On the morning of July 22, 1819, shortly after daybreak, Marianna Miszewska was discovered hanged in the cowshed of the family farmstead at Jastrzembie, near Stargard. A young farmhand had found her; her husband, Nicolaus, severed the cord and endeavored to revive her. The initial forensic examination concluded that death had resulted from asphyxia caused by hanging, yet noted nothing more about her neck than a faint reddish circular mark. The woman, aged approximately twenty-four, thus appeared to have taken her own life. Even so, the narrative in the Pitaval observes that no sign of melancholy had ever been detected in her demeanor, and that Marianna had merely repeated that she could no longer endure being denounced as a witch.
A year elapsed before a second medical opinion complicated this initial reading. An expert evaluation, solicited first from the Medical College of Danzig and subsequently from the Scientific Deputation for Medical Affairs in Berlin, deemed external violence probable in light of the neck trauma. Yet the physicians could not determine with certainty whether the hanging itself had produced death, or whether prior injuries had proved fatal to Marianna while the noose was intended merely to simulate suicide. Within the cowshed, the selfsame mark could thus be read as the trace of a voluntary act or as the final gesture of a contrivance.
The compilation assigns the affair to the year 1819, but provides neither the complete minutes of the proceedings nor the precise dates of the hearings. It identifies Marianna, née Prabuda, as the wife of a landholder, and records that she was known throughout the parish under the suspicion of sorcery. Her physical portrait is cursory; of her temperament and her daily life, the chronicler professes to discover nothing in the official records. The text opens, moreover, with contemptuous generalizations concerning the Polish-Kashubian populace of the Prussian province. Such prejudice belongs entirely to the nineteenth-century compiler, not to the evidentiary record, and cannot serve to characterize the inhabitants as a whole.
The rumor appears to have long preceded her death. According to the narrative, a twelve-year-old servant girl had told Katharina Zigowska that her mistress was a wicked woman and a witch. Katharina, who had suffered from boils the previous summer, reportedly asked Marianna whether she had cast the affliction upon her. The recorded reply—an affirmative “yes,” which the young woman could not tell was spoken in earnest or in jest—leaves it impossible to discern what Marianna herself believed. Later, Eva Krainska and her sister Victoria Baretzka allegedly reinforced this accusation, imputing to her various distempers among the cattle as well.
At the center of the case stood four women. Katharina, reckoned by the court chapter to be between eighteen and twenty years of age, and Josephina Baretzka, aged twenty-five, were the two young women accused of having acted within the cowshed. Eva Krainska, aged fifty-five, was Marianna’s mother-in-law; Victoria, twenty-six and the mother of five children, was her sister. This division of roles emerged from the statements gathered during the investigation and subsequently abridged by the Pitaval. The two younger women pointed to their elders as instigators; the declarations of Eva and Victoria presented a very different picture of culpability.
In Katharina’s version, the two younger women rose before dawn, proceeded to the cowshed, and waited until Marianna began to milk the kine. Josephina reportedly entered first to demand that she heal her ailing child. An altercation ensued: both women fell to the ground, Marianna on top of Josephina; Katharina ran in at her companion’s call and pulled Marianna down. In the confusion, she claimed, she believed the victim to be dead or unconscious, without being able to verify it. She then confessed to having passed a cord around her neck; Josephina, according to this initial deposition, tightened it and assisted in suspending the body.
Josephina offered a proximate yet divergent account. She described the dispute concerning her child’s sickness and the struggle in the cowshed, while seeking to minimize her own role in the final acts. She insisted that she had neither strangled Marianna nor compressed her chest. The chronicler notes that while both young prisoners admitted having possessed the intent to kill, each attributed the decisive act to the other. They explained the hanging by their desire to make it appear a suicide. These were the statements of the accused, not the findings of independent witnesses to the scene.
