At Amendingen, in Bavaria, the death of Vitus Reth had initially been given the ordinary name of an accident: a sudden apoplexy. Eighteen years later, his son Xaver, then imprisoned for various thefts, accused himself of having strangled him. He supplied a precise account, only to withdraw it by asserting that he had lost his senses. Had the father indeed been murdered, or was the homicide fabricated to confound another confession? The judicial resolution, as preserved in the pages of the Pitaval, never settled the question.
The chapter entitled “The Thieving Parricide,” published in the ninth volume of the *Neue Pitaval* in 1859, revisits a case from 1822, drawing notably upon the criminal study of Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach. It is a retrospective compilation, neither the original case file nor an unabridged transcript of the proceedings. Its author leans toward the hypothesis of an artifice: Reth, he suggests, contrived the confession of murder to undermine the credibility of his admissions regarding the thefts. Feuerbach, for his part, kept open the contrary possibility—that of a true confession deployed in service of that very stratagem. The narrative sets forth their reasoning without elevating either conjecture to the rank of proof.
In the spring of 1822, another man apprehended for substantial larcenies named Reth as his accomplice. The circumstantial indications recorded in the volume were sufficiently grave for Reth to be arrested in turn. On the 9th of April, during a preliminary interrogation, he admitted to several thefts committed alongside his companion: blankets, swine, geese, and diverse goods carried off, predominantly under cover of night. The Pitaval states that his depositions agreed with those of his fellow prisoner and the despoiled parties.
A week later, on the 16th of April, Reth recanted the whole of his admissions, saving for three geese that he claimed merely to have found. He explained that he had not been in his right mind when confessing. The following day, he asked that the record of the 9th of April be read back to him. When the reading concluded, he sprang toward the magistrate to seize the document. The judge restrained him, but Reth succeeded in tearing away the final leaf and chewing the portion of the page that bore his signature. The officers duly recorded the incident; yet the remaining text and their own declarations preserved the substance of the confession.
The instruments of the case were forwarded to the superior court at the end of May. On the 4th of June, before a definitive ruling was handed down, Reth requested a further interrogation. He maintained that he had not committed the thefts, but declared he had done far worse: he had slain his father. That man, Vitus Reth, had died seventeen years earlier, in December 1804 according to the parish register cited in the volume. Xaver related an altercation concerning the testamentary papers and the conveyance of the farm. He claimed that his father, still abed, had risen in fury, grasped a bayonet, and threatened to strike him down. Xaver alleged he seized him by the throat, brought him to the floor, and strangled him. He then purported to have replaced the corpse upon the bed, taken an agreement of division, and attempted in vain to secure the one hundred and fifty florins stipulated therein.
On the day following this declaration, Reth inflicted a wound upon his arm with a shard of iron broken from his fetters. The court physician found him in an agony of apprehension, his gaze dark and unsettled. The prisoner maintained that he was subject to fits of madness, while denying that his confession was true. The Pitaval describes restless nights, outcries, and acts of self-mutilation; on the 8th of June, Reth reaffirmed that his account of the murder was a falsehood. The turnkeys nevertheless claimed to have heard him speaking of his father during those paroxysms. Yet these words, transcribed decades later in a compilation, are neither original depositions nor expert testimony susceptible to modern review.
The dormant file was thereupon reopened around a death that had never, according to the chapter, been subjected to a rigorous criminal inquest. The parish register dated the decease to the 10th of December, 1804. On the previous evening, Vitus had reportedly departed the tavern in good health, a pot of beer in hand. In the morning, a day-laborer named Veronica Schuh claimed to have seen him awake and hale. Shortly thereafter, the report of his death spread throughout the village. A surgeon summoned to the scene pronounced that the old man had died of a seizure; however, according to several witnesses reported in the Pitaval, he had entered a darkened bedchamber and conducted no post-mortem dissection.
