On Sunday, 26 June 1859, at four o’clock in the morning, Madame Blando left Assmannshausen to fetch bread from Rüdesheim. Upon her return, she noticed that a vineyard fence had been broken down near the Bingerloch. Behind the planks lay a pool of blood; lower down, a stained walking stick and an umbrella. The boatman Franz Forschner in turn came upon a second pool, a bloodstained handkerchief, and a torn black mantilla. On the riverbank, stones likewise bore red traces. The objects and the ground seemed to indicate that a body had been dragged down to the river; they did not yet disclose who had been struck down, nor by whose hand.
The men who subsequently scoured the ground discovered further clues: splintered laths, tracks pressed into the earth, a bludgeon from which the lead pommel had broken off, and a multi-bladed pocketknife. The name “Schmidt” was engraved upon one of the blades. Several keys were gathered near the wall; one appeared to fit a piece of furniture. The investigators recorded the scattered garments, the tears, and the stains, then traced the marks left by the blood back toward the road. The current of the Rhine had swept the body away, and the investigation thus opened with objects bereft of their owner. A day laborer stated that he had heard moans around ten o’clock on the preceding evening; other passersby had noticed nothing amiss.
Four days later, on 30 June, the body of a woman was found by the water’s edge near Assmannshausen. Despite the facial injuries and shredded attire, local inhabitants recognized her as the lady seen five days prior in the company of a man on the Niederwald. A particular detail completed the identification: Emilie Lotheisen’s full name, accompanied by a year, had been embroidered in gold beads upon her stockings. The narrative describes a contusion to the head, wounds on the hands, and several cuts to the neck, chest, and abdomen; it records that the post-mortem examination attributed death to an abdominal wound that had brought about a fatal hemorrhage. The corpse established both identity and violence; the motive remained to be uncovered.
Emilie, born in 1820 in the Prussian village of Udorf, had inherited from her father, but debts had diminished her estate. She resided in Kassel, lodging at times with various acquaintances, and kept government bonds on her person. The chapter estimates that she possessed two financial instruments together worth seven hundred thalers: a Prussian state bond and a security issued by the Hessian credit bank. Both were missing after her death. The keys recovered by the Rhine corresponded to several rooms she had occupied in Kassel. These parallels assigned an owner to certain objects and outlined a potential theft; they did not yet identify her companion.
A lead emerged from Wiesbaden. On 29 June, a man named Nolte had dispatched a chest to Hamburg, addressed to Emilie Lotheisen, poste restante. The register of an inn revealed that Johann Heinrich Nolte, a property owner without steady employment according to the compiler, had occupied a room with a young woman presented as his sister. Witnesses at the inn matched their silhouettes and clothing to the couple observed near the Rhine. Nolte, however, had returned alone, dusty and exhausted. To one person he remarked that his companion was with acquaintances in Frankfurt; to another, that she was in Mannheim or Heidelberg. These contradictory replies aroused suspicion, yet the investigation still had to demonstrate whether the couple had indeed walked the path where the traces had been recorded.
Nolte denied having visited Assmannshausen or the Niederwald on 25 June. He recounted that Emilie had left him at the Wiesbaden railway station, that he had waited for her in vain, and that he had subsequently traveled on to Frankfurt and Homburg. He claimed to have spent the night with a woman and to have returned the following day. Three letters addressed to his former hosts and to the private secretary Zinn in Kassel, bearing Emilie’s signature and dated 27 June, were posted from Frankfurt the following day. They announced a departure for Hamburg in the company of a wealthy lady and contained instructions regarding the belongings she had left behind in Kassel. Nolte asserted that he had received a fourth letter from Emilie, since lost, and produced an envelope postmarked Frankfurt on 28 June; he maintained that this letter instructed him to forward the trunk to Hamburg. The chronicle records that the handwriting experts attributed the penmanship of the three letters, as well as the address upon the envelope, to Nolte himself; the paper and format of the Kassel letters matched those of another missive he had sent. Omnibus drivers likewise refuted his alleged stop in Homburg and the gratuity he claimed to recall giving. The correspondence intended to establish his innocence became, in the eyes of the prosecution, an artifice to delay discovery of the crime.
