The Fiancée Who Foresaw Everything
A gentleman writes to the daily press inquiring whether a betrothed woman may lawfully inherit the entirety of her prospective husband’s estate. The query belongs to that vast multitude of modest bourgeois anxieties which editorial offices routinely accommodate between a commercial notice and the local parish news. The correspondent signs his name Alexander Hermsdorf. He does not exist. Behind this pseudonym stands Grete Beier, daughter of the burgomaster of Brand, in Saxony; and behind this legal consultation there already begins to take shape a testament of which the true testator would never dictate a single line.
Grete was twenty-two years of age when she stood trial, on the 29th of June 1908, before the Assize Court of Freiberg. The deceased was named Kurt Preßler. An engineer in Chemnitz, thirty-four years old, he had believed himself to be preparing for his wedding. She was preparing his disappearance, and subsequently the explanation of that disappearance; for this affair encompasses two nested crimes: the destruction of a man, and the fabrication of an existence designed to render his demise plausible.
Between them stood Hans Merker, a young commercial clerk encountered at a ball in February 1905. Grete had secretly plighted her troth to him. The following year, she had made the acquaintance of Preßler, whose station offered a respectable family far sounder prospects than Merker’s financial embarrassments. A betrothal had been broken off, then renewed. Outwardly, decorum resumed its proper arrangement; inwardly, nothing had been resolved. Grete continued to see the other man, to supply him with funds, and to promise him a future to which Preßler remained the sole obstacle.
It would be convenient to distribute the roles at this juncture: a coerced maiden, a tyrannical seducer, an inconvenient fiancé. The trial confounded them all. Grete accused Merker of holding her in his thrall by threatening to expose an abortion; Merker denied any blackmail and depicted their liaison in terms calculated to diminish his own culpability. Before the magistrates, each offered a version wherein the other had occupied the larger share. One certainty endured: the need for money had already driven Grete far beyond the ordinary deceits of romance.
An Italian Lady of Paper
An elderly kinswoman, Frau Kröner, possessed capital and a savings ledger. With the assistance of a midwife, Grete laid hands upon these securities, then presented herself at the bank under the name of Erna Kröner to withdraw the funds. At the beginning of May 1907, Merker received several thousand marks. The fortune she thus brought him belonged to living proprietors; this difficulty, to her mind, seemed one that might yet be brushed aside with another stroke of the pen.
The selfsame resource provided Preßler with an Italian wife. One Leonore Veroni dispatched letters detailing a clandestine marriage, an unfortunate kinship, and the looming menace of a scandal. Yet Leonore was merely a phantom of Grete’s invention. The young woman was writing both sides of her forthcoming misfortune: she would be the betrayed fiancée, and the dead man would be the wretch crushed by the revelation of a former union. Thus the suicide would not appear without a motive; it would find upon the writing-table the very evidence that had allegedly provoked it.
This fabrication was not without its material advantage. A forged testament bequeathed Preßler’s entire estate to Grete. Public grief was to be swiftly succeeded by an inheritance. The two designs sustained each other: the Italian wife explained the death, the will rewarded the German betrothed; it was required only that no one demand of the two handwritings that they recount anything other than what they had been commissioned to say.
On the 13th of May 1907, Grete journeyed to Chemnitz. Preßler came to meet her. In his lodgings, he occupied himself with the coffee, the cream, and those small domestic attentions that fill the ordinary hours of a visit. She caused him to drink a draught of poison. When he collapsed, she discharged a revolver into his body and arranged the room so as to compel the conclusion of a suicide. The letters and the testament were left upon the premises. By evening, she had taken the train back to Freiberg; the crime now lay behind a locked door, in another city.
On the morrow, a charwoman, Frau Robel, discovered the corpse. The constable who arrived to record the death found the revolver and the papers. Neighbours had heard a report without imagining it proceeded from the engineer’s apartment. Nothing had interrupted Grete; now, everything appeared to corroborate her narrative. A dead man, a weapon, a tale of a concealed marriage: it required far less imagination to accept the suicide than to suspect the woman destined to be its romantic victim.
