Gizella Bodnár

Gizella Bodnár (born October 18, 1926 in Miskolc, Hungary) known as Repülős Gizi (“Airplane Gizi”) is a Hungarian criminal, who became known in the early 1950s. According to the media, she was famous for using the then-frequent domestic flights to travel to different cities, break into houses there, then fly home, avoiding suspicion, since police wouldn't suspect someone living that far away from the crime scene.

She was the fourth of six children of a railroad engineer father and a housewife mother. She began to steal smaller things while still a child; she attributed her kleptomania to meningitis she survived at the age of six. Later she studied in Kassa, when World War II broke out; it was stress that brought out her kleptomania again.

In the early 1950s, when Malév, the national airline company used to provide inland flights between cities, she often flew from Budapest to Miskolc, Debrecen, Szeged, Pécs and Szombathely, broke into houses, then flew back to the capital with the evening flight. She also committed break-ins abroad, in Amsterdam, London and Paris.

She was arrested twenty-one times between 1948 and 2006, stood trial over 20 times and was convicted to a total of 40 years in prison. She spent a total of 16 years and 7 months in prison. Later she moved to the town of Komárom, where she was arrested in January 2009, at the age of 82, for breaking into a house.

She published her memoirs in 2007, with the title Repülős Gizi – A tolvajok királynője (“Airplane Gizi, Queen of Thieves”). Her most recent arrests happened in Hungary, in June and September 2015; in the latter instance, she was found in a cupboard, where she claimed she hid from the rain outside.