Three poultry merchants were making their way from Spangenberg toward the market in Cassel when they came upon crushed thickets and traces of blood in the woods of Haina. A few paces from the path lay a man whose face had been almost entirely battered to pieces. Two heavy cudgels and large stones, likewise dark with blood, were found beside the body. The account in the Pitaval speaks of a struggle that must have been prolonged and ferocious. Yet within the dead man’s pockets more than two thousand florins were subsequently discovered. The purse remained intact; it was the traveler’s name that was missing.
The three travelers turned back and roused the district magistrate, Koch. He dispatched word to the commune of Haina, then proceeded into the forest accompanied by an actuary, a physician, and a surgeon. Their post-mortem examination corroborated the injuries noted at first glance: death had been inflicted by violent blows to the cranium, chest, shoulders, and belly. The deceased bore the air of a young itinerant merchant, but no one could recognize his features. Neither shredded garments nor foreign strands of hair offered any initial scent of a suspect, and the opening inquiries led entirely into a void.
The hypothesis of robbery prevailed, notwithstanding the substantial sum left upon the corpse. Three days of searches yielded nothing. Then, a hatter in Melsungen noticed dried blood within the crown of a hat newly brought to him by Jakob Gräbe, an impoverished dweller of Haina some fifty years of age. Gräbe declared that he had merely stumbled upon the headgear in the woods and kept it. Nothing as yet demonstrated that the hat had belonged to the victim; nevertheless, the bare head of the corpse proved sufficient to transform the article into a paramount piece of evidence.
Suspicion crystallized with great haste. Gräbe suffered from an unsavory reputation and lived in severe penury; under interrogation, he entangled himself in contradictions regarding how the hat came into his hands. He protested that he had never set eyes upon the merchant. The chronicler observes that Koch, though depicted as an educated and humane magistrate, relinquished far too much authority to his underlings and exercised little surveillance over the prisoners. The turnkey, a bailiff, and two local watchmen were already entirely persuaded of Gräbe’s guilt. In their eyes, his persistent denials demonstrated nothing but contumacy.
The retrospective account relates that these subordinates beat him, repeatedly depriving him of his rations, warmth, and candlelight. They acted, the text specifies, without Koch’s warrant. One keeper, Hoffmann, ventured further still: having threatened the prisoner with torture, he is said to have staged a nocturnal apparition of the devil within the cell. Blows, starvation, cold, and terror at last extorted what the investigation had failed to establish. After long confinement, Gräbe begged to be heard and acknowledged the murder.
His confession did not end there. He denounced four accomplices: two burghers of Melsungen by the name of Kothe, the forest ranger Fehr, and a former hussar named Kratzenberg. Because he was unable to distinguish the two Kothes by their Christian names, the authorities ordered all twelve men in Melsungen bearing that patronymic to be lined up before him. Gräbe pointed out the fifth and the sixth. The chronicler describes these two as affluent, highly respected timber merchants. Their passionate protests availed them nothing against arrest. All four were thrown into chains alongside Gräbe, cast into a dungeon as the perpetrators of a foul and covetous murder.
The intelligence threw Melsungen into consternation. Johannes Kothe’s elder sister, an unmarried woman of resolute character, journeyed to Cassel to petition for her brother’s release upon bail. At the inn where she took lodgings, she related her errand and the entire matter to the host’s sister. The latter was straightway reminded of an incident that had occurred several months earlier, which she had never thought to connect with the body discovered in the forest.
In the early dawn of May 2, a young linen merchant had entered the Heerwagen inn. He was returning from Hamburg, where he had collected the proceeds of his sales, and he carried a heavy traveling sack. He asked that a reliable porter be found to accompany him as far as Haina. Presently, two young strangers offered their services. They assured him they knew every turn of the road and could carry the pack by turns; the traveler thereupon dismissed the messenger who had already been sent for. According to the recollection preserved in the Pitaval, the men ate and drank in his company, sounding him out upon his affairs. He informed them that his name was Hau, that he was returning home to his young wife, and that he had enjoyed a prosperous year.
The innkeeper’s sister also recalled a gold pocket watch left upon the table of an upper chamber where water had been carried up for Hau. He had explained to her that he had purchased it for his wife. One guest had found the two companions sinister in appearance, remarking that he would never venture into a forest at nightfall in such company. Yet no crime had been reported at the time. When the corpse was later found, the hostess had thought fleetingly of Hau, but without sufficient clarity to lay her impressions before the courts.
