Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - “The Hungarian Vampire” Béla Kiss
Episode Date: December 13, 2021In the early 1900s, a man lured his victims with lonely hearts ads, drained their blood, and stored their bodies in barrels filled with methanol. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...es.com/adchoices
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Due to the graphic nature of this killer's crimes,
listener discretion is advised.
This episode includes discussions of blood, violence, and killing
that some people may find offensive.
We advise extreme caution for children under 13.
By 1916, the town of Sinketah Hungary
was accustomed to losing its young men
to the brutal fighting of World War I.
So when beloved neighbor, Bela Kish,
stopped responding to letters,
the townspeople assumed the worst.
But some people didn't waste time
morning, Bala's landlord decided to clean out the house and try to rent it to a new tenant as soon as
possible. But he had his work cut out for him. Bela's backyard was full of large steel barrels.
For years, he had kept these strange objects, never telling anyone what hid inside.
So when the landlord led himself onto the property one day, he was determined to solve the mystery
for himself. But strangely, the barrels were fused shut. The landowner, the landlord,
The landlord found that strange, but it only increased his curiosity.
He found a sharp tool and punctured one of the drums.
The landlord immediately reeled back from the smell.
It was a putrid stench, so strong that the man began to gag in disgust.
This wasn't alcohol or gasoline.
It smelled like something rotting.
Hi, I'm Greg Poulson.
This is serial killers, a Spotify original from,
from Parcast. Every episode, we dive into the minds and madness of serial killers. Today, we'll uncover
the mysterious life of Bela Kish, a Hungarian killer who preyed on dozens of lonely women. I'm here
with my co-host, Vanessa Richardson. Hi everyone. You can find episodes of serial killers and all
other Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify. In the first part of this episode,
we'll explore Bela's early criminal activity. Fastidious by nature, Bela treated crime as
something he could study and perfect, and it didn't take long for his criminal fascinations
to turn deadly. Later, we'll follow Bela's terrifying killing spree and try to understand how the
most wanted man in Hungary could vanish into thin air. We've got all that and more coming up.
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There's nothing quite like the power of a legend.
A story can be preserved for generations
passed down from person to person.
And with each retelling, the legend changes.
It becomes more fantastic.
more mysterious.
After a while, it almost doesn't matter what's fiction and what's real.
The lore takes on a life of its own.
It's easy to forget sometimes that even the tallest tales contain seeds of truth.
This is especially true in the case of Bela Kish.
Mystery shrouds every detail of his story.
But that doesn't make his terrifying existence any less real.
In 1877, Bela Kish was born in Hungary.
in Hungary. He grew up in a social class where he had access to education, but not many other
luxuries. From a young age, Bela had a sharp and curious mind. He was an avid reader, devouring
books on the wide range of subjects that interested him, from math to ancient history.
But as a teenager, Bela likely had to sacrifice this passion for something more practical. He
needed to learn a trade. Begrudgingly, he put down his books.
But work proved to be a welcome challenge for Bela.
He showed a great deal of talent for tinsmithing, a type of metalwork that required precision and technical skill.
Normally, an apprenticeship in this field would take four to six years, but just as Bela's tinsmithing career started to take shape, he was faced with yet another roadblock, civic duty.
Sometime in his late teens or early 20s, Bela did his obligatory service in the Austro-Hungarian army.
For the second time in his short life, Bela found himself at the mercy of the world around him.
In the army, he had no time to study, to read, or even to pursue his new interest in tinsmithing.
Many Hungarians resented this compulsory army service, and Bela was probably no exception.
For those years, his life was not his own, but all he could do was put his head down and make it through.
It's not clear exactly where Bela went after he finished his service. We do know he completely
his Tinsmith apprenticeship and became a rather successful professional.
But this source of income wasn't enough for him.
Now that he was free from the responsibilities of the outside world,
Bela was ready to make a name for himself.
He wanted to live life on his own terms.
And Bela didn't want a pauper's life.
He wanted to be rich,
and he wasn't afraid to step out of line to do so.
In 1903, Bala took out an ad in a Budapest newspaper.
Using an assumed name, he pretended to be a widower in need of a lady's companionship.
His plan was simple.
He would start a correspondence with rich, lonely women.
