On the 10th of June, 1843, railway clerks at the Fegersheim station noticed a foul odor emanating from a crate abandoned there five days earlier. Within, they discovered the dismembered body of a woman, estimated to be between forty and fifty years of age. A gaping wound cleaved her throat; her legs had been severed at the joints and were nowhere to be found in the chest. No name accompanied the shipment, nor any trace of the sender. Suspicion soon settled upon Jean-Nicolas Bletry, a ruined and ill-reputed Mulhouse merchant, and the persons of his domestic circle.
The examining physicians concluded that the throat wound had been inflicted during the victim’s lifetime and had caused her death. They observed no marks of struggle. The linen wrapping the legs bore the initials B. G.; a matching remnant of fabric was discovered among the effects of the Bletry household. The crate bore the inscription: "from Dornach to Fegersheim," wherein the word Dornach appeared to have been scoured to efface it. The transit route was henceforth a material clue. Yet it yielded neither the name of the deceased nor the hand that struck the blow.
Suspicion turned toward Mulhouse and toward Bletry, a merchant of forty-five years, born of an honorable family but then on the brink of ruin. His companion, Françoise Lallemand, shared his lodgings; domestic servants came and went from the house. The prosecution contended that a woman clad in black, a mysterious visitor, had entered the dwelling on the 3rd of June. The crime was alleged to have been committed under Bletry’s roof, the body subsequently concealed and dispatched. Yet neither the woman’s identity nor any motive could be established. Seeking to affix a face to the victim, investigators considered Adèle Bülart, an erstwhile mistress of Bletry and the mother of his child. The premise seemed almost too neatly contrived: an intimate tie, a disappearance, a man mired in debt.
Then Adèle Bülart appeared in the flesh. Arriving from afar, she established before the court that she was not the body identified by several witnesses. These bystanders had believed they recognized her garments, her jewelry, or her features; others had recounted her former liaison with Bletry. This identification collapsed in open court. The corpse remained nameless, and the prosecution lost the face it had fancied itself able to bestow upon it.
This conceivable error did not unravel the riddle of the crate. The physicians described a wound to the neck which they deemed fatal and inflicted while the subject lived; the prosecution saw therein the proof of homicide. Yet the chronicler himself, at the trial’s close, returned to this fundamental question: was the recovered body sufficient to establish that a murder had indeed taken place? The identity of the dead woman remained unknown, and the hypothesis of murder, potent though it appeared in the bill of indictment, was not ratified by the verdict. One must therefore disentangle the medical observations, the prosecution’s theory, and the criminal guilt which the jury declined to find against any of the accused.
Among those indicted stood Bletry, Lallemand, the manservant Friedrich Weidenbacher, and the maidservant Magdalene Dinicher. The prosecutorial narrative assigned to each an active part in the preparation, transport, or concealment of the remains. Marked linen, reported traces of blood within the house, comings and goings, words attributed to witnesses: each element was assigned its niche in the architecture of a collective crime. Yet these same elements admitted of diverse interpretations. The linen did not name the deceased. A stain does not of itself explain how it came to be. The presence of a person in the house did not establish complicity in murder.
The depositions sustaining the prosecution emanated from witnesses whose very credibility was contested. Marie Neuschwander, Thérèse Fleury, and the police agent Roy were among those whom the defendants and their counsel accused of stoking mere rumor. Other depositions directly contradicted them. Here lay the intrinsic frailty of a trial wherein words circulated before crystallizing: one witness would describe a woman, then waver; another professed certainty of sight, yet his recollection shifted with the passing of time. The prosecution insisted upon the mosaic as a whole; the defense dismantled each piece, laying bare the voids between them.
The initial hearings opened before the Haut-Rhin Court of Assizes in September 1844. At the behest of defense counsel, proceedings were adjourned and the venue transferred to the Assizes of Colmar. The trial resumed on the 10th of March, 1845. Spectators flocked to the ancient imperial city, and the Parisian press dispatched special correspondents. Such publicity served not to render memories more faithful; on the contrary, it magnified every purported recognition, every retraction, and every suspicion. The case had become as much a trial of the public imagination as an inquiry into an unidentified corpse.
The defense did not seek to explain away the corpse. It attacked the leap from an anonymous dead woman to the named defendants. The prosecution’s case, counsel argued in substance, was laden with coincidences which, marshaled together, exerted an impression far more forceful than any single element taken alone. Counsel reminded the court that the woman in black had never been conclusively identified as the victim, and that an unknown party might well have consigned the crate. Above all, the jurors now knew that one spectacular identification—that of Adèle Bülart—had utterly vanished when the supposed corpse walked into the courtroom.
The debate did not turn upon innocence established by a neat alibi. It turned upon legal proof: could the prosecution demonstrate that Bletry had struck the blow, that Lallemand had aided him, that the domestics had abetted or concealed the deed? The earlier proceedings had already witnessed shifting charges; in this final session, the public prosecutor abandoned charges against Dinicher and Weidenbacher entirely. For Lallemand, he conceded that extenuating circumstances might be found. This retreat did not solve the mystery, but it laid bare the fragility of the original edifice.
At the close of the arguments, the presiding judge asked the accused if they had anything to add. Bletry declared his innocence, professing his desire to proclaim it before his city and his kin. He invoked the names of his co-defendants. His declaration is recorded in the chronicle; it was no more a proof of innocence than his composure was a demonstration of guilt. Then came the questions put to the jury: had he willfully slain this woman whose name remained unknown? Was it done with premeditation? Was it done to facilitate a theft? And what part had the others played?
The jurors returned after a deliberation of ten minutes. The foreman answered "no" to every question. Bletry thereupon demanded more than an acquittal: he sought a public vindication of his honor. The presiding judge replied that the court could go no further than ordering his release. The law might pronounce him not guilty; it could not compel the town to banish its suspicions.
The verdict identified neither the body nor any murderer. Nor did it resolve the question left open by the chronicler: did the wound and the corpse alone suffice to establish a homicide? Yet it brought the trial to its conclusion: all four defendants stood acquitted. The compilation goes on to recount that other punishment, which the public inflicts without benefit of judgment. In whatever public room Bletry sought to sit, men drew away; they treated him as a convicted felon. He soon vanished, and it was rumored that he had departed for America. This final destination was recorded merely as a conjecture, not as an established fact.
The chronicle itself leans at times toward the conviction that Bletry was guilty, only to acknowledge the impossibility of weighing testimonies across the distance of time. It is this lingering doubt that outlasts the crate, the linen, and the names. Justice did not answer the question posed by the crowd: who was the dead woman, and who slew her? It answered only that which the law was empowered to decide: were these defendants guilty beyond reasonable doubt? The crate had traveled the railway line from Dornach to Fegersheim without surrendering the name of the dead; the verdict, for its part, declined to invent one.