A vote for the killer

For nearly sixty years, her mother's death was shrouded in mystery

In 1952, the sudden death of 22-year-old Marie, who allegedly poisoned herself with luminescent gas, caused a stir in Kroměříž. She is survived by three children. However, the middle daughter, Anna, has never stopped searching for the real story all her life. The files from the investigation were stamped Top Secret in 1956 and went to the basement of the StB archives. Her story maps life in totalitarian Czechoslovakia from 1948 until the opening of the StB archives in 2008, when she finally learned the truth.

In 2008, the StB archives with the most secret files were opened. While the files on her father and his friends were destroyed, the one the StB kept on her mother Maria remained in the archives. In 2010, Anna took possession of a box containing eight hundred documents and the title Marie H., suspected murderer, at the Institute for Research on Totalitarian Regimes. She read about her parents' unhappy marriage and also about the crimes of the 1950s, when those who threatened the building of communism were simply eliminated by murder.