On 29 December 1610 Gyorgy Thurzo, Palatine of Hungary and Báthory's own cousin, raided Csejthe with armed men and her sons-in-law present. Two trials followed, on 2 and 7 January 1611; the depositions of more than three hundred witnesses and survivors described tortures and secret burials; four of her servants were tried and executed. The famous figure of 650 victims rests on a servant girl's claim that a court official had seen the number in one of the countess's private books; the book was never produced. Báthory herself was never formally tried; she was confined at Csejthe and died there in August 1614. Guinness World Records lists her as the most prolific female murderer while the actual count remains unverifiable.
The blood-bathing legend, the countess preserving her youth in virgins' blood, appears in print for the first time in 1729, in the Jesuit scholar Laszlo Turoczi's Tragica Historia, the first written account of the case. When the witness accounts surfaced in 1765 and were published in 1817, they contained no references to blood baths. The legend bloomed anyway, timed with Europe's vampire scare century, until Báthory became the Blood Countess of the tourist trade and a stock answer to the question of whether vampires were real.
A modern revisionist current, led by works like Kimberly Craft's Infamous Lady (2009), argues the prosecution was a political operation: King Matthias owed the Báthory family enormous debts, a conviction would have freed the estates, and much testimony was hearsay from parties with interests. The revision corrects the bathtub and complicates the motives, but the depositions of torture are numerous, specific, and corroborated by the physical evidence Thurzo's party reported finding at the castle. The count is disputed; the cruelty is not.
Which is the documented monster: the woman in the depositions, or the legend that needed a hundred years to invent her bath?