On the ninth of November 1816, Wilhelm Coenen departed the tavern in the Mühlengasse, having dined with his principal and several companions. He had offered to accompany the bookkeeper Hahnenbein part of the way. In the midst of the Alter Markt, the two men parted company. Hahnenbein watched him turn aside, presuming he was retracing his steps toward the inn. Coenen did not return. His failure to appear would transform a dispute over ledgers into a capital investigation, and thereafter into a momentous trial whose ultimate conclusion directly contradicted the verdict.
Coenen was a young clerk in the employ of the distiller Franz Schröder, of Crefeld. Schröder traded in spirits and liqueurs in copartnership with the merchant Peter Anton Fonk, established at Cologne. The accounts rendered to Schröder had fallen far short of his expectations. Suspecting Fonk of concealing revenues, and with his distrust inflamed by intimations from certain of Fonk’s employees, he dispatched Coenen to examine his partner’s books.
The emissary was adroit with figures, yet youthful and, according to the chronicler, already prejudiced against Fonk. The interviews brought no appeasement. In particular, Coenen demanded inspection of the general ledger; Fonk deemed such insistence humiliating and detrimental to his commercial credit. The Pitaval recounts the grievances voiced by both men to their confidants: the one complaining that these disputes made his life bitter, the other protesting that he was being treated like a gendarme watching over his house. These words proceed from a retrospective account, not from a stenographic transcript.
On the ninth of November, Schröder, Fonk, Coenen, and Hahnenbein held a conference at Fonk’s dwelling. They agreed upon a compromise: Fonk would credit eight thousand thalers to the joint profit account, whereupon the audit would cease; certain subsidiary conditions were never established with certainty. The agreement was to be concluded on the morrow. It was not to be. At the tavern, Coenen dined with Schröder, Hahnenbein, and several others. He then took up his hat and took his leave. Hahnenbein reported neither altercation nor incident upon their departure; he could only affirm that he had not seen him reach his lodgings.
On the following day, all searches proved fruitless. The books, for their part, remained unsettled. Public suspicion fastened swiftly upon Fonk: he had been in bitter contention with the vanished youth, had denied access to the ledger, and had sought to remove the negotiation to Neuss. Schröder openly voiced his accusations. Friends of Coenen took them up, while verses hostile to Fonk circulated through the streets. The chronicler observes that these verses may well have been composed at a later date; public clamor does not constitute contemporaneous evidence of guilt.
Fonk presented himself spontaneously before the King’s prosecutor on the twentieth of November to state the nature of his dealings with Coenen and Schröder. Two days later, three associates of the missing man came to interrogate him. Fonk read them a letter, asserted his innocence, and wept. He subsequently sought counsel from Police Inspector Guisez, who noted that his visitor’s demeanor had done nothing to dispel his suspicions. Such actions lent themselves to opposing constructions: the natural distress of an innocent man, or the perturbation of one who knows what the law seeks. The record does not permit a decisive choice between them.
The commercial litigation pursued its own course. Arbitrators examined the accounts in January 1817, and resumed their labors in August. The second examination concluded that Schröder still owed the copartnership 7,791 thalers, whereas Fonk held a far larger credit. A distinct inquiry into the alleged falsification of the accounts failed to establish that the entries had been forged; the Pitaval records that Fonk was acquitted thereof and recovered his books. This outcome must be distinguished from the initial ruling in the homicide investigation, wherein Fonk and Hahnenbein were merely “discharged from the instance” for want of sufficient evidence—a formula that left the substance of the murder charge unresolved. Neither proceeding answered the question of what had befallen Coenen.
Touching the fate of the young clerk, the chronicle contains a divergence that must not be smoothed away. In the course of the narrative, it relates that a corpse was discovered on the nineteenth of December near Friemersheim, in a flooded tract of the Rhine. Farther on, the royal decree therein transcribed designates Coenen as having been “found in the Rhine on the twelfth of December 1816.” The text leaves this discrepancy between the nineteenth and the twelfth unresolved; the present relation therefore preserves it as an internal contradiction of the source, without assigning either date to an established correction.
More than twenty inhabitants of Crefeld identified the remains under oath. The body was fully clothed; the hat was missing, but a gold watch remained in the pocket. Two buttons of the overcoat appeared to have been torn away, carrying with them part of the lining. Hard by, there floated a long fir plank. The conjecture that the corpse had been lashed to it was entertained, but subsequently dismissed by the chronicler as an inference unsupported by the circumstances described.
