Professor Sandor Lazlo was born in 1903 in Transylvania - at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Lazlo's family, a part of the sizable magyar Hungarian minority in Transylvania, chose to emigrate after the Treaty of Versailles placed this territory under the control of the newly-founded state of Romania. Although it is rumored that Lazlo's father had ties to the short-lived Soviet regime of Bela Kun, Lazlo was regarded by the FBI as a loyal American during the Cold War, and never showed any sympathy for Communist ideology. He graduated from Princeton in 1924, and did his graduate work in Eastern European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving his PhD in 1930. His dissertation on medieval Transylvanian nobility includes some of the first original scholarly research on the dreaded Dracula family published in the United States, and included much archival work in Romania. He received tenure as Professor of History at Hillfield University in 1935. It was during this period that he was called suddenly to Dark Oaks plantation in Louisiana to investigate an imposter claiming to be of Hungarian noble descent and using the name Alucard (spell it backwards). Reports of his involvement in the murder trial of Frank Stanley and the subsequent death by burning of Alucard are sketchy and unclear, and he denied until his deathbed that he was guilty of any impropriety. After all, He once absently commented in front of a class many years later. How can a man be murdered when everyone knows he's been dead for five hundred years?