Shortly past nine o’clock in the evening, Charlotte Spillner’s son pushed open the bedchamber door to find his mother suspended from the upper hinge. Her face was smeared with blood; her hair hung dishevelled. He cut her down, laid her upon the bed, loosed the cord encircling her throat, and ran to fetch a neighbour. To the neighbour he brought into the house, he spoke of a sudden haemorrhage. To the physician, he confessed he had found her hanging; before the magistrates, he intimated she might have made away with herself in a fit of madness. The cord, however, was not produced.
Before the funeral had even taken place, Potsdam was already whispering of a calamity none could yet name. The aged gentlewoman was laid in the earth on the first of March, accompanied by the prescribed tolling of bells. Nothing in the initial examination had revealed any decisive injury beyond the furrow upon her neck. Yet the death of Charlotte—long separated from her husband and known locally as the widow Spillner—stubbornly resisted the convenient theory of self-destruction. She shrank from death, harboured plans for the future, and had appeared in robust health. Why should she have chosen the noose? And why had her son, upon discovering the body, failed to summon the authorities at once?
Since 1826, Charlotte had resided at number 20 Am Kanal. In the front house lived her son, a former master mason and town councillor. He would bring her meals and coffee, lighting her way home each evening with a lantern. The neighbours were well aware of this filial solicitude. They were equally acquainted with the old woman’s dwelling: rooms appointed in the old fashion, coin and trinkets kept on the premises, and an escritoire in which she locked her personal effects. She lent modest sums to tenants and less fortunate townspeople at steep interest, holding various articles in pledge. Her money, her promissory notes, and these pledged goods kept beneath her roof rendered her domestic habits a matter of common knowledge throughout the quarter.
On the evening of the twenty-fifth of February, several residents had seen her about. Toward half-past six, she was still tidying her henhouse. She had spoken of calling upon her brother, a glove-maker. Thaw and rain had turned the lanes into mire; a violent wind battered the gardens. Later that night, Lehmann, a peat merchant, heard two cries issuing from the rear courtyard, which struck him as resembling the shrieks of a woman in labour. Another witness recalled a muffled sound, an eerie “whoo, whoo,” toward eight o’clock. The hours and descriptions did not perfectly align, but the cry in the courtyard lingered in every mind.
The doors, too, told a discordant tale. The garden gate, habitually kept locked, was found open around ten o’clock on the night of the twenty-fifth, and remained so the following morning. A key still sat in the outer lock; four unfamiliar keys came to light upon the dung heap, two of them crossed one over the other. The key to the garden parlour was missing. Inside the apartment, locks and drawers were scrutinised with the utmost care. It was not long before the suspicion of robbery twined itself around that of murder.
The son himself took no initial inventory. On the twenty-seventh of February, seeking a modest sum to pay the joiners who delivered the coffin, he failed to find the money in its customary place, yet felt no immediate alarm. A borrower named Rennert came demanding the return of the pledges she had left behind. On the morning of the first of March, his wife urged him to search for them. It was then he discovered the disappearance of jewellery, steel-mesh purses, shifts, and window curtains. He convinced himself that his mother had been murdered solely to be despoiled. His suspicions fell upon Machold, an acquaintance. He publicly announced a reward of two hundred thalers. The accused, however, was able to prove that he had spent the evening at the Apollo Hall; his presence there accounted neither for the cord nor for the stolen property.
The son set about pursuing another trail. In the garden, he noted footprints leading from the Apollo Hall, clearing the fences of neighbouring plots, and heading toward a shed adjoining his own yard. The passage appeared to have been trodden repeatedly. From this shelter, one commanded a direct view of the window of Braun, a lodger in the opposite house. On the second of March, the son laid these particulars before the police. The cord was surrendered only later: it bore dark stains of blood and strands of mixed black and grey hair.
The grave had to be reopened. On the fifth of March, physicians examined the corpse for the first time. Their conclusions did not suffice to exclude hanging as the true cause of death. On the twenty-third, a second exhumation was ordered; this time, the garments and the cord were subjected to far more rigorous inspection. The lacerations to the head and face, the blood observed within the cranium, and the general medical findings radically altered the reading of the body. Charlotte had sustained heavy blows before being suspended. The examination did not disclose the assailant’s identity, but it shattered the notion of a solitary woman who had knotted the rope with her own hands and given herself over to the void.
