Ma Duncan to be found guilty and sentenced to death. Frank, who was a lawyer, worked tirelessly to

have the sentence changed, but Ma Duncan was executed on August 8, 1962.

Angels of Nagyrev

I have a hard time getting my friends to decide which movie to see on any given Saturday night, but in at town called Nagyrev in Hungary between 1914-1929, three hundred people were poisoned and an entire town kept who the killers were a secret for 15 years.

Julia (Zsuzsanna)Fazekas was a greedy midwife who was always looking for ways to make money. So in addition to her duties as a midwife, she also provided help to women who did not want to be pregnant by performing abortions.

When a rival midwife set up shop in what Fazekas saw as her territory, she set out to get rid of her. First, she seduced the rival’s brother (how that helped, I’m not sure) and soon the rival was found dead. Very convenient. The rival’s brother felt that Fazekas was to blame and came after her. Fazekas organized the town’s women to threaten the brother. He didn’t care and came after the midwife with a gun; he shot her, but missed. He was sent to prison…problem solved.

Fazekas was probably the only person who saw WWI as a good thing. First, the men in town all enlisted to fight in the war. This was a good thing since at that time marriages were arranged and women had nothing to say about who they married. If the husband proved to be unsatisfactory, there was no chance for divorce…divorce was illegal. So, the men going to war was advantageous for two reasons, the women were free to do as they pleased, and, since it was a war, there was a chance the husband might not return at all… truly a win-win situation.

The town became a prisoner of war camp, very much to the liking of the women in town. Here were men who were basically at the women’s beck and call for sex, but didn’t have any say over what the women did. This was heaven.

The problem came when the war was over and the husbands returned and the prisoners were released. The husbands expected life to return to normal, with them back in control of their homes and wives. The women were distressed but instead of just accepting it, they turned to the woman who had helped them before… the local midwife, Julia Fazekas.

Fazekas saw this as her next great opportunity. The killing of her rival had been easy and got Fazekas thinking that might be a profitable business…. providing the means to women who had husbands and other family members who needed killing. She advertised (word of mouth) and set prices based on how wealthy the client was. The poison of choice was arsenic. The effects were at first the inability to swallow, then vomiting, and finally convulsions and death. Arsenic was easy to get; Mrs. Fazekas simply boiled down fly paper and skimmed off the residue. She had only two rules; she would not sell to unmarried women or men.

In 1916, the first of these transactions occurred. A wealthy man in town got sick and his wife wanted to make sure he didn’t recover. She bought poison from Fazekas and her problem was solved. She even hid the vial the poison came in in the coffin.

Soon, women saw this as a way to get rid of all unwanted relatives, not just unwanted husbands. Before long, demanding parents, nosy aunts, and meddlesome children were dying at alarming rates. Quickly, the town was being called “the murder district.”

If you are wondering how they were able to get away with this, this is how. Fazekas’ cousin was the person in charge of filing the death certificates. He made sure the cause of death was appropriate which allowed the women to get away with this for so long.

The men in the town began to get suspicious, but instead of going to the authorities, they tried to guarantee their own safety by being better husbands., figuring if the wife was happy, she wouldn’t resort to such tactics to get rid of him.

From 1918 to 1924, business was booming, but so were the suspicions.  In 1924, a local doctor became suspicious. One of his wealthier patients came down with bronchitis and died. The doctor claimed he had not been that sick. But his suspicions were not enough to bring the women’s enterprise down.

In 1929, an anonymous letter was received by the police claiming Fazekas was helping people to kill. There was no proof, and the anonymous writer was found and sent to prison for slander. Mrs. Fazekas was like Teflon®; nothing stuck to her.

Mrs. Takucs, one of the “angels,” dismayed the group by killing both her parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law and an aunt, which was contrary to the wishes of the group that only men were to be killed.

The local minister was also suspicious. He said that “healthy and robust men” were dying suddenly, and the doctors could give no plausible reason why. Remember, these doctors had wives, too, so they were reluctant to rock the boat. The reverend called on Mrs. Fazekas and had some tea. The next day he fell ill and decided to not pursue the matter. It looked like these women were going to get away with these murders and get to continue on with them.

