Irish man gets 14 years’ jail for killing US tourist in Hungary in ‘intimate encounter’

A court in Hungary on Thursday sentenced an Irish citizen to 14 years in prison for strangling an American tourist to death in the country’s capital in 2024.

The victim, 31-year-old Mackenzie Michalski from Portland, Oregon, was in Hungary on holiday and reported missing on November 5, 2024, after she was last seen at a nightclub in central Budapest.

Police launched a missing person investigation and reviewed security footage from local nightclubs where they observed Michalski, who went by “Kenzie”, with a man later identified as the suspect in several of the clubs the night of her disappearance.

The man, whom police identified by the initials L.T.M. and was 37 at the time, was detained on November 7 and questioned, and later confessed to the killing.

Investigators said that Michalski and the suspect met at a nightclub and danced before leaving for the man’s rented flat. The man beat and strangled Michalski while they were engaged in an “intimate encounter”, police said.

The Budapest Metropolitan Court on Thursday found the man guilty of murder and sentenced him to 14 years’ imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The roughly 1.5 years he has already spent in detention will count towards his sentence, at the end of which the court ordered his deportation from Hungary.