On the 30th of March 1880, in his chambers at the Regional Court of Vienna, Vincenz Droz unlocked his bureau. The two drawers—one upper, one lower—remained securely locked. Neither showed any trace of violence. Yet the state bonds and savings passbooks kept within had vanished: their declared value amounted to 23,995 florins and 14 kreuzers. The theft had been accomplished behind the heavy doors of a palace of justice, from a piece of furniture whose locks appeared never to have yielded.
Droz had deposited his securities in the desk toward the end of the preceding year. In February, he had already noticed the disappearance of a gold watch, but he had nevertheless left the remainder of his valuables in the same place. He recalled inspecting them on the 2nd or 3rd of March; he believed he had done so again on the 10th. The exact date of the theft could therefore not be established with certainty. The police observed that the greater portion of the bonds had been negotiated on Saturday, the 27th of March, shortly after eight o’clock in the morning. From this they deduced that the drawers had most likely been emptied on the previous afternoon—Good Friday—when Droz had failed to return to his chambers after luncheon.
To gain entry without arousing suspicion, the thief must have been familiar with the building, the judge’s absence, and the presence of the papers. The inquiry naturally turned toward the court personnel. Investigating Magistrate Holzinger soon received an anonymous letter, posted in the Wieden district. It accused a tailor, Bernhard B., of concealing the money, adding that an employee of the court had assisted him. The lead proved entirely false, yet the handwriting and paper arrested the magistrate’s attention. The vocabulary was not that of a Viennese; an initial letter appeared to have been corrected, and the paper bore a striking resemblance to the draft paper employed within the tribunal itself.
The letter bore all the marks of a reverse snare. Its author sought to direct the investigators toward a stranger possessing neither sign nor shop, yet betrayed a thorough knowledge of chancellery customs and the titles assigned to palace employees. Suspicion settled upon Karl Goth, a young legal practitioner who had served as clerk to Droz until the 16th of March. He knew the rooms and the habits of his former superior. During the judge's recent illness, he had been entrusted with the key to the chambers to fetch an ordinance. He had had ample opportunity to observe Droz’s keys and take an impression of them; moreover, the chamber key he later surrendered to his successor was not the one he had originally received.
The preliminary investigation established that Goth was absent from the tribunal during the week of the theft. He claimed to have spent Good Friday near the Votive Church, a few hundred paces from the palace, yet could not account for every hour between six and eight. A slip of paper discovered beneath his blotter contained figures and calculations relating to securities identical to those that had disappeared. He insisted it was merely a parlour game. None of these elements, taken alone, proved that he had opened the desk. The magistrate nevertheless arrested him on the 13th of April and searched his lodgings; the stolen property was not found.
Goth was released after several days. He departed for Franzensbad, where an uncle and aunt resided, before returning to Vienna. The inquiry did not pause. It followed the trail of savings passbooks, receipts of sale, and the sudden circulation of funds among three close associates: Goth, Franz Alexander Becker, and Ernst Kopetzky. Becker, previously near destitution, now lived on a grand scale, purchasing merchandise, aiding relatives, and openly discussing the acquisition of a house. Kopetzky, for his part, had fled Vienna on the morrow of the crime.
Becker’s account books told a tale his explanations could not sustain. Bonds identical to those belonging to Droz had been negotiated across several cities; a considerable sum had been recorded at the end of March. Becker invoked a commercial traveller named Alter, for whom he claimed to have cashed cheques as a service. Inquiries in Eger and Hamburg revealed no traveller by that name. Bank ledgers indicated that the securities sold were cash vouchers, not cheques. A registered letter sent from Raab and received by Becker in Lemberg, his share purchases recorded in a pocketbook, and Droz’s passbooks presented at the Vienna savings counter firmly linked this sudden fortune to the theft.
The moment Becker paid ten florins into the passbook of a young relative drew particular scrutiny. He had stood at the savings bank on the very morning the stolen passbooks were being realized there. The tellers could not positively identify him as the bearer; however, handwriting experts attributed the signatures on the receipts and coupons to Becker. In his pocketbook were also found entries of sums and intermediaries for which he could furnish no plausible explanation. The prosecution offered no single, miraculous clue: it assembled transactions, signatures, timetables, and sudden shifts in fortune.
Goth was arrested once more in October. The handwriting of the anonymous letter was compared to his own; the paper matched a lined sheet from which a portion was missing among his effects. He had also received 180 florins from Becker three days after the crime. In prison, the two men attempted to communicate by signs, and subsequently through a cipher alphabet concealed inside breadcrumb pellets. Goth’s message instructed Becker on how to answer interrogations and what fabrications to devise regarding military papers found in a relative's keeping. The court perceived in this the design of two accomplices labouring to harmonize their falsehoods.
The prosecution rested upon a chain of circumstantial evidence which, link by link, might be disputed. The absence of forced entry, the keys, and Goth’s former employment accounted for access to the chambers; the financial papers led to Becker and Kopetzky; the handwriting linked Goth to the malicious denunciation; the banknotes and the prison correspondence bound the two prisoners together. Kopetzky, according to the reported facts, had fled Europe for America before he could be brought to justice. He did not appear. The trial thus concerned Goth and Becker alone.
Both men maintained their innocence. The jury found them guilty of having committed the theft in concert, and the court sentenced each to five years of aggravated imprisonment, in addition to restitution of damages. As the sentence was pronounced, Becker rose and declared that Goth was innocent. The outburst threw the court into turmoil, but the judgment stood. Then, before the magistrate, Becker offered an alternative account: he and Kopetzky had entered the chambers alone, while Goth knew nothing; one had kept watch outside, while the other picked the desk with a skeleton key.
This belated confession prompted no reopening of the case. Two wardens testified that prior to the verdict, Goth had urged Becker to shoulder the blame, promising that if he regained his liberty, he would depart for America and send money to his friend. The chronicle therefore deemed the confession a fabric of truth and fiction, noting that the jury had already rendered its verdict upon both men. Goth continued from his cell to contest his sentence; he died after two and a half years, without obtaining the retrial he demanded. Becker, in turn, composed a lengthy memorial retracting his confession. He, too, died before completing his sentence.
In Droz’s chambers, the lock had never been broken. It was this very silence of the metal that compelled the court to trace its way from keys to habits, from passbooks to signatures, and from signatures to men. The dossier preserved a final uncertainty: Becker’s post-verdict confession exonerated Goth, yet aligned poorly with the clandestine messages and the evidence marshalled against him. The drawers were forced open by justice through entirely different means than by the thief: slowly, document by document, without all versions ever being reconciled.