Our woman sadist, unlike de Sade, was a practising person, i.e. she wrote no books but killed and tortured to her heart's content. In 1611, aged fifty, the Hungarian noblewoman Erzsebet Bathory was walled up alive in her castle in the Minor Carpathians for having killed some six hundred young girls in various ways. The judge at her trial appears to have been particularly concerned that she murdered noblewomen as well as mere servant-girls. Bathory used a number of ingenious devices. For instance, she put a terrified naked girl in a narrow iron cage equipped with inward-pointing spikes to pierce the victim: then Bathory would hoist the cage to the ceiling and sit beneath to enjoy the rain of blood that came down. Another device was a robot - wearing real teeth torn from a servant - designed to clasp a victim in a tight embrace, whereupon sharp spikes would shoot out from the robot: the blood of the victim ran down a channel, was warmed over a fire, and collected for the countess's bath.