On the morning of July 3, 1689, the miller Thomas Lange failed to answer his family’s summons. The servant girl dispatched to seek him out in the barn and stables returned shrieking that he had hanged himself. His wife, Marie, ran to alert their kinsfolk in the hamlet, declaring that he had made an end of his days. The brother of the deceased, Hans Lange, immediately notified the princely bailiwick at Altenburg. The earliest depositions recorded no suspicious commotion during the night; hence, the magistrates embraced the presumption of self-destruction. Only when idle talk and factual contradictions converged did the machinery of justice re-examine the affair.
For generations, the Lange family had worked a flour mill in Fockendorf, upon the banks of the Pleisse, lying not far from the Leipzig highway. Thomas had entered into possession toward the close of the seventeenth century and had taken Marie to wife in 1675. Children had been born of the union, yet life under the common roof had grown contentious. The mill languished. Thomas reproached his wife for her familiarities with the journeymen millers; Marie maintained that he was incapable of directing their affairs and spurned all counsel. The village pastor and the local bailiff were both, according to the chronicler, fully apprised of these domestic discords.
On the eve of his death, Thomas had walked slowly home from the village tavern, where he had lingered a while watching the countryfolk dance. He left orders for a cartload of timber to be hauled on the morrow, supped alongside his children and the house servants, and undressed beside the stove. Announcing that he was retiring to his bed, he bade the household douse the light for lack of lamp-oil. Marie followed him; the maidservant and the young nursemaid retired with the children into the adjoining chamber. At daybreak, all rose at their accustomed hour. Yet Thomas was nowhere to be found in the places where the household thought to seek him.
The authorities conducted an initial viewing and examined the persons present. The young nursemaid, Sybille Sangloff, was fifteen years of age; the stable boy, Christoph Köhler, was eighteen. Both, together with Marie and the domestic servant Anna Rüger, testified that they had heard no unusual stir throughout the night. Christoph Kresse, who had encountered Thomas before the tavern, described him as having appeared heavy with thought; the miller’s brother and sundry neighbors shared in this presumption of self-slaughter. The consistory sanctioned a quiet burial apart, without ceremonial rites, suicide being then treated as a grave religious transgression. The inquiry seemed at an end.
Yet it was not to rest there. The protocol drawn up on the scene gave rise to perplexities, and uneasy whispers began to pass through the village. The conduct of Marie and of Martin Müller, a former journeyman of the mill, drew scrutiny. The local populace were well aware that an illicit attachment had bound them together. Martin had quitted Fockendorf at Christmas in 1688, after Thomas had surprised them in each other’s company, but he had since returned on repeated occasions. On June 29, 1689, he had met Marie at Altenburg. They had visited a wine cellar together; shortly thereafter, Martin was once more seen loitering in the precincts of the mill.
The resumed inquiry brought to light several circumstances difficult to reconcile with a voluntary departure on Thomas’s part. The miller had performed his daily labor without incident and eaten his evening repast in customary fashion. He had announced his intention to sleep, yet his body was discovered in a lumber room where he was never known to rest. His wife had exhibited no distress over his absence from the conjugal bed. Martin, for his part, had been the very first to bruit abroad among the neighbors of the adjacent hamlet that Thomas had hanged himself; the following night, he returned once more to the mill and spent hours in Marie’s company. Taken in their totality, these indications prompted the princely court to treat the two lovers as suspects and commit them to prison.
The published narrative relates that Marie confessed at her very first interrogation, yielding to the admonitions of the examining magistrate, and that she subsequently urged Martin to speak. According to her declaration, their design had been conceived during their meeting at Altenburg, as they lamented the bitterness of her marriage and the prospect that they might never live together as husband and wife. Their intention was to make Thomas’s death bear the appearance of a suicide. On the night first appointed, the presence of customers at the mill had thwarted them; they had accordingly postponed their enterprise by two days. The chronicle marks the night of July 2 as the hour wherein their design was executed.
The initial protocol described a body discovered in a lumber chamber, half-kneeling and clad only in a shirt; the breeches and nightcap lay cast upon the floor. The magistrates noted likewise an iron fitting driven into the wall, dark lividities about the throat, and six slight abrasions upon the lower back. These particulars did not of themselves constitute conclusive proof, yet they deepened the doubts already awakened by the strange chamber wherein Thomas was found and by the total absence of alarm in the house. No witness had observed the events of the night. The original finding had thus rested upon the outward appearance of the scene and the unexamined impressions of the kinfolk; the subsequent investigation was obliged to weigh that impression against the relations of the suspects, their demeanor on the morrow, and their own testimony.
In their formal confessions, as set down by the chronicler, Marie and Martin proceeded to recount their contrivance to simulate self-slaughter. Marie stated that she had ascertained her husband was asleep before admitting Martin above stairs. Together they had strangled him in the marital bed before carrying his body to the storage chamber. There, an oversight suspended their design: nothing had been prepared wherefrom to suspend the dead man. Martin had been obliged to drive an iron staple into the wall; notwithstanding the noise this entailed, the inmates of the house maintained they had heard nothing. The accused explained the abrasions upon the back as having been caused by dragging the corpse against a door-sill or a bench. They had then laid out the garments upon the floor to lend color to the appearance of suicide. Their plan required the nursemaid to seek him first in the outbuildings, so that Marie might appear to learn of his demise only at the very last. The chronicle thus attributes the incongruities of the original report to a scene contrived after the fact. It is necessary, however, to keep in view the nature of this source: the account of 1847 records statements obtained under magisterial interrogation, in the absence of any eyewitness to the crime or any post-mortem dissection, framing them within the moralizing strictures of nineteenth-century commentary.
The tribunal referred the depositions to the Schöppenstuhl of Jena, a college of learned jurists charged with rendering an opinion upon the penalty. The assessors adjudged that Marie Lange should be drowned in a sack and that Martin Müller should be broken upon the wheel—the latter sentence being accounted, in the penal hierarchy of the age, the more severe. The local authorities questioned the legal college regarding the disposal of the remains after execution and the disparity between the punishments. The reply invoked the customary law of the territory and affirmed the sentences without alteration. Thus, the record exhibits not merely an inquiry into an equivocal death, but the full weight of territorial jurisprudence in governing how the condemned were to suffer and where they were to be laid.
Martin did not abandon his cause at this juncture. His father retained an advocate to draw up an instrument of defense, which contested the corpus delicti in the absence of an anatomical examination. It was argued, furthermore, that his son’s intimacy with Marie could not be adjudicated as an ordinary case of adultery. Two faculties of jurisprudence, at Jena and Leipzig, rejected this plea. They held that the lack of a post-mortem inspection did not invalidate the remaining proofs, pre-eminently the free confessions of the parties, and that Marie’s prior reputation in no way diminished Martin’s culpability in the homicide. The judicial determination rested, therefore, not upon the premise that an adulterous liaison proved the crime of its own force, but upon the formal indictment and the depositions concerning the manner of Thomas’s death.
Both prisoners reiterated their confessions before the open court and pursued no further appeal, according to the chronicler. On August 17, 1689, Marie was drowned in a sack near Fockendorf; Martin was broken upon the wheel, and his broken body remained exposed upon it. The chronicle records that they made public profession of their repentance. Marie’s corpse was interred at the place of execution; Martin’s remained upon the wheel hard by her grave. The record preserves no subsequent inquiry challenging the justice of the doom.