On the 17th of August 1848, in the woods belonging to Burgomaster Feist, a mere quarter-hour from Furschenbach, Paul Köninger discovered the body of Monika Schweigle suspended from a sapling. A length of rope constricted her throat. Her garments were disarranged, and the corpse, half-lifted from the ground, appeared at first glance to confirm a deliberate suicide. The young woman was roughly five months with child. Close beside her, a broken horn comb piqued the curiosity of the investigators.
Two days prior, the widow Priscilla Schneider had been startled awake by the cries of Monika’s infant child. Entering the house, she found the boy utterly alone, the doors standing ajar, and his mother nowhere to be found. The child wept, calling incessantly for Monika. An initial search proved fruitless. Neighbours were questioned, yet none could attest to having seen her depart. Then the body was found, scarcely three hundred and fifty paces from the imposing Knapp farmstead—the wealthiest holding in the village.
Monika was twenty-nine years of age. She earned her bread as a day-labourer, reared two children born out of wedlock, and was carrying a third. The father of this unborn child was nineteen-year-old Bernhard Knapp, son to Johann Knapp, the master of the Günzberg estate. Bernhard still resided beneath the paternal roof alongside his youngest brother, Xaver, aged twelve; the eldest, Johann, had married and kept the Lion Inn at Kappelrodeck. In the account preserved in the Neue Pitaval, the chasm separating the humble day-labourer from this prosperous yeoman family casts its shadow over every scene. Monika maintained that she would soon become their daughter-in-law; the Knapps, for their part, would brook no such alliance.
On the 9th of August, as Monika returned from the market, Bernhard’s mother confronted her and struck her across the face. In the heat of the altercation, Monika retorted that the woman would be her mother-in-law whether she willed it or not. Her lover raised no hand in her defence. Indeed, only days before, Bernhard had initiated legal proceedings against her for defamation. The feud had become public scandal; the pregnancy could no longer be concealed.
When the district physician examined the remains, he pronounced death to have been caused by strangulation, noting further that Monika had been carrying a male foetus. Notwithstanding the suspicious circumstances of the cord, the authorities clung to suicide as the most probable explanation. Those who had known Monika protested: she had displayed neither despair nor any inclination to abandon her little ones. Suspicion quickly shifted toward the Günzberg. A young shepherd boy recognized the cord bound about the victim’s neck as a piece of rope recently missing from the farm.
Yet the first investigation halted there. Florenz Hirt, a farm servant and Bernhard’s bedfellow, swore under oath that his young master had not quitted their shared bedchamber throughout the night of the 14th to the 15th of August. Wanting any decisive material proof, the magistrate shelved the dossier. Soon thereafter, Hirt took ship for America. In the village, the official inquiry was closed; the murmurs, however, were not. The common folk remained persuaded that a foul crime had been committed, and that the Knapp household harboured the secret.
The years went by. The elder Johann Knapp died in 1852, leaving his widow at the helm of the estate. Bernhard eventually assumed management of the farm and took to wife the daughter of a neighbouring burgomaster. His elder brother Johann, known as the Löwenwirth, prospered as an innkeeper and led an easy life. Yet the Pitaval depicts him as an increasingly dark and tormented soul. On the 5th of March 1857, he was discovered hanging from a beam in an adjacent barn. Before taking his own life, he reportedly confided to his wife that he could no longer bear the weight upon his soul, and that an avowal must be made.
This violent death tore open the Schweigle affair anew. Long-forgotten particulars suddenly reclaimed their significance: the worn nail of her left foot, the broken comb discovered near the body, and the earlier remarks of Cresentia Springmann, a maidservant who had once surprised Bernhard weeping in solitude. He had confessed to her that he had sinned, casting blame upon both his mother and Monika, and adding that the girl’s blood would be upon his head if the child were truly his. Though falling short of a judicial confession, it was an admission the magistracy could no longer dismiss.
Broken by disease and bodily injury, Hirt returned from America. Brought before the interrogator once more, his composure failed him. Weeping bitterly, he confessed to having perjured himself nine years before. On that fateful night, Bernhard had instructed him to awaken him at one in the morning. The young master had stolen out into the darkness, returning an hour later in violent agitation, panting like a man pursued. Later, Bernhard had pressed his hand, telling him that his life lay entirely in Hirt’s keeping, to preserve or to forfeit as he saw fit. Hirt had chosen to shield him, and had subsequently fled overseas.
Placed under arrest, Bernhard attempted at first to shift the guilt onto his deceased brother Johann. Johann, he alleged, had confessed to luring Monika into the forest under the pretext of giving her hush-money, whereupon he had strangled and hanged her. The examining magistrate let him weave his tale. On the morrow, the magistrate asked pointedly whether Johann had stripped Monika’s lower limbs. Overcome, Bernhard broke down entirely and began his full confession.
He admitted his paternity. His mother and brother had continually pressed him to cast off Monika, threatening disinheritance and repeatedly urging that the woman must be done away with. On the eve of the murder, he had procured a halter. He had wavered, he claimed, between murdering Monika and taking his own life. At one in the morning, roused by Hirt, he repaired to Monika’s dwelling, promised her coin to settle their dispute, and induced her to accompany him into the darkness.
In the quiet of the woods, by his own account, they first embraced and lay together upon the earth. When Monika’s vigilance was entirely disarmed, he slipped the pre-knotted cord around her throat. He pulled with all his might. She struggled desperately, but could not loosen his grip. Having fastened the rope to a bough, he fled the scene, leaving her dead and with child. The 1883 narrative likewise assigns the instigation of the deed to the mother and the elder brother, whom Bernhard incriminated in his admissions. Hirt’s testimony, Bernhard’s accusations against his kin, and his subsequent confessions succeeded one another over the course of the preliminary inquiry. The Pitaval presents these developments as the decisive turning points of the investigation before the jury was called upon to apportion criminal responsibility.
Whilst incarcerated, Bernhard was visited by his wife. She asked him whether he had truly committed so atrocious a deed whilst concealing it from her all those years. He answered that he could never have brought himself to tell her, but that his soul was at last at peace. He besought her to rear their children in piety, as though a godly upbringing might atone for his transgression. His five-year-old daughter, catching sight of him behind the iron wicket, shrank back with a piercing cry. The prisoner wept. The magistrate subsequently arranged a confrontation between the accused and his family; there, Bernhard’s mother broke down in tears, acknowledging that she had indeed driven her son to the deed.
The assize opened at Bruchsal on the 1st of July 1857. The jurors returned verdicts of guilty against Bernhard, his mother, and Hirt, though their shares of guilt and their penalties were distinguished. The court condemned Bernhard and his mother to hard labour for life; Hirt received a sentence of three years’ imprisonment for perjury. According to the Pitaval, the tribunal ruled that capital punishment, which had been abolished within the Grand Duchy at the time the crime was committed, could not be retroactively applied under the penal code of 1851.
Following the dismissal of the initial inquiry in 1848, the country-folk had never ceased to believe that Monika was foully slain. In the twilight hours, travellers quickened their step when passing her grave or drawing near the Günzberg; legend whispered that at the stroke of midnight, the phantom of a woman carrying a child appeared upon the crag. The Pitaval records that after the verdict of 1857, the apparition was seen no more. The chronicle regards this sudden silence as the final extinction of the legend. Nine long years had had to elapse before human justice consented to call the demise of this poor mother of two by its rightful name, and not by that of suicide.