On the morning of April 17, 1725, Jochen Rossow was found dead near a charcoal kiln on the heath adjoining Liepe. His body lay beside the mound where he had laboured through the night; his face, blackened by the soot, initially suggested a misstep into the hearth. Yet, when the corpse was washed, wounds upon the head were laid bare. Suspicion turned from the embers to fasten upon human design. The man who claimed to have discovered the body was the farm servant, Christophel Jacob; the earliest entries in the judicial ledger did not yet account him a suspect.
On the preceding evening, Maria Schultin, Rossow’s wife, had brought victuals to her husband. She described him as cheerful, seated beside the kiln, and had supposed he would complete his firing during the night before returning home. On the morrow, Jacob asked her what labour she would have him undertake. She replied that she knew not, and dispatched him to his master. Jacob presently returned to announce that Rossow was dead. He hastened to fetch Georg Wienbrandt, a neighbouring charcoal-burner, who was stationed beside the corpse whilst the servant carried the tidings to the widow.
It was at first universally assumed that smoke, fire, or a fall had brought about the misfortune. The neighbours beheld only the soot-stained visage; it was whilst washing the body, Maria reported, that she uncovered three deep cuts and ceased to believe in an accident. A formal judicial examination, attended by a surgeon, recorded four wounds upon the skull. The certificate described perforations reaching the bone and an inward fracturing of the cranium, likely inflicted by an axe. It did not, however, conclude unequivocally that these wounds were of themselves mortal. The records abstracted in the volume preserve no detailed view of the scene of the crime; they record merely that the initial inquiries among the villagers yielded no further progress.
For several months, the investigation remained barren of any culprit. Maria’s first examination attributed to her no knowledge of the perpetrator. Jacob accounted for his tardiness by an errand: he had returned a borrowed tool to a tar kiln and, finding the farmhouse barred, had slept in a stable. In the morning, he had set out for the charcoal kiln upon the widow’s bidding. The magistrates transcribed their depositions without establishing who had crossed the heath under cover of night.
In September, Georg Wienbrandt declared that Jacob had confided to him that the widow had urged him to dispatch her husband. The proceedings altered their course: Jacob became the denouncer, Maria the accused. Before the bench, the servant maintained that she had solicited him on three distinct occasions, in different quarters of the farmstead. He claimed to have demurred. He added that, following Rossow’s death, she had commanded his silence. Maria denied these allegations. The tribunal, harbouring suspicions towards the accuser as well, inquired why he had recently demanded a passport from the widow, so that none might claim he had slain his master. He admitted having done so, though the surviving record yields no further explanation.
Maria’s defence rested upon another domestic grievance. She asserted that Jacob, spurned in his advances, had harassed and abused her; she had driven him back near the stove with a fire-iron and kicked him out of the bedchamber. The accusation of murder, she insisted, was born of vengeance. Jacob acknowledged before the judges that she had struck him following an indecent display during a harvest repast, and that she had indeed cast him out. Glave, a neighbour heard as a witness, confirmed the servant’s improper conduct and the chastisement Maria had administered. She further described the Rossows as a household that had lived in unbroken concord during the seven years she had observed them.
The dossier was transmitted to the higher court at Stargard on October 8, 1725. On October 22, the Schöppenstuhl directed that the inquiry must not rest upon a mere confrontation between the two antagonists. It ordered that Maria’s prior conduct and her relations with her husband be examined, that it be determined who had last seen Rossow alive, that the servant’s past life be scrutinized, and that Glave be required to clarify the circumstances of the harvest supper. All depositions and testimonials were to be entered with scrupulous care, and Maria’s defence heard at every stage. The procedure sought thereby to assay the character of the witnesses no less than the testimony they exchanged.
The intelligence gathered concerning the two protagonists brought their contrast into starker relief. Neighbours and the pastor spoke well of Maria: her pious demeanour, her peaceful intercourse with her husband and neighbours, and the devoted care Rossow had shown her through a grievous illness. The accounts regarding Jacob were less favourable. Former masters and clergymen described him as given to drink and remiss in his attendance at divine service; a maidservant in a previous household had formerly sought to lodge a complaint against his advances. These opinions did not establish murder, yet they guided the credit that the investigators could accord to his denunciation.
The affair took a decisive turn when, on November 26, a cord plaited from straw, linen strips, and sack-twine was discovered in Jacob’s cell. He admitted having fashioned it to hang himself, adding that prayer had diverted him from the deed. The chapter proceeds to record his confession of the murder, yet assigns to it the date of October 17—prior to the discovery of the cord it has just recounted. This discrepancy, present in the consulted OCR witness, cannot be resolved without collation against the original facsimile; the narrative therefore adheres to the order of the compilation without adopting that date as an established certainty.
Before the provost and the criminal magistracy, Jacob thereupon withdrew his accusations against Maria. He explained that he had fabricated them out of malice and chagrin: she had repulsed what he himself termed his sinful designs, and had humiliated him following his lewd gestures at the supper. He confessed further that he had desired her hand and had hoped, upon the master’s death, to provide for the widow’s children. His testimony placed the murder at the charcoal kiln in the dead of night. He stated that he had struck Rossow once with the heavy stake used to tamp the coal, following a quarrel over his labour and beer-money.
Jacob contended that Rossow had tumbled backward onto sharpened stakes, sustaining further hurt when his body slipped from the servant’s grasp. He protested that he had intended to deliver but a single blow, and had subsequently dragged the corpse to prevent his legs, which rested near the hearth, from burning. Such was the account of the confessing homicide; the surgeon’s certificate described several wounds, without establishing their lethality. The advocate assigned to his defence raised this precise doubt between an act of manslaughter committed in heat of blood and a death caused by the fall upon the stakes, petitioning for a lesser penalty. The plea was entered; it did not govern the judgment.
On December 28, 1725, the higher court of Stargard had delivered Maria’s absolutio ab instantia, staying the prosecution against her without relieving her of the costs; the proceedings continued against Jacob, whom circumstantial evidence now rendered, in the eyes of the bench, liable to judicial torture. A royal decree of March 17, 1726, pronounced the widow’s full and final acquittal, with a complete discharge of the costs imposed upon her. For Jacob, the sentence remained contingent upon his steadfast adherence to his confession before the public criminal court: to be twice pinched with glowing tongs, then beheaded; his body was subsequently to be broken upon the wheel, his head impaled upon a stake, and the mallet of the crime suspended beside it.
On April 9, at the tribunal of Ueckermünde, Jacob was examined publicly upon ten interrogatories. He acknowledged having slain his late master on the Monday night, using the very stake laid before the court, acting alone and at no other’s bidding. He likewise confirmed the motives set before him: the insult of being called a “foolish Muscovite,” the denial of his beer-money, and his desire to wed Maria. He declared his remorse for the murder and for his slanders against the widow. These replies were engrossed upon the record. The condemned was then surrendered to the executioners; the glowing tongs were applied, he was beheaded, his body set upon the wheel, his head fixed upon a spike, and the stake from the charcoal pit raised beside him.
Maria Schultin thus stepped forth from the ordeal fully cleared; Rossow’s children were not bereft of their mother through an accusation which, after months of imprisonment, collapsed beneath the confession of the very man who had framed it. The volume of 1859 portrays the outcome as a providential reversal. Above all, one may read therein the long interval between initial suspicion, an interested denunciation, the plea of an accused woman, and the confession of a man who ultimately owned himself the sole author of the crime. At the charcoal pit, the embers had blackened the visage; they had not effaced the wounds, nor the impress of the stake preserved as evidence before the court.