On May 24, 1859, Gertrud Trößken died within her tavern in Mengede, Westphalia, carried off by an illness that had seized her only the previous day. A mere forty-eight hours prior, she had been bowling ninepins with guests, seemingly in the prime of health. Her demise soon provoked an accusation of murder by poison directed at her husband and their domestic maid, Gertrud Jansen. The attending physicians never reached an accord as to the true cause of death; the law, however, saw fit to pronounce the death penalty upon both prisoners, before royal clemency commuted their punishment to perpetual imprisonment.
The Trößkens were childless. Together they kept an inn; Heinrich, who had assumed his wife’s family name upon their marriage in 1832, was known by all to drink to excess. Gertrud governed the household. In 1858, husband and wife had executed a reciprocal testament, designating one another as sole heir. Jansen had been in their employ for five years. The mistress of the house harbored suspicions of an illicit liaison between her husband and the maid, a grievance she had repeatedly voiced to neighbors. Heinrich, for his part, made no secret of his yearning to take Jansen to wife.
On Sunday, May 22, 1859, nothing presaged the coming catastrophe. Gertrud had entertained visitors and joined in their game of skittles. On Monday the 23rd, she complained of a violent cephalalgia and took to her bed. She rose again around two in the afternoon. Jansen and two other servants were working in the garden, as was a neighbor woman who had come to assist with the day's labor. Around three o’clock, two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls, boarders in the Trößken house returning from their lessons, came upon Gertrud sprawled upon the floor near the stairway leading to the maidservant’s chamber. A physician was summoned in haste, and kin and neighbors kept vigil at the bedside. She expired the following day, near noon.
The testimonies depicted a woman who, having initially complained of a heavy head, soon found herself unable to swallow any sustenance proffered to her. Remembrances varied regarding her bouts of vomiting, their frequency, and their aspect; several witnesses had observed only fragmentary intervals of her final agony. The attending physician, Dr. Funke, initially mooted the hypothesis of an apoplectic stroke. Another practitioner, on the contrary, attributed the entire clinical picture to poisoning. This divergence was no mere academic quibble devised after the fact: upon it rested the terrible question of whether the law might convict the prisoners of murder.
Suspicion first battened upon Heinrich’s own comportment. Shortly after the funeral, he openly consorted with Jansen and declared his purpose to wed her. On July 27, the pair presented themselves before the magistrate to declare their betrothal, pledging to marry within six weeks. Gertrud’s relatives rose in vehement opposition to the union. The strife also turned upon worldly goods: on July 1, Heinrich had conveyed the estate to Caroline, a kinswoman of his late wife, while retaining the usufruct and management of the inn until his death. Such transactions were well calculated to foster suspicion of a shared design; yet, taken alone, they proved nothing of a crime.
It was Reinhold, the deceased woman’s brother-in-law, a watchmaker by trade, who gave the investigation its decisive impetus. He formally declared his belief that Heinrich and Jansen had poisoned Gertrud. The authorities commanded an exhumation, which was conducted on August 5, roughly ten weeks following the interment. Putrefaction was far advanced; the surgeons confined their examination to the abdominal cavity. They separated the viscera, sealed the jars, and dispatched them to Münster for chemical assay. Minute traces of arsenic were reported in certain preparations. Yet the earliest tests remained equivocal, and the analysts confessed themselves unable to weigh the quantity recovered or to determine whether it sufficed to account for death.
The first formal medical report drew a cautious deduction. Dr. Motten opined that an apoplectic seizure might adequately account for the observed phenomena, and that the infinitesimal traces of arsenic did not warrant the conclusion that Gertrud had perished of the drug. Dr. Stricker contended the exact reverse: in his estimation, the detection of poison within the internal organs demonstrated ingestion, while the swift progression of the malady answered perfectly to arsenical poisoning. The provincial medical board, consulted in view of this irreconcilable breach, endorsed this latter view. They ruled that the general symptomology resembled a fatal intoxication, explaining the paucity of residual poison by the abundant vomiting described by the attendants.
As the inquest proceeded, a niece of the deceased furnished fresh matter for the prosecution. Approximately three hours prior to Gertrud’s death, Anna Katharina Trößken had gone to fetch an article from a kitchen cupboard; opening a paper packet, she found a whitish powder, resembling crushed sugar, yet slightly soiled. The niece had then inquired of the servant Jansen what the packet might be. The young woman answered curtly that she must leave it be, as it was no concern of hers. Anna Katharina subsequently swore that this powder resembled the samples of arsenic shown to her during the inquiry. The packet itself had never been secured for forensic appraisal.
A second deposition bore upon the kitchen between two and three in the afternoon of May 23. An apothecary’s assistant named Gaslauf had called to demand payment of an outstanding bill from Heinrich. While standing in the room, he saw a woman open the adjoining bedchamber door and utter to the innkeeper the words: “She has drunk the cup of coffee now.” Gaslauf caught no clear sight of her face, though from the cadence of her voice he presumed it to be Jansen. Heinrich reacted with agitation, rebuking her for not having warned him sooner. Jansen denied having ever set eyes on Gaslauf that day. The incriminating phrase thus rested neither upon positive visual recognition nor upon any certainty on the part of the witness as to who had spoken.
Inquiries conducted among apothecaries, a veterinary practitioner, and a rat-catcher proved equally barren: none could establish that the accused had ever procured arsenic. There remained only a curious discovery recounted by the niece and denied by the maid, a stray phrase overheard by a bystander who saw not the speaker, and a toxicological analysis fiercely contested by the experts themselves.
At the Assize Court of Hamm, on November 8 and 9, 1860, the medical authorities once again maintained their diametrically opposed conclusions. Motten stood by his diagnosis of apoplexy; Stricker adhered to poisoning. Dr. Funke admitted that he had not initially suspected any specific malady, but that having later learned of the discovery of arsenic in the organs, he was now inclined to view the demise as the fruit of poison. The witnesses called for the defense dwelt upon the absence of direct proof and the profound frailty of tests conducted upon a corpse exhumed at so late a date. The jurors declared themselves convinced of the prisoners’ guilt, yet hesitated upon the matter of premeditation. On this capital point, their voices divided seven to five. According to the chronicler, such a division cast upon the bench the duty of fixing the penalty; the court unanimously embraced the majority’s conviction and condemned Heinrich and Jansen to death.
The affair did not end upon the scaffold. At the petition of the defense, the supreme authorities solicited a definitive opinion from the Royal Scientific Deputation for Medical Affairs in Berlin. In February 1862, these eminent arbiters dismantled the previous conclusions. They observed that Gertrud had already suffered from cephalalgia and nausea prior to the suspected draught of coffee, that several decisive symptoms relied upon by the Münster physicians found no support in the depositions, and that the quantity of arsenic remained wholly unmeasured. They concluded that there existed no scientific warrant to affirm that poison had caused the demise, nor any certain proof that it had ever been administered to her.
The chronicler records that this ruling shattered the very foundation of the verdict; yet he observes that other physicians, the jurors, and the judges remained unshaken in their belief in the prisoners' guilt. According to his sources, the Berlin Deputation had itself arrived at its conclusion by a majority of a single vote. On August 19, 1862, the King commuted the capital sentence to life imprisonment and commanded that execution be stayed. In September, the prison gates swung open for Heinrich Trößken and Gertrud Jansen. They had endured nearly two years beneath the shadow of the gallows while men of science debated their fate; the chronicle records neither a formal acquittal nor any subsequent judicial decree establishing beyond doubt what had truly ended the life of Gertrud Trößken.