And once they'd formed a bond, he'd tricked them out of their money.
Bela was an intelligent, hard-working young man.
He could have made a good living without such a deceitful scheme.
But it was more than just making money.
Conning these women thrilled him.
Vanessa is going to take over on the psychology here and throughout the episode.
Please note, Vanessa is not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but we have done a lot of research for this show.
Thanks, Greg.
During this period of his life, Bala demonstrated psychopathic tendencies like manipulation and superficial charm,
and these characteristics were probably why his plan worked in the first place.
A 2020 study published by evolutionary psychological science found that men with psychopathic traits
tend to have more romantic and sexual success.
But the goal isn't love.
The true prize is to gain a woman's desire and trust for their own enjoyment.
For Bella, tricking women into trusting him wasn't just a product of his plan.
That was the whole point.
That was likely why he didn't try to make money through honest means.
A regular job simply wouldn't give him the same kind of thrill.
Fortunately for Beela, his ad had no shortage of responses.
dozens of women wrote back, desperate for any sort of connection.
Bela was right about one thing.
Loneliness was a powerful motivator.
It didn't take long for him to establish a routine.
After exchanging letters for a few weeks,
he would arrange a meeting with his pen pal in Budapest,
and that was when the magic happened.
Bela was a handsome man.
He had a solid build, blonde hair, and bright blue eyes that lit up when he spoke.
When he appeared on the doorstep, he was like something out of a dream.
His victims couldn't see the lechery behind his charm.
So they fell head over heels.
After gaining the confidence of these women, Bala made promises of love and marriage,
but he had no intention of following through.
But before he disappeared, Bela would convince his would-be fiancé to send him money.
He explained that he needed the funds so he could arrange their new life together.
Bala accepted huge sums of cash and spent it on what was turning out to be a very luxurious bachelor's lifestyle.
Once the money exchanged hands, Bela dropped the romantic act.
He cut off communication or created some story to untangle himself from his engagements.
He walked away richer, leaving a string of broken hearts behind him without a single care.
Bela finally felt the control he'd never had and he loved it.
He was like a cat toying with a mouse.
Bela continued this scheme well into the 1910s,
fleecing countless lonely women of their riches.
But there was one significant exception to Bela's schemes.
Around 1911, he met a 20-year-old woman named Marie.
From what we can tell, Marie didn't come from money.
Instead, it seemed like Bela harbored true feelings for her.
And this time, when he proposed to her in 1912,
Bela actually followed through.
After the couple married, they moved to a town called Sinkota,
just seven miles outside of Budapest.
Bala's tinsmithing business thrived there,
and he gained a shining reputation.
It seemed like Bela's life was finally on the right track,
but not everything was as it seemed.
Bela and Marie didn't have a happy union.
Marie grew bored and uninterested by her husband.
It's possible she only married him for his money,
but this comfortable lifestyle wouldn't keep her attention from wandering.
Shortly after moving to Sinkuta, Marie began having a affair with a handsome young artist,
and when Bela found out, he flew into a rage.
The humiliation of this discovery curdled into a desire for revenge.
Up until now, Bela had been the one to humiliate and reject his romantic partners,
and now that it was happening to him, he couldn't accept it.
One day he lured Marie and her new lover into his house.
It's possible that the couple had no idea that Baila knew about their relationship at all.
They thought they were safe.
But once Bala brought them inside, he attacked, striking Marie and her lover over the head.
But Bela was far from done.
In a final act of violence, he picked up a noose he had already tied.
One at a time, he strangled Marie and her lover, killing them both.
Bela took a beat to stand back and admire his work,
but he didn't rest long.
Killing them was just the first step.
Now that they were dead, the real work could begin.
Bela filled two large steel drums with methanol,
a chemical that can be converted to formaldehyde.
Methanol can preserve human corpses,
essentially pickling them.
Bela might have learned about this process
through his voracious reading habit.
