English translation of Gábor Jobbágyi’s (professor of law, Pázmány Péter Catholic University) study arguing that Ilona Tóth was innocent and was sentenced to death in a show trial. Béla Lipták introduced it with: “I hope we can contribute to clarifying the facts, to bringing the substantiated evidence to light, and thereby — if it is unambiguously well-founded — to Ilona Tóth’s rehabilitation on the 50th anniversary.” Published in the Hungarian Lobby’s August 4, 2006 action letter. Read the original in Hungarian.

The difficult sentences

“Ilona Tóth did not kill anyone. Ilona Tóth was sentenced to death though innocent. I write these grave, weighty sentences only after months of difficult research. My conclusion runs counter to the opinion of the highest officials of the Supreme Court and the Chief Prosecutor’s Office, who reached their ruling after the change of regime, under conditions of the rule of law […] My conclusion also runs counter to Ilona Tóth’s own confession and that of her two co-defendants, also sentenced to death, who from the start of the proceedings to the death sentence consistently admitted full guilt. Perhaps the hardest, almost impossible task for a lawyer is to prove the innocence of a defendant who confesses their own guilt.”

The case

From November 12, 1956, the Péterfy Sándor Street Hospital was a key site of political resistance, where medical student Ilona Tóth led the care of the wounded. The authorities learned of the group’s activity early on and raided the hospital on November 16. Tóth was taken into pre-trial detention on November 19, together with József Molnár.

She was first interrogated on November 21 — solely regarding the production and distribution of leaflets. On December 4 the case took a dramatic turn: she admitted that she and others had tried to sedate a man they believed to be a member of the ÁVH (secret police), that she had attempted to inject gasoline into his neck vein, and then, “in the bathroom […] I stabbed him with Piri’s pocketknife near the right ventricle, so that he wouldn’t accidentally survive.”

Jobbágyi notes the disproportion here: “while the trivial matter of producing and distributing leaflets was investigated in detail on November 21, 24, and December 3 (eight pages of transcript in total!), her full confession regarding the actual, substantive matter of the killing is shorter by orders of magnitude (December 4, 14, and 21 — two pages in total!).”

What the investigation files reveal

1. Basic documents are missing: there is no crime-scene report on the discovery of the body, and no autopsy report survives in either the investigation or the trial records.
2. The victim is named only at the close of the investigation — Kollár István, a warehouse worker — despite the fact that the suspects had checked his identification, and each of them firmly maintained that the man they checked was ÁVH personnel.
3. Overall, the victim’s identity is never properly established.
4. Tóth and Molnár were taken into custody on November 19 and the proceedings were opened for homicide — even though Tóth did not confess to this until December 4. “Question: how could the investigating authority have known, when there was as yet no evidence of a killing?”
5. There is no witness testimony anywhere in the case files. The confessions contradict each other on essential points.

The medical expert opinions

Professor Dr. László Haranghy’s opinion of February 13, 1957 found that Kollár’s death was caused by the stab wound to the heart, but that the strangulation marks on the neck would themselves have been fatal. What is decisive, however: “The autopsy report records no trace of any injection whatsoever, either on the skin, the arm, or the carotid arteries.” The National Forensic Chemistry Institute could not detect even trace amounts of chloroethyl, morphine, or gasoline in any part of the body.

“What does Dr. László Haranghy’s fundamentally honest expert opinion prove beyond doubt? That the sedation and repeated injections that Tóth confessed to never actually took place.”

The autopsy report never identified the body: it records only that “the body of a young man, 161 cm tall, of average build and good muscle tone” was found beside the Dominican church. According to Dr. László Buris’s 1992 expert opinion, the forensic examiners who conducted the autopsy “acted with extreme carelessness and in violation of professional standards: no attempt whatsoever was made to identify the unknown body.”

The summary, in four points:

1. There is no identified body.
2. The autopsied body shows no trace of any injection or sedation.
3. The victim’s death was caused by strangulation of the neck.
4. The heart stab wound that Tóth confessed to was inflicted on a person already dead.

The abuse

The February 22, 1957 psychiatric expert opinion — signed by Drs. László Balassa, Endre Kelemen, Pál Juhász, and Gyula Nyírő — records neurological symptoms that even the era’s own experts classified as pathological. Jobbágyi’s conclusion: “There can be only one cause for such severe neurological symptoms in an otherwise healthy, athletic young woman: severe physical abuse suffered during interrogation. It should not be forgotten that by this point more than two months had passed since her confession, yet her symptoms remained severe.”

Psychiatry professor Dr. László Iván’s opinion: “In the view of several of us, the change in Ilona Tóth’s state was produced by a combined manipulation method — a form of brainwashing carried out through physical mistreatment and psychological torment.”

What she herself said in her final statement

“When I saw what I had done, this man was already dead.” — Jobbágyi highlights this with exclamation marks, then notes: “Ilona Tóth states once again that she encountered someone who was already dead.”

The real purpose of the trial

In June 1957, the People’s Tribunal Council of the Supreme Court “carried out a complete conceptual reversal. The essence of the case became clear: by placing the murder at the center of the first-instance proceedings, the sole purpose was to serve propaganda aims toward both foreign and domestic audiences — the goal was to link the resistance group’s intellectual leaders (Gyula Obersovszky, József Gáli) to an ordinary criminal offense.“

Ilona Tóth’s death sentence was carried out on June 27, 1957. “The execution began at 6:37, and death occurred at 6:48. The executed body was then left hanging on the gallows for 30 minutes.”

What may have happened on November 18

Jobbágyi outlines four possible scenarios, without asserting that any one of them is proven. He considers two things certain: that Ferenc Gönczi and Miklós Gyöngyösi severely beat someone at the hospital, and that Ilona Tóth had nothing to do with the beating or with the victim’s possible death.

The possibilities: that she was called to someone already dead, and the heart stab wound was inflicted on a corpse — possibly not even by her, and it is “even conceivable that the authorities’ own men later stabbed the corpse in the heart”; that she was called to someone in clinical death, whom she unsuccessfully tried to revive; or that no death occurred at all — that the severely beaten, unidentified man was carried out of the hospital unconscious, survived, and the authorities simply “manufactured a corpse.”

To this last scenario, Jobbágyi adds a fact uncovered in 1992 by Dr. Frigyes Kahler at the Ministry of the Interior: “An ÁVH officer named István Kollár did exist! […] this István Kollár, born in 1930 (the same age the body appeared to be), served in the Ministry of the Interior from 1952 to 1981, and at the time of his death in 1981 held the rank of colonel.”

“None of the scenarios can be established with absolute certainty, and it is possible that a fourth, as-yet-undescribed scenario is the true one. What can be stated beyond doubt, however, on the basis of the evidence uncovered, is that Ilona Tóth was completely innocent, and that she was sentenced to death in a fabricated, show trial as the medical faculty’s martyr.”

Gábor Jobbágyi, Head of Department and University Professor, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, Pázmány Péter Catholic University

Source: Hungarian Lobby, August 4, 2006.