A famous Hungarian case.
On 28 May 2000, 11-years-old boy Tamás Till disappeared from Baja, Hungary. On that day, the young boy set off on a bicycle ride to a nearby wildlife park. His parents had made a commitment that he would be home by 1 p.m. However, Tamás Till never returned home. He didn’t even arrive at the wildlife park. The police made a serious mistake early in the investigation by not issuing a warrant immediately. Several false reports also led the authorities to a dead end, and no trace of the boy was found.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen the boy at various locations, but those reports proved to be false. The investigation was also hampered by the presence of many strangers in Baja due to local events (Children’s Day and an air show at the local airport). The parents received an anonimous call from a person claiming to know about the whereabouts of their son, and a letter with an inscription “Élek” (I am alive) on it was sent to them. Police suspected that Tamás was a victim of a hit-and-run or he was abducted and taken abroad. In Hungary, the press in the 2000s gave special attention to Tamás Till’s disappearance, for instance his picture was displayed on milk boxes. For a while, Tamás Till was the number one on the FBI’s list of missing children, and Hungarian investigators interviewed five hundred witnesses without success.
A turning point came in the summer of 2024, when a person arrested in an unrelated case gave a tip-off to the police that a former resident of the Baja orphanage was involved in hiding a body in the early 2000s. According to his story, a former resident of the Baja orphanage was blackmailed by a local contractor into disposing a child’s body in the latter’s farm in the outskirts of Baja. Both men claimed to be involved in the hiding of the body committed suicide in 2011 and 2021, respectively. Human remains were excavated at the site the informant described to the police, encased in concrete in a farm’s outbuilding. DNA testing confirmed that Tamás Till’s body had been found. The child’s body was found to have broken ribs, skull and vertebrae, which were the result of abuse. As police gathered more information on the persons claimed to be the perpetrators, the informant and his story became suspicious. It was finally revealed that the actual killer testified at the prosecutor’s office against his former friend and employer.
The informant was interrogated repeatedly and finally collapsed under the weight of his crime, admitting to killing Tamás Till and provided a detailed confession. Janos, who was only 16 years old at the time, lived in the Baja orphanage and occassionally worked for the local contractor mentioned in his invented story. He was working alone on the contractors’ farm on that day, when Tamás Till, a boy he didn’t know, came along on a nearby industrial road, and invited him to the farm under the pretence of needing help. Janos lured the young boy into a wood storage, where brutally beat him to death with his bare hands and a carpenter’s staple. The murderer moved the body on a wheelbarrow into the outbuilding, wrapped it into a tarp and buried it, because he knew that the owner of the farm wanted to cover it with concrete. A few days later the farm’s owner, and another resident of the local orphanage poured cement over the floor, unaware of what lay beneath. It was not revealed to the public what motivated Janos to commit the brutal murder, but some theories suggest it was sexually motivated. Janos, now a 40-year-old man who runs many businesses in Hungary, didn’t tell his terrible secret for anyone for 24 years. However, according to Hungarian criminal laws (that stipulates that the maximum penalty is capped at 15 years for offenses committed by juveniles), because he was under 18 at the time he committed the murder, his criminal liabilty had expired in 2015. Despite his confession, Janos was initially released, but due to strong public pressure he was captured and re-arrested. In order to close legal loopholes that allowed juveniles to evade accountability for even qualified homicide, new criminal laws will take effect on 1 January 2025. Continue reading
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