Now he wanted to try it out.
himself. Carefully, Bala submerged the two corpses into the liquid. Finally, he soldered a lid to the top,
sealing the bodies off from the open air. Once the barrels were sealed, he moved the drums into his
backyard, but even this choice to keep them is a mystery to us. It could just be that he liked the
idea of his wife and her lover being hidden in plain sight. After moving the barrels into his
backyard, Bela finally relaxed. It had been surprisingly easy to kill his first two victims,
and even easier to hide their bodies. And as Bela stared at the two steel drums sitting in the
grass, he knew that this wouldn't be the last time. He was just getting started.
Coming up, Bela develops a dangerous interest in mysticism.
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In 1912, 35-year-old Bala Kish murdered his cheating wife and her lover. Instead of getting rid of
their bodies, he preserved them in barrels of methanol. Then he told his neighbors a sob story.
His wife had run off with another man. His entire town of Cinco to Hungary,
already seemed to know about Marie's affair.
So nobody blinked an eye at Bela's explanation.
His neighbors did note a change in Bala's behavior after Marie's disappearance.
He used to be so polite, but now he was bitter and curt to any woman he saw.
And that wasn't the only difference.
Bela was already known for being an academic.
He read constantly about a huge variety of topics, from geopolitical tension in Europe to complex chemistry compounds.
and he loved talking with neighbors and friends about his latest interests.
But after Marie's death, he gravitated to darker subject matter.
Bala became enthralled with the links between reality, spirituality, and the supernatural.
He became mystified by the occult.
Bala then shared his latest thoughts and findings with his friends.
But these subjects were extremely polarizing.
People either drew back in revulsion or leaned in, curious to hear more.
but Bailey discovered that this subject matter was a useful tool in attracting women,
and he was very interested in that.
Sometime in the 1910s, a woman named Louisa Rooste met a handsome stranger at a movie theater in Budapest.
In his book Lonely Hearts Vampire, Wallace Edwards detailed how detectives later theorized
that he was actually Bela Kish, but used an alias when introducing himself to Louisa.
He invited Louise on a drive through the...
country. She happily accepted. The drive was pleasant and Marie thought her new companion was
charming. So when the man brought up his interest in the occult, she was intrigued. The handsome
stranger offered to read Louisa's fortune. Louisa agreed and the pair drove to the man's
Budapest apartment. Once they arrived, Louisa was given a mysterious drink, claiming it would
help her see into the crystal ball. Within minutes, Louisa complained about feeling dizzy, then
Passed out.
This was the moment the stranger had waited for.
Moving quickly, he took the unconscious woman's money and jewelry.
Then he dumped her body in a public park.
When Louisa finally came to, she was shocked to find herself alone in an unfamiliar place.
She was confused and having a hard time remembering what happened the night before,
but it didn't take her long to realize that she had been robbed.
Louisa reported her experience to the police, but it was,
useless. She couldn't remember anything about the events of that night, and without that information,
there was nothing that law enforcement could do to help her. Louisa's case was only the first.
Similar robberies took place several times over the span of the next few years, during which
women were lured into a handsome stranger's apartment under the guise of reading their palms.
There he would drug and rob his victims. Once he was done, he would leave the unconscious woman
in a public place where she would wake up alone in a daze.
Several of these women reported their experiences to the police,
but none of them could remember the details of their attack,
making it virtually impossible for the police to begin an investigation.
All the while, this man, who very well could have been Bela Kish,
slipped through the fingers of law enforcement again and again.
No one had any reason to believe that he was the mysterious criminal,
so he was never officially tied to these individuals.
attacks. Safe from detection, perhaps Bela grew more confident in his taste and talent for violence.
Fortunately for him, there was no shortage of vulnerable women for him to prey on.
If the drugging and robberies were in fact the doing of Bela, they weren't the only way that
Bala was getting his kicks. Throughout this period, he continued using a phony newspaper ad
to seduce lonely women and con them out of their money under the alias Hoffman. On the surface,
Bala's plan looked the same, but now he wanted more than just cash.
He wanted to add to his collection of pickled bodies.
One by one, Bela invited unsuspecting women to his house, under the guise of starting a life
together. But once his victim arrived, Bela attacked, murdering his bride to be in cold blood.
The details of these murders are vague, but Bela was not one to rush through things.
He liked to take his time, beating and strangling his victims before killing them.
It's possible that he prolonged their deaths for hours, even days.
Once he was done, Bayla stripped the corpses and stored them in barrels full of methanol,
just as he'd done with Marie and her lover.