The physicians summoned by the examining magistrate noted wounds to the head and lesions about the neck and breast. Their initial report attributed death to external violence, conjecturing cerebral concussion and strangulation prior to submersion. Experts consulted at a later stage disputed whether the marks were sufficient to demonstrate strangulation, suggesting that floating ice or the action of the river might account for certain injuries. The source recites these conflicting opinions without recording any medical unanimity. The remains were dealt with as those of a victim of homicide, yet the medico-legal certainty remained contested.
The inquest presently turned toward Christian Hamacher, a cooper in Fonk’s employ. Following a brawl at the Kümpchen tavern, he was placed under surveillance and subsequently arrested on the thirtieth of January 1817. The police resorted to methods that today appear disquieting: a convicted thief was set upon him, and a conversation between Hamacher and his wife was overheard without their knowledge. The compiler records these expedients as the standard practices of the age, yet they assume particular gravity when the accusation came to rest almost entirely upon words uttered in detention.
Hamacher at first denied all knowledge of the deed. In the spring, he delivered several circumstantial relations. On the sixteenth of April, he affirmed that Fonk had solicited him to make away with Coenen; he described the conveyance of the corpse in a cask, asserting that his brother Adam had furnished a cart. On the seventh of May, he retracted a portion of his statements, only to confirm their substance shortly thereafter. Two days later, according to the chronology of the Pitaval, he reiterated his account before the magistrates. He maintained that Fonk had engaged him, whilst altering certain particulars of the transport and ceasing to implicate his brother.
His admissions thus shifted, yet they were not swept away at a single stroke. Hamacher later maintained that the Procureur-Général von Sandt had dictated his confession, that he had been incited to take vengeance upon Fonk, and that the rigors of his confinement had broken his spirit. He further charged the authorities with ill-treatment. To these retractions the prosecution opposed the circumstantial consistency and persistence of a large portion of his statements. The Pitaval takes a decisive stand: it deems it incredible that a man could have sustained so elaborate a narrative over so long a period without personal knowledge of the facts. Such is the reasoning of the chronicler, whose text defends the veracity of the confession; it is not an impartial assessment of the duress employed.
The two accused were not tried together. On the thirty-first of October 1820, the Assize Court of Trier found Hamacher guilty of voluntary manslaughter and condemned him to penal servitude for life. His appeal was dismissed in January 1821. The proceedings against Fonk pursued their course independently. His trial opened on the twenty-fourth of April 1822 and concluded on the ninth of June. The jury found him guilty of premeditated participation in the murder by eight votes to four; seven only declared him the direct perpetrator. The court pronounced sentence of death. In August, the Court of Cassation rejected his petition.
The sentence, however, was never confirmed by the King of Prussia. On the twenty-eighth of July 1823, the Sovereign Decree set forth three principal grounds: the fact of homicide was not established beyond doubt, Hamacher’s retraction was more credible than his accusations, and Fonk’s alibi had been sufficiently demonstrated. The King declared that he could hold neither Fonk nor Hamacher liable to punishment, and refused either to confirm the sentence or to commute it to a lesser penalty. Fonk’s liberation ensued; a subsequent order likewise remitted the costs that had been assessed against him.
The chronicler does not conceal his own conviction. He accords extensive space to the inculpatory testimony and holds that Hamacher’s vacillations did not impair the veracity of his initial narrative. Nevertheless, he faithfully transcribes the grounds of the royal decree, the medical reservations, and the flaws of the preliminary inquest. The affair broadened into a vehement debate upon Rhenish justice, the jury system, the nature of confessions, and the influence of public clamor. The sovereign decision arrested the penalty; it did not name another murderer.
The ultimate uncertainty resides, perhaps, in the manner in which the words of an accused man are weighed. Had Hamacher disclosed a crime in which he had taken part, or merely repeated under duress a narrative whose outlines the magistrates had already traced? Fonk was condemned, then set at liberty; the death of Coenen was pronounced violent, then contested. Even the date of the discovery wavers within the pages of the chapter. What the record establishes with the utmost clarity is not the hand of the assassin, but the succession of certitudes asserted, withdrawn, and ultimately refused.