The Trials of Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory

By: TJ Buck

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

THE TRIAL OF GILLES DE RAIS
France, 1440
The clerk wrote many confessions before, but never one that made his hand hesitate.
Ink was meant to record certainty. Dates. Names. Charges. It was designed to trap truth on paper so that it could not escape into rumor. Yet as he sat beneath the vaulted ceiling of the ecclesiastical court, quill hovering above parchment, he felt the familiar betrayal of his craft: that words could also be used to hide what they named.
Gilles de Rais stood a few paces away, unchained. He wasn't required to be restrained. That alone unsettled the room.
A man accused of murder, heresy, and unspeakable crimes against children ought to look like a prisoner, but de Rais was still dressed as a noble. His cloak was brushed. His boots shone. Even now, he occupied space the way men accustomed to command always did , not loudly, but as if the air learned to give way.
The charges were already read. The witnesses already spoke. The court already heard enough to satisfy itself something terrible happened behind the walls of his estates. What remained was ritual: the conversion of knowledge into record, and record into fate.
“Do you understand why you are here?” the presiding judge asked.
De Rais inclined his head. “I do.”
The clerk waited for the expected denial, the reflexive protest that marked the beginning of most trials. Innocence always arrived first, even when it was only a formality.
Instead, de Rais said, “I am here to tell the truth.”
A stir passed through the chamber. Truth wasn't what courts usually received. They received versions, shaped, negotiated, trimmed to fit law and politics. Truth was too unruly to be useful.
The clerk’s quill touched the page. It was the first stroke that would follow Gilles de Rais to the end of his life.
THE TRIAL OF ELIZABETH BÁTHORY
Hungary, 1610
There would be no courtroom. No judges in robes. No witnesses speaking aloud. No accused woman allowed to answer.
Elizabeth Báthory would be tried in ink. Men traveled from estate to estate collecting stories, not evidence, but recollections shaped by fear, envy, and the promise of favor. Each statement was written down, then rewritten, then summarized. Each time it changed, it became more certain.
By the time the pages were bound together, they no longer resembled voices. They resembled a verdict. Elizabeth never saw them. She was already condemned by the time the first accusation reached her.

BACK COVER BLURB
Two trials.
Two names.
Two very different kinds of truth.
In fifteenth-century France, Gilles de Rais, war hero, nobleman, and companion of Joan of Arc, stands accused of crimes so horrific they defy language. His trial unfolds not as legend, but as record: testimony taken, confessions given, a machinery of justice grinding forward with dreadful certainty.
Two centuries later in Hungary, Elizabeth Báthory, one of the most powerful women in Eastern Europe, is charged with acts just as monstrous. But this trial is different. No courtroom. No defense. Only depositions gathered by men who stood to gain from her ruin, and a story that grows darker each time it is repeated.
In this paired historical novel, TJ Buck places these two infamous figures side by side, not to equate them, but to reveal how guilt and myth are manufactured in radically different ways. One case is a descent into documented atrocity. The other is a study in how rumor, politics, and fear can create a monster where the evidence is thin.
Written with the precision of a court transcript and the restraint of serious historical fiction, The Trials of Gilles de Rais & Elizabeth Báthory is not about horror for its own sake. It is about how history decides who is damned, and why.
Some crimes are real.
Some legends are useful.
Both can destroy a life.