The postboy took it at first for an overturned carriage. In the night between the 30th of April and the 1st of May 1811, on the highway linking Hemsbach and Laudenbach, he caught the sound of a man crying out for help. He turned his steps toward the voice; then other words checked him. Money was being demanded. Men were threatening to kill. The dull sound of blows was enough to tell him that this was no roadside mishap.
Charged with an urgent dispatch, the young courier turned back to raise the alarm in Hemsbach. The townsmen gathered to hunt down the assailants came upon a postilion with an empty carriage. The fellow had been struck down; he knew nothing of what had befallen his passengers. A little farther on, two men came staggering along, leaning one against the other. The brigands had vanished into the night. The road yielded up the victims, but kept its silence on the culprits.
Jacob Rieder came from Winterthur; Rudolph Hanhart, from Zurich. They were returning home from the Frankfurt fair. Rieder, forty-five years of age, had six children. Hanhart had been struck senseless almost the moment he stepped from the carriage. Coming to, he had found his traveling companion upon the ground and helped him to his feet. Both men were conveyed to the inn. There, one could number their wounds; one could not extract the description of a single assailant.
The forced trunk, scattered garments, and bloodied cudgels were left behind in the thieves’ wake. A little higher up, toward the Odenwald, the embers of a fire and a linen band marked with Rieder’s initials marked their retreat. The magistrates circulated a list of the stolen goods. It was still an affair without faces, yet it already possessed an inventory.
Rieder begged to be removed to Heidelberg. All the care lavished upon him could not avert his death on the 5th of May. His eldest son reached his bedside only after the burial: he had hastened along the roads to assist a father whom the physicians could no longer restore to him. The judicial inquiry now turned upon an armed robbery coupled with wilful homicide.
A few days earlier, the future assailants had gathered round a fire in the hills. The account that the magistrate Ludwig Pfister drew from their depositions shows no solemn council among them. They were merely seeking an occasion to gain something—which meant to steal; no particular proposal carried the day, and they resolved to descend toward the post-road. Hölzerlips happened along in the midst of this and fell in with the band.
His true name was Georg Philipp Lang. He had once hawked wooden wares, whence the sobriquet that was soon to fill the gazettes. By his own account, his life had run off the rails following an imprisonment for vagrancy and the collapse of his household. Pfister records this defense without subscribing to it. The peddler by then knew the houses where a man might drink, eat on credit, and return later with the proceeds of a foray.
A first night had yielded nothing. Two carriages were traveling close together; Hölzerlips deemed his company too few to fall upon them both. The following day, they were seen at the widow Geiger’s house, in Oberlaudenbach. Georg Schmitt proposed breaking into a mill. They judged the business too paltry. The commerce of violence, like any other trade, required that one weigh the venture against the return.
They made their way down again. Two foot-passengers were left unmolested because they promised little. Hunger next drew the men toward the kitchen of an inn, where they had begun to force an entry; word of an approaching carriage diverted them at once. That carriage was conveying Rieder and Hanhart.
Hölzerlips seized the horses. His companions dragged the postilion down and battered the carriage body to strike terror into the travelers. The two men leaped out and were met with blows. In the depositions taken down by Pfister, “Long Andres” fell with particular savagery upon Rieder. Meanwhile, others forced open the boot; Hölzerlips lent them a hand. Not all had dealt the same blows. Yet all met again afterward to divide the spoil.
Their retreat took them through a house where they had run up a score for food. It was paid with the stolen coin; a neckerchief bestowed upon the master of the house settled the account to his satisfaction. The goods that could not be divided were assigned by paying compensation among the confederates. A watch thus changed hands a second time before its rightful owner had even been able to reclaim it.
The flight did not hold out for all of them. Near Sickenhofen, the villagers pursued suspicious men who flung down their bundles. A man arrested under the name of Valentin Schmitt ended by acknowledging that he was Veit Krähmer. The garments in the bundles matched the inventory sent out by the magistrates. He confessed his part and supplied the nicknames of his associates.
At Heidelberg, Hanhart identified the recovered goods. He recognized neither the face nor the voice of the prisoner. This reserve matters every bit as much as the identification: the inquiry advanced through tangible property, confessions, and cross-checks, without forcing the survivor to play the witness to what his eyes had never seen.
Descriptions circulated from court to court. Several suspects had already been taken up elsewhere under other names. Hölzerlips was held at Hanau; removed to Heidelberg, he held out in his denials until the confrontations of late June. Pfister records that he then admitted his guilt. One watch was still missing: Lang said he had entrusted it to Catharina Weis, his companion.
The woman refused to give up her secret hoard. She had been threatened by Hölzerlips; she was also threatened and beaten during her examination. When Lang, brought before her, revoked his threat, she revealed the spot where she had buried the watch within the prison of Steinheim. Dispatches were exchanged; the timepiece was unearthed along with its chain and restored. The discovery confirmed an intelligence. It did nothing to absolve the violence by which it had been wrung from her.
The prison had not held every man without mischance. Basti, one of the youngest, managed to slip from his cell and reach the Neckar. He concealed himself in the water beneath a bathing raft while the hue and cry was raised. The notices sent out to the neighboring communes and the reward offered brought about his recapture by the very next day. His flight demonstrated how precarious the whole apparatus remained: prisoners had to be held fast, identities verified, and information sent traveling faster than the fugitives themselves. An isolated capture was never enough to close the ledger.
The dossier was laid before the court at Mannheim. The gravity of the penalties incurred required a formal defense; the supplement published by Pfister recounts this judicial phase, following months of an investigation whose every step he had himself directed. On the 31st of July 1812, at Heidelberg, Hölzerlips, Manne Friedrich, Veit Krähmer, and Krämer Mathes publicly heard their sentence pronounced before being led out to the place of execution.
The road had yielded up things, then names, and finally bodies to the law. A watch had been returned to its owner. For the six children of Jacob Rieder, no post could ever bring back what had been taken away.