Hamburg, 1803–1804. A father puts his wife and five children to death, then avows he wished only to preserve them from a destitution he so mortal feared. Justice received this explanation as an inadmissible excuse.
In the dead of night between the 14th and 15th of August, 1803, Johann Georg Rüsau slaughtered his wife and their five children within their dwelling on the Gröningerstraße, in Hamburg. When morning came, a maidservant came upon the first bodies; searching the upper chambers, she discovered four more. The retrospective narrative preserved in the Pitaval recounts six dead in total, while two young female boarders were spared. The victims were Rüsau’s spouse, Anna Elisabeth, née Päthau, and their children, aged three to sixteen years. The greater part were taken by surprise in their beds; the eldest daughter, sixteen years of age, appears to have offered some resistance.
The scandal instantly ran through the town. City guards were dispatched to the residence; an agitated crowd gathered in the thoroughfare. Rüsau, however, was already gone. He had quitted the house around four in the morning, having informed a servant that he should shortly return. He sought to drown himself in the Alster, but the water proved too shallow. He thereupon inflicted wounds upon his neck, his wrist, and his chest with a small pocket knife. Later in the day, two men bound for the hunt came upon him by the water’s edge. He stated his name, confessed to having slain his family, and professed himself unable to say how many souls were dead.
Rüsau was then fifty-two years of age, according to the date of birth recorded in an 1804 pamphlet: he was born in Riga in 1751 and had followed his parents to Hamburg in 1771. The Pitaval assigns him the age of fifty-five in its summary of his first examination; this discrepancy accords poorly with the dates furnished by the prisoner himself. He had read theology at Erlangen, subsequently returning to Hamburg where he taught and preached as a candidate for holy orders. His wife directed a school for young ladies. He himself opened a school for boys; the establishment prospered at first, but its pupils gradually dwindled in number. He thereupon abandoned instruction and entered into partnership with an associate to conduct a drapery business.
During his first examination, as related by the Pitaval, Rüsau neither denied the murders nor appeared disordered in mind. He explained that the trade did not yield the profit he had anticipated, and that he fancied his household soon reduced to utter destitution, and thence to starvation. He maintained that he had deemed it better to slay them outright than to suffer them to taste such wretchedness. He added that he had intended to make away with himself, but had perceived, upon his wounds and his failure in the Alster, that Providence was delivering him up to his earthly judges. These motives represent words ascribed to the accused; they in no way depict the objective condition of his household.
Indeed, the investigation reported by the compendium reveals a stark disparity between his dread and his actual estate. His wife’s school was still conducting its affairs. The drapery business was not bankrupt. The family residence, purchased for some 18,000 marks, was valued at roughly 40,000 and fetched over 35,000 at auction. All charges being defrayed, there remained substantial assets to be distributed, as well as a surplus upon which Rüsau was still able to execute a testament. His business partner, Christian Kunst, described him as an upright man of orderly habits, but ill-suited to the retail trade and prone to extravagant anxieties regarding household outlays. He likewise recalled disputes concerning the upbringing and apparel of the daughters. Other witnesses deposed that they had observed neither grave quarrels nor any manifest tokens of domestic violence.
The contention soon turned upon the question of Rüsau’s criminal responsibility. His advocate, Dr. Schleiden, pleaded that the slaughter proceeded from a delusional fixation and that the accused ought not to be held answerable as a man in full possession of his reason. In particular, he petitioned for the formal counsel of a medical faculty. The volume asserts that this expert opinion was never solicited by the bench, and records that the cause was determined solely upon his overt acts and his demeanor throughout the proceedings. A modern historical study, citing the dossier held in the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, provides archival particulars that the Pitaval omits. Having not consulted these original records, the present narrative declines to pronounce upon any retrospective diagnosis or the exact compass of the medical examination.
On February 10, 1804, the lower tribunal condemned Rüsau to death by the sword. His counsel appealed the cause to the superior court. He laid great stress upon the possibility of an idée fixe and upon the circumstance that the accused might have sincerely believed in the impending ruin of his house. The populace and a portion of the public press demanded, on the contrary, a more exemplary chastisement, judging that the substantial property Rüsau possessed rendered his explanation utterly inadmissible. The Pitaval depicts a city torn between fury and compassion, while printed pamphlets debated madness, penal accountability, and the sovereign right of the State to punish.
On March 16, the superior jurisdiction confirmed his guilt and aggravated the sentence. Its decree, transcribed in the chapter, held that Rüsau had premeditated and consciously consummated the six homicides. His apprehensions, his dejection, and his despair did not constitute, in the eyes of the magistrates, a sufficient legal defense. The sentence was enhanced to the wheel, to be broken from above; his body was subsequently to be interred at the place of execution. An 1804 pamphlet, known here by the title cited in a historical treatise, gives March 19 as the date of execution. Yet the body of that same treatise mentions March 16, the very date the Pitaval assigns to the superior decree; wanting the original pamphlet, the precise day of execution remains unresolved. The sentence was handed down as an example, calculated to deter other husbands and fathers from slaying those whose welfare they were appointed to preserve.
Rüsau’s final days in custody are related by the printed accounts compiled in the Pitaval. He took his meat, played games, and conversed freely with his fellow captives. He expressed his gratitude to those who ministered to him and bestowed a portion of his remaining effects upon two fellow prisoners. He received the clergymen appointed to attend him, conferring with them upon death and faith. A witness attributes to him the following reflection: had he but unburdened his heart to a friend when he was so sorely oppressed, his wife and children might yet be among the living. This utterance derives from an account published after the event; it must by no means be taken as a verified transcript of his speech.
On the morning of his execution, a dense multitude thronged the route to the scaffold. Rüsau asked to choose his conveyance and consented to enter a carriage. At the foot of the scaffold, he recollected himself in prayer and besought the executioner to shorten his torments. The narrative presents him as the last convict in Hamburg broken upon the wheel. Thenceforward, the record ceases to be a mere domestic tragedy: it traces the struggle among contemporaries to interpret both the act and the retribution. Some clamored for unmitigated rigor; others beheld in Rüsau a man tragically mistaken concerning his penury and the preservation of his house.
The Pitaval blends herein procedural documents, occasional broadsides, and the moral commentary of its compiler. It collates the divergent recitals of the night of the crime, notes the popular rumors that swelled the roster of victims, and distinguishes the judicial decree from speculative theories of lunacy or motive. It permits us in no way to convert an alleged explanation into a psychological certainty. The judicial finding, for its part, remains unequivocal: Rüsau was convicted of six premeditated murders and executed in March 1804. The motive he professed—a terror of destitution unsupported by any imminent financial peril—remains an assertion ascribed to the prisoner, hotly debated by contemporaries, and impossible to reduce to any modern diagnosis.