The Dying Man Had Lived Long Enough to Speak
The men who abandoned Christoph Pfister near the Gaisbühlhof had committed a single error: they had left him alive. On the morning of April 5, 1786, he was discovered grievously wounded, unable to rise. Carried to a neighboring farm, he still found the strength to utter names. He did not survive the journey to Reutlingen; but before the cart reached the city gates, his assailants had ceased to be nameless phantoms encountered in the dark.
Pfister served as a horse grenadier in the forces of Württemberg. His former companions knew him by the name of Toni. Chief among those he denounced was a man called Hannikel, whose true name was Jakob Reinhard. With his brother Wenzel and several kinsmen, he roamed the southwestern German territories and adjacent lands. The borders that halted or delayed legal pursuit never impeded their wanderings or their enterprises. Yet Pfister’s murder was to compel the authorities to seek their quarry far beyond those frontiers.
The root of this vengeance was an old grievance. Mantua, formerly Wenzel’s companion, had abandoned him for Pfister. Threats had followed the rupture; for several years, they had remained unfulfilled. Pfister had taken the king’s shilling, yet he continued to travel, hawking porcelain whenever he obtained leave. He had never entirely severed ties with the world that held this grudge against him. An encounter with Ursula, Hannikel’s stepdaughter, brought him once more within reach of his enemies.
According to the account drawn from the official inquiry and published in 1787 by Christian Friedrich Wittich, Ursula informed the men of an assignation arranged with Pfister. Hannikel sanctioned the expedition. Wenzel, Duli, Nottelen, and others took part in the ambush. Some intended to maim him, others to break his limbs; any flight by the soldier was to be prevented by force of arms. What was purported to be the redress of a private insult had assumed the character of a collective enterprise.
Vengeance Beneath the Boughs
On the evening of April 4, the men drew near the appointed rendezvous and posted themselves along the path. Ursula was to hold Pfister’s attention. By the time he perceived the danger, he was already surrounded. The firearms primed in the opening moments failed to discharge; clubs and blades took their place. Pfister attempted to flee, was overtaken, thrown to the ground, and beaten by several assailants. The violence continued until he lay virtually motionless.
The subsequent interrogations sought to distinguish the part played by each man. Hannikel, it was said, held the victim down and inflicted mutilations; Wenzel struck with his edged weapon, while Duli and Nottelen laid on with their cudgels. Each man later attempted to diminish his own share by pleading the authority of their leader. Yet the scene had produced injuries that surgeons could formally attest, and a witness who, for a few crucial hours, was the dying man himself.
The news spread swiftly. The names recorded from his lips were published in warrants of arrest. At Sulz, the magistrate Jacob Georg Schäffer, already engaged in the suppression of wandering bands, organized the search. He relied in particular upon two men familiar with the fugitives: Matthes and Hans Jerg Reinhardt. Their assistance was rewarded with coin, and their intimate knowledge of the suspects proved far more serviceable than the vague descriptions with which magistrates often accompanied their requisitions. The hand of justice found its bearings in human relations that the accused still hoped to disavow.
Arrests were made in Württemberg. Other members of the band had made their way toward Switzerland. In August, word arrived from Chur: several suspects had been seized near Zizers after a hunting party led by the Count de Salis stumbled upon their encampment. Schäffer obtained authorization to claim them. He set out with an escort and carriages, taking with him an informant capable of identifying those who might present themselves under false names.
The Man Who Denied His Name
At Chur, the interrogations began with questions of identity. Hannikel insisted he was Kilian Schmid, a huntsman by trade. He was confronted with the informant, then with his own brothers. He persisted in his denial. Such obstinacy could not alter his features, yet it delayed the moment when he would have to answer for the deed: before being transferred as a murderer, he sought to remain a traveler taken by mistake.
Then, on the eve of their departure, he escaped. The guards discovered that a prisoner secured in heavy irons had somehow vanished. Schäffer found himself obliged to treat simultaneously with the local authorities, with the men dispatched to recapture the fugitive, and with jailers whose custody fees he now bitterly disputed. In the contemporary chronicle, the costs of detention occupy a place almost as vexatious as the flight itself. Money had to be paid to receive a prisoner; and the man to be received was gone.
The hue and cry spread into the mountains. Hannikel attempted to reach a pass, encountered snow, and sought another way. Peasants had caught sight of him; their reports eventually reached his pursuers. Recaptured after another attempt at flight, he was brought to Bad Ragaz and then to Sargans. He tried yet another identity, calling himself Johannes Lagarell, and petitioned not to be surrendered to foreign authorities. Schäffer returned to claim him. In September 1786, the convoy reached Sulz; this time, the heavy gates closed behind him for good.
Confessions did not come all at once. Confrontations multiplied. The members of the band, examined separately, recounted their movements and their assaults. Duli provided a verifiable detail: Pfister’s pistol had been left with a man in Abtsgmünd. The weapon was demanded, and it duly arrived in Sulz. The prosecution no longer rested solely on contradictory tales that the accused could cast back and forth; a physical object had retraced the very path one of them had described.
Old Cases Reopened
Behind the murder, a long catalog of robberies came to light. The parsonage at Eltingen, various workshops, farmsteads, and several families of Jewish merchants had been raided. Certain ventures were mere housebreakings; others had coupled plunder with torture to extort the hiding places of savings. At Dettwiller and Marienthal, the band had even pretended to act as a French patrol dispatched to seize contraband. A uniform or the appearance of lawful command had served to disarm the vigilance of neighbors.
These Jewish victims were no mere extras in a tale of the highway. Their losses, their wounds, and their formal depositions formed integral parts of the prosecution’s dossier. At Marienthal, Hannikel contested certain acts of cruelty described by the master of the house; his brother contradicted him. This detail reveals an inquiry intent on weighing versions of the truth, even if the contemporary text that records it remains colored by the anti-Jewish prejudices of the era.
A further revelation concerned victims of an entirely different nature. Following the sack of Mittelbronn in 1768, seven men from Lutzelbourg had been condemned—four to death and three to the galleys. Yet Hannikel and Wenzel named entirely different participants. Questioned anew, they affirmed that they did not know the condemned men as accomplices. The account published in 1787 denounced this as a miscarriage of justice and called for a search for the survivors. The archival text does not record the outcome of this appeal; it reveals, however, that the dismantling of a band could reopen an affair that the courts had declared settled far too hastily.
At the conclusion of the proceedings at Sulz, Hannikel, Wenzel, Duli, and Nottelen were sentenced to the gallows. On July 17, 1787, they were led to the place of execution. Hannikel was condemned to die last, having watched his companions hang; members of their families had been brought thither to witness the spectacle. The execution was intended as a public lesson, down to the children compelled to look upon the fate of their fathers.
Justice had caught the scent of the soldier’s death in the confessions of his killers, and behind them, had uncovered years of pillaged homes. It could not restore Pfister to life, nor could it undo the errors the law itself might have committed elsewhere. When the cart halted before the gallows, two opposing trajectories reached their end together: the fugitives had run out of roads; while other cases, thought to have been closed for eighteen years, were only just beginning anew.