It was said that she had supernatural powers. And people believed her, even when she took everything from them – literally everything.
“Maria sat next to me in the car and looked at me, but not through her eyes. It was someone else who was looking at me. She drove but just looked at me and talked to me. I asked her: Who are you? Then this person said through Mary: The good Lord.”
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If Harald Ucherer hadn’t moved so quickly back then, perhaps she would have gotten away with all of it: the talk of the end of the world and the “cleansing” by fire, the lies and fraud and everything that came afterwards. If the usurer hadn’t answered the phone back then, he wouldn’t have put two and two together straight away, perhaps something even worse would have happened.
Maybe the three women they call “the witches of Villach” in Carinthia and all of Austria would still be gliding through the village streets in their cars, looking for someone lonely to whom they would first promise everything and then everything take.