In the night between the 3rd and 4th of July 1703, a man in a dressing gown ran before his house, crying out that his papers had been stolen and his wife slain. He claimed to have surprised five or six brigands, fought them hand-to-hand, and barely slipped from their grasp. Within the house, Anna Margarethe Heing lay in her bed, struck in the head by a musket ball. The counterpane remained smooth; a strongbox beside the back door had been forced. Yet when the neighbours hurried to the threshold, not one among them had heard the faintest sound of struggle, nor the report of a gun.
The master of the house had himself addressed as the Baron von Münchhausen. Since the preceding spring, he had lived in Halberstadt under this style, speaking of estates near Golding and of a suit at law against Eberstein. He was received as a gentleman, and his advocate, Christian Bemsdorff, introduced him into the circles frequented by Anna Margarethe, the only daughter of a court councillor. Her parents being deceased, she was possessed of an estate at her own disposal. The suitor was not slow to display his properties, his connections, and revenues that, he averred, would shortly fall to him.
They were married at Halberstadt in July 1702. The recorded chapter does not establish whether his promises of wealth were ever verified; it shows above all that the young woman’s fortune soon sustained the household and the couple’s travels. Early in 1703, they journeyed to Jever, where the baron intended to press a claim against the heirs of Protti. Dohrenheim, the district judge, was to expedite the proceedings. In a letter dated June, Anna Margarethe wrote of her happiness, described their new residence, the table and the music, and assured her correspondent that her husband’s affairs stood in good order. This intimate testament lends what followed its full measure: a few weeks later, she was to perish in that very dwelling.
On July 2, the baron dined with Folte, an acquaintance of the couple. He appeared melancholy and pressed him to drink; Folte took his leave towards ten o’clock. The chronicle passes over the day of July 3 in silence. It recounts that a newly repaired bedchamber was to be cleaned late into the night: the maidservant laboured there until nearly midnight with the young manservant, whereupon both fell asleep from exhaustion, the one in the kitchen, the other in his garret. The text fixes the baron’s alarm in the night of July 3 to 4, past one in the morning, without specifying on which day this cleaning had taken place.
He affirmed that a noise had startled him awake, that he thought he had heard the maid, and then perceived several men who had entered the chamber. They had insulted him, demanded bonds, pursued him into the adjoining room, and thrown him to the floor. He had then reached the kitchen, roused the servants, and, at that very moment, heard the fatal shot. The thieves, he declared, had fled through the back door. A chest had been forced open and emptied of coin and papers; yet the bonds they had allegedly demanded were nowhere to be found.
The judicial inquest commenced at once. The town gates were closed, the ramparts placed under watch, the inns searched, and the neighbours and domestics interrogated. No one reported having seen the brigands. The young servant had heard no gunshot; upon stepping into the room, he had seen only the dead baroness and caught the scent of powder. The maid related that her master had awakened her after the shot was fired, without her having previously heard the slightest tumult. The night watchmen had seen a light at eleven o’clock and at midnight, but no longer at one. The baron, for his part, wavered regarding the candle, whether his wife was awake, and his own position in the room.
Above all, there remained one trace that the master of the house had himself effaced: a stain near the casement, which he claimed to have wiped clean before the magistrates arrived. The forced chest showed an actual shortfall, yet this did not establish the truth of the alleged intrusion. A house-to-house search throughout the town disclosed no suspicious stranger; in the bedchamber, the investigators came upon a firearm with its cock drawn back and its pan open, both blackened by powder. The day before, Folte had cleansed this weapon after having discharged it at the baron’s command. It now bore fresh traces of firing.
Folte then retraced the couple’s recent journeys. At Wittmund, the baron had purchased musket balls; later, Folte learned that he had also procured powder at Esens. When his friend asked him whether he still possessed any ammunition, he answered that only two balls remained to him. These he handed to Folte, imploring him to make them disappear. Folte carried them straight to the court. The magistrate subsequently obtained a ball bought at Wittmund: its calibre matched the projectile extracted from under the pillow of the deceased, whereas the two balls delivered by the baron were of a larger bore. Far from dispelling suspicion, this discrepancy raised a new question: what had become of the balls purchased at Wittmund?