But that was far from the strangest thing he did to the bodies.
Before storing the corpses, Bela punctured their necks, draining out all of their blood.
This could have been another way that Bela prolonged his victim's death,
though it isn't clear if these women were alive when this gruesome act took place.
There are several reasons Bela could have wanted his victim's blood.
It's possible he used it in some sort of occultist ritual.
In some practices, blood connects a supernatural force to the physical world, acting as a bridge.
Bela could have discovered this in his reading and wanted to experiment with it.
Another possibility is that this blood-letting exercise was Baila's way of dominating his victims in an extremely intimate way.
A 2006 case study published in South African Psychiatry Review found that there was an overlap between organized killers and individuals who display vampire-like behavior such as bloodletting.
The study found that these kinds of criminals use blood play as a calculated method of exerting control over their victims.
Unlike disorganized criminals who may behave violently out of passion,
these kinds of killers act out of a need for power.
This could help explain Bela's meticulous routine of trapping,
killing, draining, then storing women.
To him, all of this may have served as a confirmation of his own power
and an ability to control his victims.
Bela's calculated nature was also probably emphasized
through his passion for intellectual research.
Bala filled his study with books on murder, from strangulation techniques to poisons.
He likely experimented with his methods based on what he read.
Bala treated killing, just like any other academic subject,
something he could research and perfect through practice.
And his victims were nothing more than lab rats for him to experiment on.
But it wasn't always so easy.
Despite his careful planning, Bela faced several complications.
While courting a woman named Margaret Toccurring,
Tote, Bela risked meeting her mother to ask for money.
Bela must have decided he had to kill Margaret, but her mother was a difficult roadblock to manage.
But Bela found a crafty solution.
Before murdering Margaret, he forced her to write a letter to her mother,
saying she was so embarrassed by the failed engagement that she was running away to the U.S.
Bela knew that this lie would sound plausible enough.
At this time in Hungary, emigration to America was extremely common.
Margaret Toad's mother remained suspicious of her daughter's disappearance,
but the authorities didn't take her concerns seriously.
And once again, Bala was able to avoid suspicion.
Bala continued his murderous routine for years.
By 1914, he had received 174 marriage proposals through written correspondence,
74 of which he accepted.
Out of his 74 fiancés, Bala killed anywhere from 24 to 30 of them.
But Bela didn't worry too much about the police.
In his mind, he had perfected every element of his murderous scheme,
and in a way, he was right.
Even with his more difficult victims,
he always found a way to avoid detection by law enforcement.
So Bela continued to lure more and more women into his home,
but somehow the people of Sinkota didn't suspect a thing.
The community loved Bela and could see no evil in him.
To them, he was a kind, charismatic.
man with a passion for knowledge.
His neighbors knew that he entertained many glamorous women,
but they didn't think much of it.
Townspeople simply assumed that he was just a charming bachelor.
Bayla seemed so confident in the protection of his reputation
that he hired a housekeeper.
Letting someone inside his home was a risky move,
but Bella chose the perfect person for the job.
His housekeeper was an elderly woman,
will refer to as Mrs. Simcoe.
With Mrs. Simcoe taking care of the house,
Bala could spend even more time in his study,
pouring over books about murder.
But once again, events out of his control
drastically changed his plans.
In 1914, the first World War broke out across Europe,
sending the region into a state of terror and violence.
And as part of the Hungarian reserves, Bala was called to action.
The 37-year-old left his house in the care of his housekeeper,
Over the next three years, 1,200,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers died fighting the Allied powers.
Another 2,200,000 were either taken prisoner or went missing.
Men left for war, and one way or another, they never came back.
This was the accepted reality.
So when Bala stopped writing back to his neighbors in Sinkota, many assumed he would never return.
But Baila's landlord didn't waste his time grieving.
He assumed Bela was dead and immediately began planning to sell his house to a new tenant.
But first, the landlord needed to inspect the house to see if it needed any repairs.
And if he was going to put the house on the market, he had to sort out the mystery of those strange steel drums.
Over the years, Bela had placed more and more barrels in his backyard.