Kothe’s sister inquired where the two strangers had settled their score. The answer directed her to the Ziller tavern, in the Unterneustadt quarter. The register of foreigners and the recollections of the tavern servants brought to light two travelers: Jakob Roßbach, of Sterbfritz, and Georg Müller, of Schwarzenfeld. The woman conveyed these names to the criminal judge Hausmann, in Cassel, who immediately solicited inquiries from the authorities in Schwarzenfeld. The initial dispatches characterized the pair as bankrupt traders and noted their sudden, lavish expenditures, though murder was not yet formally proved.
The trail was confirmed when one of the men returned to Cassel. The innkeeper’s sister recognized Hau’s watch, which she had seen upon the table in the upstairs room. She alerted her brother, who in turn warned the magistrate. The man was apprehended; it was Georg Müller. Jakob Roßbach was soon arrested as well. Questioned and confronted with the witnesses and material evidence, he broke down and confessed. The chronicle explains that the two men, ruined in their commercial ventures and burdened with families, had contemplated enlisting as volunteers upon the renewal of the war against France. Encountering Hau had presented them, by their own reckoning, with an opportunity to secure the necessary funds.
The Pitaval relates that after walking in his company, the two men fell upon him in the woods. Müller struck the first blow with a bludgeon; Roßbach threw himself upon the merchant. The narrative attributes to Roßbach the command to strike again, to which Müller is said to have replied that Hau was already dead. This scene is derived entirely from retrospective chronicle and reported admissions, rather than from court minutes consulted firsthand. The murderers carried off the sack and the watch; pressed for time, they did not rifle the pockets, wherein the chronicle places over 2,090 gold florins alongside silver coin from Hamburg. Casting off their bloodied clothes, they donned Hau’s apparel and returned to the district by stages. It was the watch, far more than the gold, that brought about their ruin.
Justice, however, failed to hold both culprits until the close of the trial. While being conveyed to Haina for a judicial view of the scene, Müller made his escape; the chronicler severely censures the escorting guards, drawn from the territorial militia, for their laxity. He vanished despite all pursuits and was never apprehended. Hau’s widow, who resided in Bavaria, was summoned to the court. She identified her husband’s garments and personal effects, and further evidence placed the merchant’s identity beyond doubt. Roßbach alone stood trial throughout the remainder of the criminal proceedings. The court condemned him to death, the supreme tribunal affirmed the sentence, and he was executed by the sword in Cassel in the year 1816.
Gräbe’s confession had not merely obscured the truth; it had dragged four innocent citizens into prison. The chronicler attributes that initial confession to the prisoner’s weak intellect and the brutality inflicted upon him; as no primary court records are available here, this explanation remains that of the Pitaval, as do the details of his midnight torment. The author estimates that the five men languished in custody for roughly a year, though conceding that the precise duration is unrecorded. Their ultimate liberation is taken as a matter of course in the narrative, without specific dates.
Redress was neither uniform nor complete. For Gräbe, the authorities granted a lifelong exemption from taxes, both for himself and for his modest plot. The commune of Haina was subsequently obliged to make good this deficit in his stead, so that the favor accorded the maltreated prisoner fell as a burden upon neighbors wholly innocent of offense. Johannes Kothe, whose commerce had been shattered by his incarceration, obtained two thousand thalers from the Treasury following hard negotiation. Werner Kothe, Fehr, and Kratzenberg likewise petitioned for reparation; the record notes that they received neither indemnity nor any public vindication of their innocence.
The subordinates who had maltreated the prisoners were brought to trial. The turnkey, the bailiff, and the two watchmen were dismissed from their posts and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment within the very cells where they had tormented their victims. Koch met a different fate. Disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him as well, but the account states that they were never carried to their conclusion. In 1815, the territory of Katzenelnbogen passed from Hesse-Cassel to Nassau; Koch was transferred along with the jurisdiction, assuming an official post under the new sovereign. The chronicler attributes the abandonment of the inquiry to this change of sovereignty.
At the outset, Hau’s murder had seemed to offer only an unknown body, a suspicious hat, and an extorted confession. The real crime was laid bare by a recognized pocket watch and recollections long left dormant; the forced confession, for its part, had manufactured four accomplices out of thin air. The chronicle leaves the five prisoners without adequate redress for a year of bondage, just as it allows Koch to escape definitive punishment. Thus could a solved crime leave in its wake a second injustice: that visited upon men whom the law had condemned in the mind long before establishing the facts.