Eventually, though, there were more letters and more investigations, including exhumation of the bodies. Arsenic was found, including the vials that some women had tucked away in the coffins, assuming they would never see the light of day again.

Mrs. Ladislaus Szabo poisoned her uncle, but he survived and called the police . When arrested, Mrs. Szabo pointed the figure at a Mrs. Bukenoveski who had used the poison to kill her mother. Mrs. Bukenoveski was the one who pointed her finger at Mrs. Fazekas.

When it looked like Fazekas was going to be arrested, she took her own poison.

Six people were found guilty and sent to death while 7 others got life and 7 others served 5-15 years.

The authorities chalked this up to the promiscuous sex the women engaged in during the war while others understood that it was brought on by the extreme poverty and lack of medical supervision. 

Does Long Island Have a Serial Killer?

The saga of the Long Island serial killer begins in May 2010 with the story of Shannon Gilbert, a Craigslist escort who went to Oak Beach with her driver Michael Pak to party with Joseph Brewer and was never seen alive again. At some point during the visit, Shannon made a 23 minute 911 call where she sounded hysterical and screamed “they’re trying to kill me.” According to her driver, she became unhinged and ran from the house, knocking on neighbors’ doors and asking for help. When she received no offers, she was last seen running off toward the water.

On December 10, 2010, skeletal remains were found. All assumed they would be Gilbert’s but no. They were the remains of another Craigslist escort, Melissa Barthelemy, who had gone missing in July of 2009. The search continued for Gilbert and three additional remains were found at that time: Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Amber Costello and Megan Waterman, all escorts bt none were Gilbert.

Shannon was found a year later on December 13, 2011 along with six other bodies, taking the total found to 10: four on Ocean Parkway, one in Nassau County, a skull in Tobay Beach (matching legs had been found on Fire Island in1996), and a mother and child. The DNA of the mother was matched with a torso found in Nassau County in 1997. At this point the term “serial killer” was being used by both the police and the media.

The autopsy on Shannon proved to be inconclusive since all that was recovered was bones which led to two theories: one was that she was killed by the “Long Island Serial Killer” and the other was that she had wandered into the thick brush, got lost and confused, and ended up drowning.

Shannon’s family, though, was sure it was murder and honed in on one suspect, Dr. Peter Hackett, a local physician. Shannon’s mother claimed Hackett called her and said that he ran a home for wayward women and took Gilbert in the morning she disappeared. This call echoed the one that Melissa Barthelemy’s sister Amanda claimed to have received from a person who claimed he was holding her sister.  Dr. Hackett said this wasn’t true, but the phone records disagreed. Gilbert’s family sued him in 2012, claiming he encountered Gilbert as she ran off knocking on doors and gave her drugs, which killed her.

A litany of amateur sleuths was also convinced that Hackett was the Long Island Killer. It was alleged that he was fired by Suffolk County for misusing his work cell phone and claiming to be at work when he was not. He also was said to have embellished his role in the investigation of the crash of Flight 800. None of this makes him a killer, a bad employee, maybe, but not a killer.

Crime Watch Daily (newsmagazine) followed Hackett from a deposition and claimed he faked a heart attack, clutching his chest and falling to the ground. Since this alleged event, he has moved to Florida… wouldn’t you?

My feelings on the “Long Island Serial Killer” are that it is not a serial killer. What the recovery of these remains, often long after the death, proves is that this area of the Long Island shore is a perfect area for hiding bodies.  Finding so many bodies discarded in the same place would naturally lead one to think this was the work of one person, but perhaps not. Let’s look at the situation. That area is the perfect place to hide a body due to its thick thorny brambles. Also, most the victims were escorts, a common killer’s victims.

It would be nice to think there was only one person out there killing women, but not all these victims fit a nice neat profile. Not all were escort; one was a child. Some were found whole, others in pieces scattered all over the Island. We don’t want to think that the number of killers is high, but in the research for my book Who Killed Starr Faithfull and othermurderous tales of Long Island, I found that Long Island has many and varied killers both in the past and future and to think we are looking for just one killer is shor tsided and could be deadly.

 What do you think?