Geza de Kaplany

Marriage In June 1962, he met Hajna Piller, daughter of Olympic fencer György Piller , who was also from Hungary. She was a 25-year-old former fashion model, beauty queen, and showgirl at Bimbo's 365 Club. Despite Piller already being engaged to a Hungarian engineer, the two had a whirlwind courtship and married that August. A few weeks after their marriage, de Kaplany heard from a friend that his wife had continued dating her boyfriend. de Kaplany carried out his plan to punish his wife for her supposed infidelity. He tied her to the bed in their apartment, played loud music and disfigured her body with a scalpel. He dabbed a mixture of hydrochloric, sulfuric and nitric acid in the cuts, causing her to suffer third degree corrosive burns over most of the front of her body. After three hours, he called police. He told police that he had wanted to destroy her beauty, but not kill her. She recovered enough to give a statement, but died on 30 September in St. Francis Memorial Hospital. He was initially charged with attempted murder, and was later charged with murder by torture after his wife died. brought a witness, Ruth Krueger, a former lover who testified otherwise. He was declared legally sane, though medically insane.

He was convicted of first-degree murder, but the testimony of a psychiatrist who claimed that de Kaplany had become a "paranoid schizophrenic with latent homosexual tendencies" Superior Court Judge Raymond G. Callaghan formally sentenced him on 15 March. He was sent to California Institution for Men.

His license to practice was revoked by the California Board of Medical Examiners on 9 March 1964, for violating sections 2378 and 2383 (moral turpitude and unprofessional conduct ) of the Business and Professions Code.

He appealed his conviction in the California state and federal courts, but the Ninth Circuit ultimately upheld his conviction in a 1976 opinion that issued after de Kaplany had already been granted parole and left the United States. decision marked by accusations that postmortem photographs of his victim were removed from his file by Raymond Procunier, the chairman of the California state parole authority for men, prior to review of de Kaplany's case by the parole board. As a result, the ability to be paroled while under the sentence of life imprisonment was removed.

The parole board under Procunier allowed de Kaplany to travel to Taiwan on 13 November 1975, to work as a medical missionary doctor serving poor patients in a Catholic hospital in Lutsao. De Kaplany left the United States before his prosecutors and the general public knew he had been paroled. Negative public reaction followed, with legislators calling for Procunier's ouster.

De Kaplany worked at the Lutsao clinic for the next four years, and remarried. Tired of constant parole checks, he left Taiwan in late 1979 and dropped out of sight. Two years prior, he had become a naturalized German citizen, making it impossible to extradite him for the parole violation.