On the 21st of September 1820, Christopher Bäumler’s shop remained bolted well past the hour at which its master was accustomed to open. Standing in a bustling thoroughfare of Nuremberg, the barred door drew the attention of the neighbours; they rang, and presently, with the sanction of the police, gained entry through the upper-storey windows. The drawers had been rifled. On the ground floor, they came upon two corpses: Bäumler, a corn-chandler and spirit-dealer, and his maidservant, Anna Catherina Schütz. The Bavarian jurist Anselm von Feuerbach, who took part in the judicial inquiry, recorded the case in an account translated by Lady Duff Gordon in 1846.
The position of the bodies allowed the investigators to reconstruct the initial sequence of events. Schütz lay near the doorway, between two bins in the shop; Bäumler was in the adjoining chamber, beside the stove where he was wont to sit. Both had sustained fractured skulls. The medical examiners attributed these mortal injuries to a heavy instrument, most probably the poll of an axe, and noted broken ribs as well. Upon a table lay a closed clasp-knife, smeared with blood; upon the floor, near the threshold, two small rolls of bread. The baker and his wife identified them as the very loaves Schütz had purchased at approximately a quarter before ten on the preceding evening.
A neighbour had observed the shop door closed at that hour—an earlier closing than was the householder’s habit. When the officers entered, the bell suspended above the door failed to ring: someone had stuffed it with paper. Not a cry had been heard. Feuerbach placed Bäumler’s death during the maid’s brief errand to the baker’s, and that of Schütz upon her return, as she stepped over the threshold carrying the bread. The proximity of the bakehouse and the narrow interval between her purchase and her return led him to infer that the assailant was well acquainted with the household routine and had deliberately lain in wait.
Witnesses from the previous evening remembered a stranger who had lingered alone after the departure of the other patrons. He had given himself out as a hop-merchant awaiting a comrade who had gone to the playhouse; he drank clove-brandy, smoked his pipe, and kept his hat pulled low over his features. He was described as a dark-complexioned man of some thirty years, wearing a tall beaver hat. Two witnesses identified him as Paul Forster; others wavered, affirming merely that he resembled the stranger. Several persons had caught sight of him in Bäumler’s street during the days prior. These identifications, of varying certainty, took their place alongside more tangible clues.
Forster was apprehended on the 23rd of September at the lodgings of Margaretha Preiss, his mistress. He had only recently been discharged, on the 21st of August, from a house of correction where he had served a sentence for theft and housebreaking. In her dwelling were discovered two bags containing altogether slightly upwards of 360 florins; her daughter likewise surrendered a small purse containing medals and a ducat that Forster had bestowed upon her. He asserted at first that the money came from a buried treasure which a fellow prisoner had directed him to unearth. This tale failed to satisfy the magistrates. At Fürth, an inn-servant had seen Forster arrive in a grey greatcoat, which he bartered for a blue coat with an old-clothes dealer. He had left in the innkeeper’s keeping a brown coat he had worn on the day of the murders; the garment was stained with blood. The grey greatcoat, for its part, had belonged to Bäumler.
Subsequent searches brought to light further articles belonging to the murdered merchant: a pair of nankeen trousers, boots, and various garments identified by the tradesmen who had sold or tailored them. Forster’s sister, Walburga, admitted that he had borrowed an axe from her under the pretext of committing a burglary. She had initially declared that he spoke of an aborted robbery; later, she testified that he had confessed to taking a man’s life and had charged her to scour the axe and wash his boots. The officers recovered the implement, whose reddish stains were pronounced by the surgeon to be blood partially washed away. Walburga stated that the boots had been washed as high as the ankles, and that their silk tassels were matted with blood.
On the very night of the slaughter, Forster had returned to his family in the suburb of St. John. A witness observed him calling up to his father at the window at about two in the morning; his sister Walburga joined them. All three conversed in hushed voices for roughly half an hour. On the morrow, Walburga gave out that he had departed to pick hops, and related that he had given her his old boots after purchasing a new pair. Other witnesses confirmed that he had shifted his clothing and handed over money to his father. In the eyes of the magistrates, these actions assumed a dark significance when set beside the bloodied coat, the axe, and the goods belonging to Bäumler.
Forster stoutly denied any knowledge of the victims. He admitted having been in Nuremberg, but maintained that two brothers, hop-merchants named Schlemmer, were the actual perpetrators of the robbery and murder. By his account, they had encountered him upon the highway, promised to help him find employment in Bohemia, and subsequently drew him into a scheme whose true purpose was concealed from him. They had, he said, delivered the apparel and the money into his hands. His story varied little under questioning, but extensive inquiries at Hersbruck and elsewhere yielded not the slightest trace of the Schlemmer brothers. The examining magistrate also pursued various leads concerning possible confederates; several suspected individuals established their absence, and no other accomplice was ever brought to light.
The suspicion of a larger booty likewise occupied the court. Certain acquaintances of Bäumler believed that he kept between 1,500 and 2,000 florins by him to replenish his stock; after his death, no such sum could be found. This rumour fostered the conjecture that several thieves had divided the spoils. And yet, garments, a gold repeating watch, and other articles of value were left untouched in the ransacked rooms. Feuerbach remarked that the estimates of the merchant’s wealth exceeded what the documented evidence warranted. The axe, the apparel, and the sudden changing of garments pointed inexorably to Forster; the absence of a large sum did not, of itself, suffice to conjure up unseen confederates.
Forster was confronted with his sister and she stood by her testimony. He denied that she had ever heard him confess to murder. He offered other explanations for the stains upon his garments and persisted in claiming that the goods derived from the Schlemmers. Feuerbach records thirteen examinations, one thousand three hundred and thirteen formal questions, and numerous confrontations with witnesses. In the course of the inquiry, Forster did confess to another theft—that of a pair of silk braces stolen from a former fellow prisoner—while continuing obstinately to deny the double murder. The jurist regarded this partial admission as a cunning subterfuge; the recorded fact remains that it did not shake his primary denial.
The prosecution possessed no eyewitness to the fatal blow, nor any confession from Forster’s lips. The court nevertheless pronounced him guilty, on the 22nd of July 1821, of the murders of Bäumler and Schütz, committed during the night of the 20th of September 1820, and sentenced him to imprisonment for life in irons. Feuerbach deemed the sentence illogical: according to his reading of Bavarian law, the absence of a confession and of competent eyewitnesses precluded capital punishment, even while the conviction formally affirmed his guilt. This censure of the statute and the sentence remains the author’s own reflection, and forms no part of the judicial decree itself.
Walburga Forster was sentenced to twelve months in a house of correction for having aided and abetted her brother. Margaretha Preiss, in whose dwelling the money had been discovered, was acquitted. The tribunal thus drew a strict distinction between the man bound to the dead by a chain of circumstantial evidence, the sister convicted of having assisted him, and the companion whose alibi was held good.