Had the Dead Man Known His Own History?
Preßler was cremated on the 16th of May. The destruction of the body closed an avenue of verification whose grave importance would only later be measured. His mother and brother initially accepted the explanations tendered to them. Grete took possession of sundry effects from the lodgings; the engineer’s severed existence began to be parcelled out among keepsakes, personal chattels, and the formalities of probate.
Yet the Italian tale suffered from a defect that even the finest forged epistles could not mend: it existed nowhere save in those letters. A sister of the deceased harboured doubts. A friend, Herzog, failed to recognise Preßler in this sudden biography. As for the wish to be cremated, invoked following his death, it bore no resemblance to any desire this friend had ever heard him utter. The papers appeared to speak with admirable precision; the living who had known the man could not discern his voice within their lines.
The inquiry commenced also through another portal. The embezzlements committed to the detriment of Frau Kröner brought Grete behind prison bars. The disarray of her pecuniary affairs pointed directly to Merker; Merker, in turn, led to what she had dropped concerning Preßler’s prospective fate. The detective Fähndrich learned that, prior to the demise, she had already mooted to her lover the possibility that the engineer might take his own life. The hypothesis of suicide ceased to be a discovery made in the wake of tragedy: it revealed itself as a solution announced in advance.
In custody, Grete continued to write. Missives were smuggled out to Merker, notably through the agency of her mother. She solicited his aid, contrived further substitute narratives, and sought the removal of yet another individual—an aunt with an interest in the Kröner inheritance. Upon certain particulars of these schemes, their subsequent depositions were to diverge; the letters themselves, however, furnished the examining magistrate with far firmer ground than their convenient recollections.
Merker surrendered them to the police. This gesture shattered Grete’s final sanctuary: the very man for whom she claimed to have acted could henceforth speak using her own words against her. Her advocate, Dr Knoll, informed her that the correspondence was in the hands of the investigators. Following lengthy conferences with him, she confessed. The fiancé had not been betrayed by an Italian lady; he had been murdered by the woman who presented herself as his forsaken bride.
Those Who Condemn and Those Who Plead for Mercy
A preliminary judgment, rendered on the 5th of June 1908, had already penalised the financial offences. The murder trial followed. Grete admitted the poisoning, the pistol-shot, the forgeries, and their intended purpose. The magistrates were at last able to impose order upon what had at first appeared to belong to disparate histories: the indebted lover, the relative’s savings ledger, the Italian correspondent, the testament, and the revolver.
The proceedings were not thereby rendered simple. There remained to be weighed the premeditation, the criminal responsibility, and the alleged ascendancy of Merker. The latter testified as a man who had everything to lose should he appear more deeply implicated in the crime. The medical experts concluded that the accused’s mental condition did not warrant an exemption from penal liability. The defence sought, within her youth, her emotional dependence, and the general tenor of her conduct, grounds to distinguish the author of a terrible deed from the monstrous figure public curiosity had already begun to construct.
The jurymen returned a verdict of guilty against Grete. Thereupon, the selfsame jurors unanimously petitioned that she be granted royal clemency. Between these two determinations lay the entire dilemma that the verdict could not extinguish: to establish premeditated murder did not necessarily compel those who had found it to desire the execution. Their petition reached the Saxon sovereign. It was rejected.
On the 23rd of July 1908, Grete Beier was guillotined in the courtyard of Freiberg prison. Her mother had visited her once more; her counsel and the prison chaplain accompanied her unto her final hours. The composure attributed to her provided further matter for debate. Knoll discerned therein the solace of religion rather than an added proof of callousness. Even at the scaffold, her demeanour continued to be interpreted by those who had determined in advance what it must signify.
As for Preßler, he had very nearly vanished beneath a biography utterly alien to his own. This remains, perhaps, the most singular feature of the affair: to seize his fortune and his life, Grete had also sought to take possession of his past. A handful of kin refused to recognise their dead in that portrait. Their objection appeared at first remarkably frail when confronted with a testament and a bundle of letters. Yet it restored to the inquest its paramount question: who had written the history that all the world was preparing to believe?