For years, Agnes had been silent. Silent about her own abuse, silent about the unnatural series of killings on which she and her father had embarked. Of course, she had tried to tell the story, or at least part of it, before. But no one had been listening. So she simply remained silent.

They were listening now. For two days in October of 1997, she talked. Her confession took several hours, authorities would later say.

It was, she told authorities, at her father's behest that she killed her own mother. Together, between 1986 and 1992, they killed her stepmother and three of her siblings. They disposed of the bodies in the most gruesome way.

When the case finally made it to court earlier this year, jurors would get a taste of just how awful that disposal had been.

Forensic scientists, working for the prosecution, took body parts harvested from a man who had died of natural causes, and as a video camera recorded the experiment, they dumped the viscera into a vat of Cleanest. The household cleanser has since, for reasons unrelated to the Pandy case, been pulled from the market.

The acid bath worked just as Agnes had claimed. The remains of the man who had donated his body to science simply vanished into the frothy pool of chemicals.

When the tape was played in court, Pandy was unmoved. But Agnes averted her eyes.

Agnes, Andras & Tunde Pandy (Reuters/Landrov)

The gruesome image on the screen seemed, observers would later say, to bring all the horror back to Agnes. Illen Sores, Edit Fintor, her daughters, Andrea and Tunde. Agnes own brothers, Zoltan and Daniel. Their deaths were brutal. Their dismemberment was even more savage. Seeing it stunned her back into silence.

But as she sat in Monsiuer's office on that October afternoon in 1997, she was anything but silent. She told the police how she and her father chopped up the corpses using kitchen knives and axes before dissolving the remains. She told them how she had eviscerated one of her own stepsisters with her own hands. "It was my task to take out the organs while Pandy was cutting up the remains," she said. "I just used a kitchen knife . . . you have to exercise strength. It's not that easy."

The only real sensation she could recall, she would later testify was this: "It felt cold."

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