24-year-old murder solved: Identity of little Hungarian boy Tamás Till’s killer revealed

The police have finally solved the 24-year-old mystery surrounding the murder of Tamás Till, revealing that the killer was 16 years old at the time of the crime, announced Gyula Bogdány, Deputy Head of the Criminal Division at the Bács-Kiskun County Police Headquarters. Till, who disappeared 24 years ago, at the age of 11, was found dead this past summer, buried in cement on a farm in Baja. Experts discovered fractures in the ribs, skull, and spine of the skeletal remains.

Since the summer, the police have questioned over 40 people as witnesses and worked with numerous experts. The breakthrough came when János F., a former suspect, confessed to the crime. János F. came under suspicion after it was revealed that he had coerced several witnesses into giving false testimony, 444.hu reported.

Tamás Till’s murderer confessed

The police re-interrogated János F. for the fourth time on 28 November, and he finally admitted to killing Tamás Till and provided a detailed confession. According to his account, on the day of the murder, he met Tamás Till, a boy he didn’t know, on a nearby industrial road, and invited him to the farm under the pretence of needing help.

Once there, János F. attacked the unsuspecting boy without any apparent reason and killed him with a cramp iron.

He later hid the body in a storage building, covered it with a tarp, and buried it, knowing that the area would soon be paved over by József V., the farm’s owner. He discarded the boy’s bike in the overgrown back part of the property, where it was found by a neighbour in July and later confirmed by the police in September.

When József V. returned to the farm, he reprimanded János F. for not progressing with the work, but he never discovered the murder.

On the following Sunday, József V. and another colleague poured cement over the floor, unaware of what lay beneath.

János F., now a 40-year-old family man and entrepreneur in Budapest, never revealed the details of the crime until his confession.

Despite his age at the time, János F.’s criminal liability had expired in 2015, meaning he could only be questioned as a witness and was allowed to leave freely after his interrogation.

High-profile unsolved crime

The murder of Tamás Till had remained one of the most high-profile unsolved crimes in Hungary for 24 years. On 28 May 2000, Till, then a young boy at the age of 11, disappeared while riding his bike to a nearby wildlife park. His bicycle was found three months later, carefully cleaned and placed against a fence.

The breakthrough in the case came this summer when authorities learned that a former resident of a local orphanage, K., had been involved in hiding a child’s body in 2000 under duress. The body was later found under the concrete floor of a building on the farm. DNA testing confirmed the identity as Tamás Till.

The investigation was complicated by the fact that K. committed suicide in 2011, and József V. took his own life in 2021. János F. had previously made statements about the case, but they were inconsistent with his later confession.

Over the years, many false leads emerged, including an anonymous caller who claimed to have seen Till at a train station a year after his disappearance, insisting the boy was alive and knew where he was. The police repeatedly revisited the case, but it wasn’t until this summer that new information led to the breakthrough, 444.hu wrote.

Tamás Till was laid to rest on 5 December, in a white coffin.

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• Missing boy’s body found after 24 years on Hungarian farm – 18+

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