In the night of November 12 to 13, 1833, the mail coach plying between Aarau and Zurich passed near Wohlenschwyl. Its rear boot was broken open; letters were strewn across the highway, and a pouch of money disappeared. Six nights later, the hasp yielded anew at the very same turn of the road. With the morning light, letters lay scattered about the village streets, and near the parsonage gate, a picklock was discovered. The post had been plundered twice; subsequent assaults were to be thwarted by heavy iron bars affixed to protect the chest. Yet the highway was not the sole theater of these events. Ere long, flames began to leap about the village church.
Wohlenschwyl is an Aargau village straddling the post road connecting two cities. The mail rolled through its center, travelers halted at its inns, and the parish priest, Peter Welti, knew every roof and every face. After the first blazes, he gathered alms for the ruined cottagers. He was one of those to whom the parish instinctively turned whenever it was time to pray, to console, or to bring relief. Nothing in the eyes of his flock linked him to the forced locks of the mail coach.
Early in January, fire broke out in a great timbered homestead thatched with straw. The night resounded with alarms; beacon shots were fired from the heights, the tocsin pealed, and the peasants came running through the dark. Just as they believed the first furnace subdued, another house, standing hard by the church and the parsonage, burst into flames. The belfry itself was imperiled. Seven households lost roof, bedding, clothes, implements, and nearly all their gear. A boy of ten perished in the fire; three cows, a calf, a pig, and a goat burned with him.
Inside the parsonage, a straw mattress began to smolder upon the floorboards. An ember, carried by wind and flame, might well have reached the rafters; it was smothered in the nick of time. The shingles of the steeple were already blackened. When the parishioners assembled to reckon their losses, Welti went about soliciting contributions for the destitute families. News of the conflagration was published in the gazettes, accompanied by an appeal to public charity. Offerings arrived from sundry quarters. The villagers set about rebuilding; the authorities inquired into the origin of the fires and discovered nothing.
On February 6, towards half-past four in the morning, another house took fire at Mägenwil, half an hour’s march distant. It was the dwelling of the widow Huber. The inmates were startled from their beds and fled into the cold night. Welti chanced to be traveling toward Aarau to discuss repairs to his parsonage; perceiving the glare as he walked, he aroused the household and lent a hand in driving out the livestock. One of the Huber daughters ran back into the flames, presumably to save some wearing apparel; she never emerged. The fire consumed the dwelling and four adjacent houses. Welti later gave out that the family had been careless with their hearth. His exertions as a deliverer and his explanations did not, however, dispel all doubts.
On February 18, the tocsin rang once more in Wohlenschwyl: a barn belonging to the brothers Seiler was burned to the ground. The communal council formally resolved that the fire had been deliberately set, naming no man. Private talk was no longer so circumspect. The name of the village priest began to pass from mouth to mouth. On February 21, another blaze erupted at Birrhard, in a peasant’s homestead. The fire caught in the thatch and spread with such fury that the occupants, already abed, had barely time to save their lives. The district prefect hurried to the spot and found Welti busy hauling beasts out of the burning stable. Once again, he stood at the very heart of the disaster, seemingly having hastened thither only to preserve life.
On February 22, the *Aargauer Zeitung* inserted an anonymous paragraph touching the burning of the barn. It recounted the aid dispatched from neighboring parishes, the inhabitants watching over their own roofs, and the dread of some fresh blaze bursting out behind their backs. It subjoined a curious incident: on the night of the catastrophe, a burgher of Eckwyl returning from Bühlison was said to have been stopped by highwaymen between Wohlenschwyl and Mägenwil, owing his preservation solely to the swiftness of his horse. No soul had heard of this assault; the magistrates took it for a sheer fabrication. They presently traced the author of the report: it was Welti himself. At the very moment his name was whispered about the village, his pen was conjuring up a band of marauders whom no living witness had ever encountered.
Within the parish itself, suspicion was fed by more substantial clues. On the day of the Birrhard fire, February 21, Welti had sat at the sign of the Sun. He had twice quitted the taproom, once by day and once after nightfall. He claimed to have seen no one prowling about the farmstead; upon the first cry of alarm, he had rushed forth with the others, entered a stable familiar to him, and unbound the cattle. Witnesses corroborated parts of his movements. They placed him also, shortly before several of the outbreaks, in close proximity to the affected premises. An inquest into the direction of the wind decisively disposed of his assertion that the mattress in the parsonage had ignited by mere hazard.