The volume also records an ancient rumor directed at Xaver. Three witnesses and a former local magistrate were said to recall that the villagers had accused him even then of having slain his father. Georg, the younger brother, allegedly whispered to his guardian: “None other than my brother Xaver killed my father, but I dare not say it.” This phrase reaches us through the recollection of the guardian, not through any preserved contemporary document. The Pitaval accords it decisive weight; the reader, however, must remain mindful of the numerous intermediaries standing between Georg’s supposed utterance and the printed account of 1859.
A plausible motive appeared in the disputes surrounding the homestead. According to the cited witnesses, Xaver desired that his father surrender the estate to him so that he might wed his companion. Vitus had refused, preferring to convey the property to his second son. The local administrator had reportedly received several complaints from the father against Xaver before managing to bring about an uneasy reconciliation. Such elements sketch the contour of an inheritance dispute, yet they fall short of demonstrating a murder. As for the physical evidence, it had all but vanished: after eighteen years in the earth, the remains could no longer exhibit the hallmarks of strangulation, and the surgeon had recorded no examination to confirm it. The chapter considers that an exhumation would resolve nothing: even if discovered and identified, the bones could never establish a fatal constriction of the throat. The court was thus compelled to reason from fading recollections, registry entries, and an ever-shifting word. It was not merely the absence of an eyewitness that weakened the prosecution: the very object that might have confirmed it had ceased to exist as a legible proof.
This fragility did not deter the chronicler from speaking of “moral conviction.” He marshals the sudden demise, the familial rancor, the testamentary motive, and the longstanding rumor, bringing them into alignment with the narrative offered by Reth. Yet this convergence rests entirely upon the belated depositions cited in his chapter; it does not transform an imaginative reconstruction into a judicial finding. The very documentation that renders the suspicion intelligible also reveals why it could never be fully verified.
The physicians summoned to evaluate Reth’s condition concluded, according to the compendium, that he was feigning madness. The narrative emphasizes the contrast between his nocturnal paroxysms and his diurnal composure, as well as his ability to answer with coherence whenever he denied the parricide. This remains a medical interpretation reported by the Pitaval, not a contemporary conclusion that can now be verified. It leaves the truth of the confession unresolved: to counterfeit a fit proves neither that the murder took place, nor that Reth committed it. It demonstrates rather how heavily the appraisal of his testimony depended upon an arbitrary reading of his demeanor.
The judicial determination yielded two distinct results. Regarding the charge of parricide, the work records first a dismissal *ab instantia*, followed by a second decree discharging him from punishment. The chapter reproduces neither the judgments nor their full rationale; such historical legal formulas cannot be assimilated uncritically to modern categories. For the thefts, conversely, the facts were held to be established: Reth was sentenced to six years and six months in the house of correction. That verdict does not declare that he murdered his father; neither does it warrant the conclusion that he was innocent of it.
The compilation maintains that the belated confession had been devised as a ruse to cast discredit upon the admissions of theft. Feuerbach acknowledges the force of this psychological explanation, but underscores another possibility: the parricide might have been genuine, and Reth might have recounted it not out of contrition, but because the event, already lodged within his memory, provided a narrative far more compelling than any invention could supply. The calculating demeanor ascribed to him by these authors thus permits no decisive choice between falsehood and truth. The circumstantial confession matches certain longstanding suspicions; it collapses subsequently upon its retraction, even as all physical proof had passed beyond reach.
In the end, the affair yields no grand revelation, but rather a frontier. The tribunal was competent to punish the proven thefts, while leaving without penalty a charge of murder that the evidence was inadequate to establish. The Pitaval crosses that frontier through psychological narration: it imagines the calculation underlying the confession and attributes to Feuerbach an intuition of probable guilt. True prudence requires that both propositions remain strictly in their place. Xaver Reth was punished for thefts; as to the death of Vitus, the 1859 account preserves the suspicions, the retracted confession, and the conjectures, without affording the slightest judicial certainty.