Toward seven o’clock on the morning of February 18, 1842, Barbara Forster went down to her mistress’s bedchamber. The sitting-room door, customary secured from within by a bolt, yielded slightly before striking an obstruction. Upon the floor, immediately before the leaf, lay Luise Behold, motionless, her countenance ringed with clotted blood. Forster took it at first for some sudden seizure; she did not yet perceive that the throat had been cut.
The first man summoned to examine the body was a police surgeon, awakened by the house clerk. Lifting the linen cloth knotted about the neck, he discovered a deep, circular wound several inches across. The principal veins of the neck and an artery were divided. The forensic report concluded that the injury had induced rapid exsanguination and paralyzed the respiratory passages; even instantaneous aid could not have preserved Luise’s life. It was thus no fainting fit. Yet this finding, clear though it was regarding the physical cause of death, left unanswered the question that was to hang over the entire inquiry: had the hand that wielded the blade been that of the deceased, or that of a stranger?
The house in the Brunnenstrasse, at Nuremberg, possessed two entrances. The principal portal opened upon the thoroughfare; the other, ordinarily kept locked, gave upon a narrow lane and led through dark corridors to the stables, the courtyard, and the internal staircase. Thence, one gained the common room, and subsequently Luise’s chamber. An intruder would scarcely have found his way in the darkness; a former dweller might have known it well.
Luise, née Küster and native to Erlangen, resided there with three children, aged six, four, and two years. Forster had been in service but a fortnight; the clerk, Albert Baier, had been employed in the business for seven years. The husband, frequently absent on commercial travels, had been in Stuttgart since autumn. The text of the chronicle prints two Christian names for him—first “Georg,” and later “Leonhard” on page 293; the facsimile confirms this discrepancy, and for want of further records he shall be designated here as Herr Behold.
On the eve of the tragedy, toward nine o’clock, Luise had dismissed Forster to her bed, and prepared to retire herself. The maid had handed her mistress a neckcloth, which slipped into a basin of water. To prevent the dampened ends from touching her flesh, Luise secured it about her throat like a cravat. This trifling domestic precaution was to become a contested piece of evidence. The children slept in the same chamber as their mother; the maidservant on the upper floor; the clerk on the ground floor. None professed to have heard any struggle or outcry.
The four-year-old girl alone reported a sound, which she described as a gurgling or whistling. She fell asleep again; neither the precise hour nor the true nature of the noise could be determined. This testimony neither dated the blow nor pointed to any person.
Forster awakened Baier and called the neighbors. The door was cleared by shifting the body toward the sofa, where it was covered. The tracks of blood leading from the chamber to the threshold were strewn with sawdust. The surgeon removed the cloth from the neck and exposed the wound. The examination noted as well slight contusions upon the head and cheek, yet no unmistakable signs of defense.
The bedlinen, the chambers, the doors, and the floorboards were bespattered with blood; yet beyond these rooms, no trace could be found. The cutting instrument was recovered neither in the bedchamber nor anywhere within the house. The official acts did not specify whether a razor was missing or whether the casements had been inspected. These omissions, taken alone, establish neither an intrusion nor a premeditated suicide.
The right arm was raised, the fingers curled as though the hand had grasped a knife. The medical examiner deemed this posture consistent with suicide, without regarding it as decisive: the spasm of death might equally have induced it. Nor did the absence of defensive wounds exclude an assault committed during sleep.
The kinsfolk and the household provided no greater certainty. Forster knew of no one upon whom suspicion of murder might fall. She had observed no melancholy in her mistress; on the preceding evening, Luise had bid her goodnight in an untroubled voice. Baier declared that she had worked in the shop until evening, performing her customary duties without any outward sign of suicidal intent. The husband, arriving from Stuttgart after the interment, extolled her character and piety, doubting that she could ever have taken her own life; he was, however, unable to name any conceivable enemy.
The family physician advanced a different interpretation. According to his deposition, the household’s finances were strained; the husband’s prolonged absence and dealings with creditors had weighed heavily upon Luise, who suffered, so he claimed, from nervous debility. He judged it conceivable that, in a moment of despair, she might have struck the fatal blow herself. These observations proceeded from his own conjecture and what he knew of the family’s fortunes; they did not constitute an irrefutable retrospective diagnosis. The medical examiner confined himself to a more guarded formulation: in the absence of certain indications to the contrary, suicide was to be presumed, though he acknowledged that the wound did not exclude violence inflicted by another hand.
Upon the table lay also a letter from Herr Behold, dated February 7 from Karlsruhe. The police commissioner believed he discerned in it an embarrassed commercial situation; the examining magistrate considered its contents immaterial to the case. The letter was not transcribed into the file as transmitted by the chronicler. Thus the very document that might have illuminated the family’s pecuniary anxieties remained obscured beneath opposing impressions, rather than being laid open to the reader’s scrutiny.
A former maidservant, who had spent a year and a half in the house before leaving on account of pregnancy, was likewise examined. She had wept upon departing and was, by her account, to return after her confinement; yet she could recall no trace of despondency in Luise. Her affection for the family lent weight to her recollection, yet it could not reveal what had transpired within the bedchamber during the night. The maid who had been in place only a fortnight knew her mistress too little to shed light upon her past disposition.
Beneath the corpse lay a piece of wax. Forster conjectured it might belong to the children; another servant believed she had seen a candle in the sitting room on the previous day. Neither its owner nor its purpose could be established.
The neckcloth presented a sharper perplexity. Forster recalled having handed Luise, the evening before, a cloth which the latter had bound about her neck after wetting it. The surgeon judged the one he removed too sparsely bloodstained to have covered the throat at the moment of the cut. Several months later, a woman charged with washing the dead produced a blood-soaked towel, though the witnesses could not confirm that it was the cloth worn that night. The towel exhibited no visible rent; its identity remained uncertain.
The service door was found standing open, with no mark of forced entry. The former coachman asserted he had left his key with the clerk; a former servant maintained she had laid it in the kitchen. A key was indeed discovered in that spot, yet the lock was in working order, and none could explain how the door had been unfastened. A second key or a skeleton key was posited, without evidence.
The investigators turned their gaze likewise toward Barkel and Hofer, two former apprentices recently discharged from proceedings for the theft of plate and fraud, though kept under surveillance. They knew the house and were aware of Herr Behold’s frequent journeys. It proved impossible to determine where Barkel had spent the night of February 17 to 18; the gendarme reported Hofer at Bruck and had found nothing suspicious among his effects. Familiarity with the premises nurtured suspicion, not proof.
Häring, in his foreword to the volume, states that the study rests strictly upon the acts assembled by a Bavarian official. The chapter, however, is no complete verbatim transcript and pronounces no verdict upon the death. It weighs murder and suicide in turn, showing the assumptions required by each: a blade carried off or concealed, a door opened by an intruder or by Luise herself, a cloth identified or mistaken. It dwells also upon medical theories and nineteenth-century notions regarding women, which are not established facts and must not serve as evidence.
On May 30, 1842, the Court of Appeal of Middle Franconia provisionally stayed the inquiry. No perpetrator had been designated, and the death of Luise Behold remained without known judicial explanation in the chronicle. In an affair where every object seemed poised to unlock a door—a cloth, a key, a bit of wax, an absent blade—none opened wide enough to lead to a conclusion. The doubt of the magistrate and the doubt of the chronicler do not constitute the verdict of a court: they merely mark the boundaries of the recorded papers. In the end, there remains a dead woman upon the threshold of her chamber, a suspended investigation, and two hypotheses between which the surviving evidence could never decide.