They were becoming an eyesore, and the landlord was desperate to get rid of it.
bit of them. In July of that year, the landlord led himself into Bela's backyard. Taking a pair of
pliers, he stabbed a hole into one of the barrels. A clear liquid began to pour out of the hole,
and instantly the landlord was overcome with a terrible odor. It smelled like death.
The landlord reeled backwards, retching from the terrible stench. He called a neighbor who
happened to be a chemist. It didn't take long for the professor.
to determine the source of the smell.
It was rotting flesh.
In horror, the landlord looked at the unopened barrels
that filled the backyard.
Then it finally hit him.
He was standing in a graveyard.
Coming up, legend and reality mix
when people learn the extent of Bela's occult fascination.
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Now back to the story.
In July of 1916, Bayless Land,
landlord opened one of the mysterious barrels in the backyard and was overcome with a stench of rotting
flesh. The terrified man called the authorities, and shortly, Chief Detective of the Budapest
Police Department, Charles Nodge, arrived. As soon as he stepped into the yard, Nodge was hit
with the unmistakable odor of death and decay. Covering his nose, the detective took the punctured
barrel and cut it completely open. Inside, they found the well-preserved
naked corpse of a woman.
Najd didn't have to guess how she'd been killed.
She still had a news tied around her neck.
The horror only increased as Naj and his men realized
just how many barrels were stored on the property.
Seven sat in the yard out in the open,
but they found ten more hidden inside the house.
One by one, Naj's team emptied the barrels
and pulled out naked bodies.
We don't have a precise number of the corpses found in these barrels,
but it was anywhere from 24 to 30.
Almost all of them were women, except for one,
the man who seduced Baila's wife, an artist.
After this horrifying discovery,
Najd searched the house.
Inside the study, the officer discovered
the paper trail of Bala's Lonely Hearts newspaper scam.
It was then Nodj may have realized
he was dealing with an extremely prolific criminal.
People still believe that Bela was dead,
but Nage wasn't leaving anything to chance.
He put a call out to the Hungarian reserves, looking for Bela Kish.
He sent out descriptions of Bela to police stations, army stations, and hospitals.
Someone had to know something.
While the authorities struggled to locate Bela, the news of his murders spread across Sinketa.
People couldn't believe their local Tinsmith, who always seemed so polite and charming,
was capable of such revolting crimes.
But in the midst of such a terrible discovery, the community was the community
The community focused on one detail in particular, the puncture wounds in many of the corpses' necks.
When the bodies were first discovered, a mortician reported the wounds on the neck were a sign of blood draining.
Slowly, rumors began to spread.
Maybe Bela Kish was a vampire.
By the 1900s, Hungarians were very familiar with the legends of vampires.
In fact, stories of evil blood-sucking demons have existed in Hungarian culture for centuries.
In the early 1600s, 300 years before Bela was born, a Hungarian noblewoman named
Countess Elizabeth Batery de Eched tortured and killed hundreds of peasant girls.
The legend goes that she drank and bathed in their blood, believing it would give her eternal
youth.
Accounts of the Countess traveled across Hungary, mixing with pre-existing folklore about vampires.
By the 18th century, vampire hysteria in Eastern Europe had become a real concern.
And well into the 20th century, some people still reported seeing creatures returning from the dead and drinking blood.
So when the puncture marks were discovered on Baila's victims, some people in Sinkata were convinced that their neighbor was actually a vampire.
As we mentioned earlier, Bela's blood-draining habits could be described as vampire-like activity,
but by the time the police were on his trail, Bala's murderous habits had graduated into something far more.
something far more intense.
A 2010 case study published in Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association
explored a condition called Renfield Syndrome, otherwise known as Clinical Vampirism.
The study found that those with clinical vampirism focus on compulsive blood drinking
and an affinity with death.
While Bella was likely not a blood-sucking creature of the dead, he may have believed that
drinking blood carried some kind of dark power.
In his studies of the occult, he likely would have come across tales of vampires.
Perhaps they caught his interest.
It is also possible that one book in particular may have inspired the young man.
Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, was published in 1897 when Bala was 20 years old.
It's possible that the story of Dracula influenced his murderous appetite.
In the novel, the Count seduces women before drinking their blood and killing them.
Bela's method of killing was suspiciously similar, and it's possible that he was inspired by Count Dracula's seductive style.
