Romulus Vereș was born in Cluj on January 23, 1929. He drove locomotives. He married at nineteen and had a son, and the marriage ended after six years. He was retired on medical grounds after driving trains through stations without stopping, ignoring the signals; his explanation was that little devils had told him not to stop.
Between September 11, 1972 and February 14, 1974 he attacked women in Cluj with a hammer. Five died. Others survived, which is unusual in a case like this and is part of why the file grew so large.
The investigation ran for three years and questioned around four thousand people. Investigators worked through lists of people retired on psychiatric grounds, and Vereș was not on the list they had. What found him was door to door work: an officer canvassing a block of flats got talking to the cleaner, who mentioned a man in the building who had been handing out pornographic posters and behaving strangely. He knocked, Vereș opened the door and tried to close it again, the officer put his foot in the way, and after a brief exchange he turned to his colleagues and said that this was the man.
He was arrested on February 14, 1974. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and blamed the Devil for what he had done. The court found him not guilty by reason of insanity, so he was never convicted and never imprisoned. In 1976 he was committed to the psychiatric hospital at Ștei, where he stayed until he died on December 13, 1993, aged sixty-four.
The Romanian press of the Communist period gave the case almost no coverage, and in the absence of reporting the story grew on its own. It was said that he had killed two hundred women. He was charged with five murders. The gap between those two numbers is the most durable thing about the case, and it is the reason this entry gives the charged figure rather than a range.