On June 1, 1807, a peasant who had gone to cut wood in the Dettingen forest caught sight of a child’s body a few paces from a path. The wound to the belly lay open; contusions also marked the head and upper body. The boy, aged about ten or eleven, had died only recently. His name was Joseph Anger.
The magistrates of the Burghausen court repaired to the scene. The corpse had been displaced or arranged in a manner that the inquest could not immediately explain. Joseph was identified as the son of a Burghausen woman. His father, her fourth husband, had died some eight years earlier. By her first husband, a plasterer named Mathias Lenzbauer, she had borne another son: Mathias, who had thus become the murdered boy’s elder half-brother.
This name arose the moment the mother inquired where Joseph was. Mathias returned a strange answer and conducted himself in a fashion that alarmed the magistrates. They took him into custody. He at first denied any part in the crime, then, during a third interrogation requested by his own plea, confessed to having slain his half-brother. The confession proved unstable: he repeatedly altered his account of the road taken, the blows struck, the wound inflicted, and what he had done with the body. Yet the narrative of the attack he ultimately delivered placed both boys together in the forest.
Mathias had not known an easy childhood. Following his father’s death, his mother had remarried and borne other children. The household was destitute; she spent part of her days laboring or begging, and the boys passed much of their time left to their own devices. Mathias was intended for the joiner’s trade. He learned to read and write, then was placed into an apprenticeship at Neuötting. At the end of five years, his training remained incomplete. He complained of earning too little to establish himself and hesitated to begin anew under another master. He subsisted on odd jobs or lingered at the maternal hearth.
The testimonies concerning his character painted no simple portrait. Neighbors recounted that he was indolent, that he abandoned his labor the instant the master quit the room, and that he showed himself harsh toward his mother. One woman reported that he would sometimes drive her from her bed with insults. Yet others saw him care for the younger children. He organized the household chores, led his little brother to church and school, prayed with him, and shared his bed. They played and laughed together. True, he might strike the boy when he disobeyed or returned late, but such roughness could scarcely account for murder.
At the end of May, Mathias set out with Joseph and an apprentice tailor named Rablbrunner to seek employment. The young apprentice returned to Burghausen that very day. Mathias remained in the company of a mason, claiming he had found no work. The two brothers lingered in Altötting until Sunday afternoon. Toward four o'clock, they set off on foot. Mathias carried in a cloth a dozen earthenware vessels he had taken from Neuötting on behalf of a farmer's wife.
Before reaching the forest, Mathias sat down with Joseph in a wheat field. Anna Pongratz, who happened to pass by, saw him sharing bread with his younger brother. She asked whether they were not returning home. Mathias answered that it was still early and that they wished to rest. He allowed her to gain a lead of a hundred paces, then set out again. Instead of keeping to the common road, he turned off toward the track known as the Prince’s Way. Anna observed this change of direction as well.
Within the woods, the track narrowed and lost itself in the brush. Mathias related that he seized a heavy stick and struck Joseph upon the head. The boy fell and lay motionless for a time. Mathias believed at first that he was dead. When he saw him stir, he struck him again, three times, and then repeatedly. In one of his accounts, he stated that Joseph rose and attempted to clutch at him; in another, he could no longer recall how many blows he had dealt. The child cried out the names of his mother and the Holy Virgin. Mathias continued until the boy scarcely moved at all.
He then declared that he opened the abdomen with his pocket knife in order, so he claimed, to shorten his brother’s agony. It was here that his narrative grew clouded. He could offer no consistent explanation for how the entrails came to be wound about the neck and secured to a tree. At times he acknowledged that this might have occurred in his state of confusion; at others he claimed to have no memory of it. He denied having done it deliberately, yet could not exclude having done so. The ferocity of the wounds, the club, and the knife stood at the center of his confession; the singular arrangement of the corpse remained its darkest enigma.
After the attack, Mathias quit the woods. He related that he continued along the path, paused, and then begged a carter to take the earthenware vessels onto his wagon. The driver observed that the youth was trembling, yet did not ask why. Mathias pressed on and reached his kin. When his mother questioned him regarding Joseph, he offered only evasive replies. The following day, the peasant who discovered the body sounded the alarm. Mathias’s proximity, his responses, and the contradictions running through his tales swiftly directed the inquest toward his person.
Money emerged during the interrogations as a plausible motive. Mathias stated that Joseph had inherited roughly fifty florins from his father. He also mentioned one hundred florins purportedly kept at home, and another sum placed with an artisan, the interest of which was paid to his mother. He claimed to have believed that by securing his brother’s inheritance, he might extricate himself from his destitution. This justification shifted throughout his depositions. He spoke likewise of a sudden impulse, and then of the dread that Joseph might denounce him. Feuerbach, however, was to seek a deliberate calculation beneath these variations.
The trial proceeded in accordance with the Bavarian law of the era. Following the inquest and the interrogations, the court of first instance condemned Mathias to the wheel, preceded by a coup de grâce, and pronounced a sentence of infamy. The case subsequently came before the Council. Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach, who drafted the report, examined the successive confessions, the testimony regarding the young man’s conduct, and the question of his discernment. Some neighbors depicted him as dull-witted or strange; others judged him sufficiently orderly to manage the household and comprehend his own deeds. Feuerbach weighed these impressions against Mathias’s behavior during and after the crime.
He concluded that the young man’s self-interest and discernment admitted of little doubt. The precise recollection of the facts, the manner in which he had prepared his tale, and his efforts to minimize his guilt seemed incompatible with any absence of reason. A single riddle, he wrote, eluded him: the manner in which the entrails had been tied about the neck and fastened to a young fir tree. The conviction was affirmed, but the agony of the wheel was commuted to decapitation. The chronicle records that several strokes of the sword were required before Mathias’s head fell.