In the valley of Uri, a glove recovered from the waters of the Reuss was to guide investigators to a stone darkened with blood. In the final days of January 1861, Anna Maria Gamma, a thirty-five-year-old seamstress, set out from the village to return to her dwelling after a night spent in the company of the Zurflüh household. She never reached her door. Several days later, a child came upon her corpse in the Reuss. The inquest would trace along the riverbed stones the path of a murder; it would likewise disclose, within the record of the interrogations, the marks of a justice that presumed to wring truth from agony.
Gamma resided on the ground floor of a newly built house, hard by the road. She had a seven-year-old son and employed Barbara Zurflüh, whose brother Kaspar had reached the age of twenty-four. The judicial report reproduced later in the *Der neue Pitaval* indicates that Gamma was with child by this young man. Their liaison reached back to the preceding autumn. He had pledged to take her to wife, only to betroth himself subsequently to another maiden. When Gamma pressed him to hold to his word, she directed letters both to him and to his parents; she prepared moreover to petition the authorities in order to establish paternity.
On Friday, 25 January, an officer dispatched to summon her before the police magistrate delivered the notice into Barbara’s hands, Gamma being then absent from the house. The summons was set for the following Sunday; she was not to appear. On Friday evening, accompanied by Barbara and Clara, sisters to Kaspar, she journeyed to Meitschlingen, where she laid her demands before the Zurflüh family. Kaspar denied neither the commerce between them nor his promise; he consented, with wavering resolve, to wed the young woman. Yet his earlier utterances and his demeanor, as set down by the examining magistrate, revealed that he dreaded this union and the scandal which an outright refusal must provoke.
On the following evening, by the light of the moon, he accompanied Gamma upon the road homeward. Wayfarers crossed the path of the pair and observed that the young man’s countenance was muffled in a kerchief. He halted at an inn, while Gamma waited further down the road. Both then resumed their course toward the seamstress’s house. Kaspar initially contended that he had not quitted Meitschlingen. This denial foundered by degrees against the depositions of those who had met them and the conflicting accounts given by his own kin.
On Sunday morning, Gamma’s young boy found the door ajar and the bolt fallen upon the floor. His mother had vanished. Initial searches yielded nothing. On 1 February, a child caught sight of a woman’s body in the Reuss, lying upon a gravel spit. It was recognized as that of Anna Maria. One glove was missing; within her clothing were found a few centimes, two letters, and the key to her dwelling, but scarcely any money. The post-mortem examination noted several contusions to the head, upon the temples, and at the back of the skull. The physicians judged that they had been inflicted by a hard, blunt instrument. While no single wound appeared mortal of itself, their aggregate was capable of taking life; the river, they concluded, had subsequently dispatched the victim.
On 4 February, the missing glove was retrieved from a quiet reach of the stream. From that point, stains of blood led across the gravel toward the bank. Hard by an embankment sheltered by alders, a heavy boulder lay disturbed in the frozen earth; splashes and pools of blood marked the sand and fallen leaves. The report then traced a drag-mark down to the water, where the body had been hauled into the flood. These physical findings assigned to the disappearance both a scene and a progression of events. They did not as yet name the perpetrator.
Suspicion soon attached to Kaspar. Gamma’s letters, her condition, and his promise of marriage formed a clear motive; his suit with another woman gave to this promise an outcome he was desperate to avert. The garments he had worn on the night of the disappearance were recovered and found to be stained with blood. Kaspar maintained that the marks had come from a horse he had helped to slaughter, but his relatives and outside witnesses placed those clothes upon him at different times. He had also been seen returning home carrying a basket belonging to Gamma’s house. He initially denied having accompanied her, then conceded having escorted her to her threshold. His account shifted once more: he claimed to have lingered until dawn, swearing he had left her alive within her home.
Other particulars weighed heavily upon the case. He had concealed his movements, lied to the missing woman’s kin, and asked a fellow prisoner whether it were possible to prove who had done the deed. When the authorities pressed him regarding his coin, his answers wavered. At length, he admitted to having taken thirteen francs and earrings from the corpse. These contradictions and material exhibits did not, of themselves, resolve every hour of that night; joined, however, to the blood, the garments, and the depositions, they tightened the circle against his denials.
The report relates that following weeks of steadfast refusal, the prison administration subjected Kaspar to a diminished diet—first for three, then for four days in the week—and to the lash. After ten strokes administered during one interrogation, and fifteen upon a subsequent occasion, he confessed upon the eighteenth examination. He set forth the scene: he had drawn Gamma aside under the pretext of concealing the basket, and had then struck her upon the head with a stone as she bent down. He had followed with several blows, dragged the body to the Reuss, and thrust it into the current. He recounted further having rifled her pockets, carrying away the money and the earrings. By this narration, he had sought to rid himself of Gamma in order to marry the other woman.
The medical officers noted discrepancies between this confession and the wounds observed upon the corpse; they deemed, nevertheless, that the narrative did not contradict their finding as to how the victim had met her end. The examining magistrate had already assembled a formidable tissue of circumstantial evidence prior to this admission. Yet the confession had been extorted through a regime of starvation and the rod, explicitly ordained to break his silence. The chronicler of the *Der neue Pitaval* condemns this practice, maintaining that the dossier was sufficient without it.
The chapter cites the articles of the *Landbuch* invoked at trial: deliberate homicide fell under capital crimes, whereas the measure of punishment was left to the magistrate's discretion in a canton lacking a codified penal statute. The same chronicle observes that unwed pregnancy exposed Gamma, no less than Zurflüh, to penalties for illicit conduct. Thus, the young woman seeking recognition of her condition found herself already under the shadow of a police summons.
The Criminal Court of Uri condemned Kaspar to death for murder and robbery on 10 June. He appealed; the cantonal tribunal affirmed the sentence two days later. He addressed a final petition for clemency to the Landrat, which rejected his prayer by eighty-two votes against five. On 18 June 1861, at midday, he was conducted to the place of execution near Altdorf and beheaded. The gazettes cited in the work depicted the hooded penitents who accompanied the condemned man, the gathering multitude, and the prayers offered up once the axe had fallen. Their cowls were black; atop their staves, a small skull surmounted the procession. As the condemned passed on his way, the town bell tolled.