The merchant refused to sell his horses. Jasper Hanebuth had offered a price so wretched that the purchase already resembled a confiscation; met with this refusal, he declared that by the following morning the beasts would no longer belong to their master. He threatened the man’s wife as well: the house might burn, and everything within it perish. This time, his words encountered someone unwilling to wait for their fulfillment.
Medefeld, the merchant, laid a formal complaint before the council of Hanover. On November 14, 1652, Hanebuth was apprehended. The account published in the nineteenth century by Rudolf Hartmann accords this denunciation a decisive weight. The man who was soon to be charged with nineteen murders was not run down after an exhaustive manhunt through the woods. He was well known in the town; he frequented it, sold his wares there, and drank in its taverns. A threat leveled over horses turned that familiar presence into an occasion for his capture.
A Man Who Kept Returning to Sell
Hanebuth was a native of Groß-Buchholz, near Hanover. The Thirty Years’ War had torn through the fabric of his life. Early accounts place him in service among the soldiery, interweaving his military wanderings with a sequence of violent acts whose precise chronology remains difficult to establish. When peace returned, he did not emerge from some distant frontier: the outskirts of the town, its highways, and its hamlets were entirely familiar to him.
He traded in horses. Between a beast led to market and the story its seller offers of its provenance, there lies an ambiguous space wherein theft easily conceals itself. Hanebuth frequented the houses of Hanover, showed his animals, and found willing buyers. The spoils did not languish beneath the trees of the forest. They entered ordinary commerce, and such traffic implied not some romantic den of thieves, but rather a chain of mundane transactions whose origins were not too closely questioned.
The facts gathered by Hartmann are of an unadorned, unglamorous brutality. Near Celle, a merchant hailing from Uelzen was reportedly slain for a silk garment and a handful of thalers. Elsewhere, a man dressed in a fine coat was struck down by gunfire; the garments stripped from him proved so infested with vermin that the killer reaped none of the anticipated profit. In this latter instance, the failure of the theft did not soften the death: it rendered its motive all the more harrowing.
These episodes stem from the judicial tradition recorded by the historian. The victims often appear merely as a trade, an origin, or an object, for lack of names preserved in the chronicle. The peddler becomes the one who had a few coins; the soldier, the one whose coat was coveted. A man’s entire existence was thus reduced, post-mortem, to whatever the murderer had hoped to strip from his person.
The Pathways of the Trade
Hanebuth did not always operate alone. Hans Stille and other men appear at his side in several affairs. Hartmann relates in particular the murder of a companion whose indiscretions they had come to dread. In the sharing of perils as in that of profits, he who knew too much might in turn become the one who had to be removed. Violence knew no boundary at the edge of the gang.
In 1647, a trumpeter riding toward Burgdorf was reportedly killed in the woods of Misburg. His assailants took his weapon and his coat, inside of which was found a receipt, before casting the corpse into a ditch. The following year, two soldiers were dragged from the road into the underbrush and stripped of their clothing after being slain. They carried no coin. Of the sought-after gain, nothing remained save the cloth the men wore upon their backs.
Another episode involved a sutler and his boy, near the List. The stolen horses, according to Hartmann, were kept for several days in a Hanover house before being sold. The detail is significant: it gives the flight an address, the plunder a period of harbor, and the operations a domestic tie to the burghers themselves. While a body lay undiscovered in the thickets, the stolen beasts could be examined and bargained over like any ordinary merchandise.
In 1651, a shepherd was reportedly forced into a pit near Seelze before being shot dead. The account notes nine groschen and a piece of linen carried away. Such petty plunder held little of the grandeur that legend would later confer upon a man imagined as an uncrowned sovereign of the forest. The paltry value of the objects did not palliate the acts; it merely exposed what a traveler became whenever the man who crossed his path saw nothing in him but his pockets and his bundle.
Hartmann attributes Hanebuth’s prolonged impunity to the habits of violence left in the wake of the war and to the silence of those who lived in fear of him. Such an explanation belongs to the historian; it does not reveal what each neighbor truly knew. Medefeld’s complaint, at the very least, marked a tangible rupture. A named individual, an explicit threat, and an appeal to the town council finally delivered Hanebuth into the hands of justice.
What He Confessed
The interrogations brought to light matters far graver than the initial threat. Hartmann records five separate examinations, noting that the second was held in the torture chamber. He describes the deliberate use of the fear of torment to break what the judges termed the prisoner’s persistent denials. The confessions to which the inquiry ultimately led must be understood within these conditions. The figure of nineteen murders is the tally officially retained against him; it does not, by mere repetition, represent nineteen equally elucidated cases.
The chronicle even imputes to him an inability to recall the entirety of his violent deeds. The judges solicited legal opinions from three distinct university faculties before decreeing the punishment of the wheel. The inquest had thus transformed a local arrest into a weighty, formalized procedure, whose voluminous briefs and consultations were required to sustain an irrevocable sentence.
Meanwhile, the prisoner was cold. The municipal accounts transcribed by August Jugler preserve an entry for December 22, 1652: stockings were furnished to him on account of the bitter frost. Other items record a linen nightshirt and straw for his bedding. The man whose crimes were being cataloged remained also, for the town that held him captive, a body to be clothed and kept alive until the day of judgment.
On February 4, 1653, the sentence was carried out before the Steintor. The court had assembled beneath the arcades of the town hall; the condemned man was subsequently led to the place of execution. He had been granted wine, which the ledgers record as having been used for a warm soup and during his transit. They also record the payment rendered for the wheel.
Following the execution, the judges, magistrates, and pastors received the measures of wine prescribed by custom. In the very same register, the prisoner’s straw, the stockings granted out of Christian charity, and the instrument of his death each bore their itemized cost. The town was able to balance these accounts. It could not balance in the same manner the absences left along the roads, nor could it restore a name to those whom history remembered only as a coat, a receipt, or a few coins.