The hunt for the stolen effects led directly to Helmrich. In his dwelling, two gold rings were found concealed beneath the stove. His wife had sold a brass mortar on the very day of the funeral. Further goods were unearthed within a parcel hidden in the cellar of a house where Frau Helmrich worked as a day-labourer. The items lay wrapped in a piece of black woollen cloth tied with a cord. A neighbour had caught sight of another bundle near that cellar a few days earlier; it had since vanished. Every fresh discovery drew the net tighter around Helmrich, yet left the riddle of the homicide unresolved.
Helmrich had been bred to the blacksmith’s trade. He boasted an ability to fashion keys and was familiar with the ways of the house. He had long subsisted on petty theft, odd jobs, and shiftless contrivances. His debts were mounting; he spoke openly of emigrating to America. Braun, his companion, had lived directly across from Charlotte and was well acquainted with the premises. The pair had kept company since the previous autumn. Both men were taken into custody, and their wives were subsequently prosecuted for harbouring stolen goods or maintaining a guilty silence.
Helmrich acknowledged the thefts, but advanced a chronology contrived to absolve him of the blood on his hands. He maintained that he had entered Charlotte’s lodging only after her death, clambering through an unlatched window on the twenty-eighth of February or the first of March. Yet several items had already gone missing prior to that date; the casements had been found secured, and the points of entry he described contradicted the physical findings. A prior burglary had indeed taken place in December, targeting Charlotte’s escritoire. Helmrich’s successive accounts of this intrusion, of the doors, and of the stolen articles contradicted one another at every turn. In proportion as he was forced to concede a larceny, he pushed back the hour at which he could have set foot inside the house.
Other witnesses testified that Helmrich had spoken of dispatching a wealthy old crone, seizing her coin, and fleeing to America. These depositions were sworn under oath, yet the witnesses did not all enjoy untarnished reputations; some were no strangers to prison walls, and their testimony had to be weighed with caution. One witness recounted Helmrich’s discourse on how to disguise a murder as a suffocation leaving no telltale finger marks. Braun, for his part, had offered a gold ring to a dealer and could furnish no coherent account of how it had come into his possession. Yet no confession ever came to substantiate a common, murderous pact.
The assize trial, conducted from the seventeenth to the twentieth of July 1855, was thus obliged to resolve three distinct questions: who had penetrated into the house, who had carried off the goods, and who had slain Charlotte. The clues at times supported one another, and at times clashed. The son had moved the body and initially spoken to the neighbours of a haemorrhage, though he had disclosed the true state of his discovery to the physician. Despite this, the initial inquest had permitted the interment before an adequate examination could be made. The second exhumation had corrected that first impression, but it could not reconstruct every movement of that fatal night. The cord, the hair, the contusions, and the plunder formed a compelling body of material evidence; the reported conversations introduced designs that no living soul had witnessed in their execution.
The jury declined to convict Helmrich of premeditated murder. They found him guilty of having intentionally slain Charlotte in order to remove the obstacle to his robbery; it was not established that the resolve to kill had existed prior to the commission of the act. This legal distinction did not preserve his life: he was sentenced to death for intentional homicide without premeditation. Braun was acquitted of murder, complicity, manslaughter, and accessory after the fact. The two wives were likewise acquitted. Helmrich’s guilt was not allowed to taint all those whose names had been drawn into the net of the investigation.
Royal confirmation of the sentence was handed down on the nineteenth of February 1856. Helmrich was remanded for execution at Moabit. Bureaucratic delays, alterations in the judicial calendar, and the intervention of the Minister of Justice deferred the final reckoning. The prison chaplain, Klehmet, believed he discerned in the condemned man’s demeanour grounds to doubt his guilt, and petitioned for a reprieve. The sentence was reaffirmed; on the eighth of July, Helmrich fell beneath the headsman’s axe. Until shortly before the execution, he persisted in protesting his innocence. Nothing in the records permits us to ascribe to him any more precise dying words.
In the garden along the canal, the strange keys had at first seemed to point to a forced entry; the footprints had led toward a shed, and the open gate appeared to trace the flight of an assassin. Yet the trial did not transform every neighbour into an accomplice. It left Braun a free man and both women cleared of the charge, while the capital verdict against Helmrich rested upon a narrower conclusion: that the theft and the mortal blow were inextricably linked, even if premeditation could not be proven. Above the bed where Charlotte had been laid out, the cord had been tossed atop a wardrobe. When the physicians took it down alongside her garments and her hair, it failed to tell the whole story; it merely ensured that the first tale—that of suicide—could no longer stand alone.