The people of Sinkhata certainly thought that Bela was pure evil, but these rumors complicated Detective Nage's work.
The mystery of Bela Kish had reached mythic proportions, and everyone had a theory about his whereabouts.
Nage was overcome with tips that went nowhere.
For a moment, it looked like Bela might never be found.
Some reports say that toward the end of World War I,
Naj received letters from a hospital in Serbia.
In one letter, the hospital said that they had a patient named Malikish,
but he died from typhoid.
Another letter claimed that Bala actually survived his illness
and was recuperating in their care.
Confused, Naj visited the hospital himself
in hopes of finding his killer, either dead or alive.
When Naj arrived, he was taken to the corpse of a man who had died during treatment.
hospital officials pulled the sheet back for Naj to confirm the killer's identity,
but the eyes weren't blue.
And this was the body of a very young man, not the 40-year-old Naj was looking for.
This was not his man.
He argued with the staff, thinking they had just found someone else with the same name.
The nurses at administrators seemed just as confused as he was.
After going through the paperwork, Najd discovered the mistake.
A man matching Bela's description has to be.
had been at the hospital, but he was listed under a different name.
Naj believed that Bela switched his paperwork with another patient at the hospital, the one who died.
That way, he could leave completely undetected.
The more Naj thought about it, the more he believed this had to be true.
The legend of Bela Kish must have spread from Sinkata all the way to this hospital.
Bela could have learned that the authorities were finally onto him and decided to flee.
This was the closest thing to a lead that Naj had.
And if it was true, Beala Kish would be nearly impossible to track.
The killer could have changed his identity and moved cities, even countries.
And there was no telling what horrors he would commit.
Naj continued searching for years, but he never found Beala Kish.
It was as if the man simply vanished into thin air, which only further cemented his eerie reputation.
For years, sightings of Bella circulated.
throughout Central Europe.
People saw him walking the streets, a beautiful woman on his arm,
or perhaps he was the shadowy figure lurking near a local bar.
He was more like a ghost than a real person.
He could be anywhere.
The legend of Bela Kish terrified all of Europe.
But one day in 1932, 16 years after he officially went missing,
Bela materialized once again.
Henry Oswald, a New York detective,
thought he spotted Bela outside of
Times Square subway station. He was convinced that it was the same man whose picture he studied years ago,
the famous Hungarian vampire, Baila Kish. The detective tried to chase the stranger, but the man
slipped away before Henry could catch him. Perhaps it was nothing more than a mistake. After all,
New York was a long way from Sinkgo to Hungary, but just four years later, someone reported a blue-eyed
janitor in a New York apartment building. Apparently, this man also looked like the infamous vampire.
By the time the authorities arrived to question the mystery man, the janitor had apparently vanished.
Decades passed, these sightings became less frequent. By now, Bela Kish is certainly dead.
But even that doesn't feel like closure. Bala is a unique case in which legend meets history.
There are so many details about his life, we'll never know.
But his lust for murder was undeniable.
Bala killed anywhere from 24 to 30 innocent people
praying on loneliness for his own sadistic desires.
Vampire or not, Bela Kish was a terrifying force.
And he will always be remembered that way.
Thanks again for tuning it to serial killers.
We'll be back soon with a new episode.
For more information on Bela Kish,
amongst the many sources we used,
we found the Lonely Hearts Vampire,
the bizarre and horrifying true account of serial killer,
Bela Kish, by Wallace Edwards,
extremely helpful to our research.
You can find more episodes of serial killers
and all of the Spotify originals from Parcast for free on Spotify.
We'll see you next time.
Have a killer week.
Serial Killers is a Spotify original from Parcast.
Executive producers include Max and Ron Cutler,
sound designed by Alex Button,
with production assistants,
Ron Shapiro, Trent Williamson, Carly Madden, and Bruce Kitovich. This episode of serial killers
was written by Kit Fitzgerald, with writing assistance by Abigail Cannon, fact-checking by Cheyenne
Lopez, and research by Brian Petrus and Chelsea Wood. Serial Killers stars Greg Paulson and Vanessa
Richardson. Alt Disney had a gift for storytelling that resonated with audiences.
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