The priest’s pecuniary affairs darkened the case against him. Welti was heavily encumbered with debts; his creditors were pressing him hard, and judicial execution was imminent. Yet, from November 13 onward, he had discharged payments to twelve separate creditors, totaling 1,624 francs. The pieces of money he handed them were identical in kind to those missing from the looted mail packets. He could assign no legitimate source for these funds. The magistrates further discovered that he had made inquiries as to the construction of the post-boot and the mechanism of its locks. Concurrently, he had taken out a policy of insurance upon his parsonage furniture in the sum of 3,000 francs. Thenceforth, the constabulary joined the postal robberies and the conflagrations in a single investigation.
The village did not wait upon the law. Groups of peasants assembled, threatening to slay Welti if he dared appear abroad or attempt to say mass on the coming Sunday. The authorities shrank from conveying him directly to the common gaol; instead, they posted gendarmes to guard him within his own presbytery. In this measure lay both magisterial caution and fear of a populace whose suspicions had turned to fury. A search of the parsonage brought to light a singular object: an axe bearing traces of greenish-yellow paint. The boot of the Aarau coach was painted that very hue, and the clefts in the wood answered to the width of the blade. The implement now joined the curate’s hearth to the post road.
The criminal court decreed his formal commitment, and Welti was conveyed to prison. During his initial examinations in April, he stoutly denied both the robberies and the fires, even when witnesses stood forward to confound his statements. The examining magistrate sentenced him to three days on bread and water for his contumacy. On the morrow, the turnkey discovered that he had hollowed out an opening in the wall of his cell. The breach, however, was too narrow to afford him passage. This abortive flight changed the course of the inquiry: the priest petitioned for an audience, announcing that he would disclose the whole truth.
On May 3, he made a full confession. He recounted how he had forced the mail-boot, seized the specie, and cast the correspondence upon the road. He had returned to the same spot; later, he had renewed his attacks upon the hasps, first with an axe, then with cold chisels fetched from his house. The iron had held fast, and the carriage, traveling at speed, had outrun him. These later assaults had left only toolmarks behind, but the booty of the two successful robberies had already been parcelled out among his creditors.
Touching the conflagrations, Welti revealed an unadorned device: a piece of tinder-sponge ignited at his pipe, thrust deep into thatch or hay. In January, he had fired two dwellings, one above and the other below the parsonage, while the peasants were absorbed in fighting the first flames. He had then attempted to consume his own residence by dropping the live ash of his pipe onto the mattress in the entryway. The straw had smoldered, but those who rushed in quenched it before it could take hold. At Mägenwil, he had awakened the family after kindling the eaves; he had stayed to assist in driving out the beasts, then retired to an inn where he lingered until noon. On February 18, he fired the Seiler barn with his glowing sponge and duly appeared among the firemen. At Birrhard, he again inserted the burning spark beneath the thatch of a cottage he had never entered, remaining upon the scene until three in the morning.
The bill of indictment no longer rested on the mere presence of a priest at the scenes of misfortune. There were the payments to his creditors, the coins corresponding to the postbag manifests, the paint upon the axe, the matching gouges in the timber, the inquiries regarding the diligence, and, finally, the confession tallying with every material fact. The pecuniary motive stood revealed in his crushing debts and the insurance upon his furniture; the fire was intended to consume the insured chattels while multiplying disasters all about, so that the parsonage and its incumbent might appear merely one ruined household among many.
Two courts of judicature declared him guilty of aggravated robbery and repeated arson under manifold circumstances of guilt. Welti was degraded from his sacred office and condemned to die. On September 4, 1834, he was led forth to the place of execution and beheaded by the sword.
The collector of church alms, the deliverer of Mägenwil, and the man with the yellow-stained axe were revealed as one and the same. On the post road, iron hasps had yielded their letters and their silver; at the church, the tocsin had roused the whole valley to save the burning roofs. Even the curate's mattress had begun to smolder, but neighbors had quenched it before the fire could mount. The priest had relied upon the tumult to turn all eyes away. At the bar of justice, it was the small traces he had failed to extinguish—a smear of paint upon iron, coin paid out across the table to creditors, and the narrow breach in his cell wall—that related all the rest.