Arrested on July 7, the baron initially adhered to his narrative. He styled himself Friedrich Karl von Münchhausen, the son of an officer and a noble mother, formerly a lieutenant and then a captain, decorated by the Kings of Sweden and England. He could produce neither patent of nobility, nor military discharge, nor any document that might substantiate his claims. By degrees, he admitted to having lied regarding the decorations, his commissions, and a debt owed by the Count of Schaumburg. Letters signed Fabian von Sternburg, Baron of Scharrenschild, were compared with his hand; he confessed to having written them under that name.
He then advanced an alternative explanation for the death. He had wished, he alleged, to shoot his wife’s pet dog, which she jealously kept even in her bed; the firearm had discharged too hastily and struck Anna Margarethe. He sued for clemency, offering to endow a chapel and to forfeit his financial claims. The neighbours examined under oath failed to confirm the alleged drunkenness. Folte declared that the baron had taken only two glasses of spirits throughout the day and scarce any wine. No witness claimed to have seen any accident. The tale of the dog remained solely his own, just as the story of the brigands had been before.
His true identity gradually emerged beneath these successive names. From Golding, the widow of a Lieutenant Münchhausen wrote to the government of Jever that the prisoner was her son-in-law, Fabian von Sternburg, Baron of Scharrenschild, and that her daughter Sophie Elisabeth was his lawful wife. The pastor Johannes Schuck confirmed their nuptials. Letters written by Sternburg, both anterior and subsequent to his marriage with Anna Margarethe, were produced before the court. In one, dispatched from Bremen on October 8, 1702, he addressed his wife at Golding three months after having wed Anna at Halberstadt. He could no longer maintain that he believed her to be dead.
Another woman, Katharina Margarethe Herckels, likewise presented herself at Jever. She related that she had wed the baron at Hanover in 1699, in a ceremony she believed to have been solemnised by an ordained priest. The investigation established that a non-commissioned officer dressed in a black cloak had played the part; the baron had stripped her of her securities and deserted her with a child. The records, however, left Herckels’s status uncertain regarding her prior marriage to Captain Robbig, as well as the lawful ownership of the papers she claimed to have inherited. The court sent her back to Hamburg with her son; her testimony laid bare the scope of the imposture without unravelling all the legal knots of her condition.
The magistrates had thus unearthed several promises of marriage, dissipated estates, accumulated debts, an abandoned wife, and a second spouse still living. An inquiry from Halberstadt had also noted the disappearance of a young manservant, Christoph Julius Schaden; the Jever dossier on this head remained incomplete and did not allow his fate to be determined. As to the homicide, the baron persisted in claiming it was an accident, then confessed under torture to having murdered Anna with premeditation. He initially reiterated this admission before recanting, claiming that unbearable pain had forced the assent from his lips. The official records do not preserve the minutes wherein he set forth his motive.
In February 1704, following a second legal ruling and further examination under torture, he again admitted the murder, while continuing to assert that he was unaware of Sophie Elisabeth’s survival when he took Anna to wife. He recanted this confession two days later. The judges, however, possessed his letters, his fabricated tale of the robbery, the musket balls, the blackened firearm, and the witnesses who contradicted his plea of drunkenness. The tribunal sentenced him to die by the sword and ordered that his body be laid upon the wheel, with the weapon hung beside it. The prince confirmed the sentence.
On September 1, 1704, the judgment was carried out. The chronicler cannot say whether the condemned man acknowledged his guilt at the last moment, nor how he bore himself upon the scaffold. This silence cannot be supplied. There remains only that first night, when the townsfolk ran to the cry of thieves, only to discover a strangely quiet house, a back door left ajar, and a dead woman lying in an untroubled bed.