Further depositions placed him back in Emilie’s company. The couple had left Wiesbaden on 25 June, taken the train to Rüdesheim, and thence a boat to Assmannshausen. A guide had conducted them to the Niederwald; several persons remembered seeing them in local taverns. That evening, they took food and drink at Madame Fischer’s before setting out on foot along the road toward Rüdesheim around nine o’clock. Witnesses described Nolte by his bearing, his Westphalian accent, and his attire; several identified him with varying degrees of certainty. A blacksmith named Kaspar Trenz stated that he had passed him during the ensuing night, carrying no stick, the hems of his trousers soaked through and covered in dust to the calves. This detail aligned with the traces along the riverbank, yet it remained the testimony of a man who had only realized the connection after hearing news of the murder.
The walking stick and the knife formed another pillar of the case. Nolte maintained that the cane recovered from the vineyards was not his and that he had never possessed the knife. Yet several witnesses recalled the stick he had carried prior to the events: a cane fitted at its lower tip with a brass ferrule. The lead pommel found near the scene had separated from it, and witnesses recognized the splintered shaft. The craftsman Schmidt identified the bloodstained knife, with near certainty, as a model he had sold to Nolte; the accused admitted having bought a similar knife, but claimed his had remained in Kassel. It was never found. The key gathered near the scene of the crime opened, according to reported tests, a chest of drawers used by the couple in Wiesbaden; Nolte had ordered a replacement key cut on the very day of his return and offered multiple conflicting explanations for the loss of the original.
The missing securities linked the material evidence to monetary gain. The record asserts that Nolte forwarded the two-hundred-thaler bond to his creditors and sold the five-hundred-thaler Prussian bond to a Frankfurt banker under the signature “H. Nolte.” He denied having taken it from Emilie, maintaining that he had acquired the second bond from her in Wiesbaden; according to the compiler, he was unable to offer a credible account of this acquisition. The money subsequently enabled him to satisfy certain debts and to travel. Before the murder, his creditors were demanding payment, and his prospective marriage arrangements with wealthy women had either collapsed or were on the brink of exposure. This motive forms part of the prosecution’s reconstruction: Nolte’s poverty and his possession of the documents do not, in themselves, reconstruct the fatal act.
Under examination, Nolte persisted in his denials. He explained that the bloodstains upon his clothing were the result of leeches he had applied to himself on 27 June to treat varicose veins, claiming he had placed a soiled cloth over his trousers to protect the furniture. The compiler confirms that leeches were indeed applied to him on that day, but disputes his explanation of the stains, aligning the condition of the garments with Trenz’s observations and the attempts at washing them reported by the police. According to the account, Nolte, while in detention, asked a fellow prisoner to write, upon his release, two letters dated from Hamburg to the burgomasters of Assmannshausen and Rüdesheim. These letters were to confess to the murder and assert that the author was already at sea, beyond the reach of the authorities. He promised to pay his fellow inmate; he also sought, through the agency of female prisoners, to procure a false witness to support his alibi in Homburg. The compiler groups these episodes together as stratagems devised to mislead the inquiry; they must, however, be distinguished from the verdict rendered by the jurors.
The Hanau jury found Nolte guilty of having murdered Emilie Lotheisen to seize her bonds, his denials notwithstanding. The court sentenced him to death by decapitation, a sentence affirmed by the higher tribunal. His defense counsel petitioned for clemency, arguing among other grounds that such a penalty would not have been incurred in the Duchy of Nassau, where the crime took place. The sovereign denied the petition. On the eve of his execution, the pastor exhorted him one last time to confess; Nolte replied by drawing a comparison to the pardon granted to the thief upon the cross, without acknowledging the deed. On 11 January 1861, he was led to the place of execution near Hanau and beheaded. The chapter concludes with the moral and religious reflections of its compiler. The judicial proceedings had brought the case to its close without an admission from the accused.