Katharina had known Marianna for two years and had lived beneath the same roof until shortly before her death. The Pitaval observes that no prior enmity between them was established; nor had Josephina displayed any personal malice. Their belief that the victim was a witch, however, appeared to have rendered the homicide permissible in their own eyes, judging by their recorded words. This explanation did not diminish the homicidal intent they acknowledged; rather, it illuminated the legal question the court was forced to resolve: how to classify the death when the accused confess they intended to kill, yet cannot know whether Marianna was still breathing when they hanged her?
The two older women were interrogated separately. Eva admitted having persuaded Katharina that Marianna was a witch and having urged her to “render her harmless,” according to the compiler’s summary. She also acknowledged having designated the feast day as a propitious moment, when the other villagers would be asleep. Yet she maintained that she had instructed them to strangle and hang Marianna only if she refused to heal Josephina’s child; she claimed scarcely to remember having promised a patch of potato ground as a reward. Victoria admitted having spoken of sorcery and declared that she did not consider it a sin to kill a witch, but asserted that she had regarded the entire enterprise as a jest.
The inquiry also brought to light older accusations. A twelve-year-old girl, Anna Scharafin, was said to have testified that Eva had encouraged her to repeat that her mistress was a witch, rewarding her with milk and potatoes. Her testimony did not carry the weight of a sworn deposition on account of her tender years, the chapter notes. A court bailiff likewise claimed, without being placed under oath, that he had once subjected Marianna to the water ordeal to verify the accusation. Such accounts illustrate how suspicion circulated through the village; they establish neither sorcery nor any legal culpability in her death.
The statements of the four women did not remain consistent. On appeal, a resumption of the preliminary examination was ordered after several of the accused retracted portions of their testimony. The compiler adds that several withdrew these retractions following formal admonishments, while threats or suggestions from third parties were said to have inspired certain denials. He deemed the two younger women so vulnerable to fear and hope that they might have been induced to utter almost anything; nevertheless, he regarded their initial concurring statements as damning. This interpretation remains that of the chronicler alone. In the absence of unabridged trial minutes, it remains impossible to verify how the original depositions or retractions were obtained.
The expert medical testimony, however, made it impossible to reduce the matter to the mere discovery of a suspended corpse. For the Berlin Deputation, it was exceedingly probable that antecedent injuries to the neck had been inflicted by human hands; yet the immediate cause of death remained indeterminate. Marianna might have succumbed to those initial injuries, her body subsequently strung up to disguise the deed. Alternatively, she might merely have been stunned before being hanged, with the suspension completing the murder. The medical report left these possibilities open rather than designating a single gesture as the certain cause.
It was this second hypothesis that formed the crux of the legal knot. The Criminal Senate of the Berlin Kammergericht, consulted for an opinion by the head of the judiciary, held that the two young women had maintained their intent to kill from the initial assault through to the hanging. Even had Marianna still been alive when the cord was slipped around her neck, this subsequent act could not, in the opinion of the court, be divorced from the assault as a mere attempt to stage a suicide. The legal opinion, delivered by a divided vote, accordingly recommended the penalty of death for Katharina and Josephina. This, however, was not the sentence ultimately recorded against them.
The appellate judge imposed a lesser penalty: twenty-five years of hard labor in a house of correction for each of the two younger women. The Pitaval explains that their belief in the victim’s alleged sorcery was deemed to have diminished their capacity for criminal culpability. Eva Krainska received five years of confinement in a house of correction, while Victoria Baretzka was provisionally acquitted in the final instance, her exact role remaining shrouded in doubt. These distinct punishments reflected the hierarchy of acts and the prevailing doubt regarding the instigation; they did not alter the reality that Marianna had perished in a scene whose precise medical cause could never be established with certainty.
The compiler chose primarily to treat Jastrzembie as an exemplar of penal law: where does criminal intent end, and at what precise moment does an action become consummated homicide? His narrative preserves sharp, concrete details—the cowshed, the ailing infant, the village rumors, the diverging accounts—yet frankly concedes the dearth of information concerning Marianna’s life. The depositions and penalties reach us through a retrospective volume from 1842, rather than through original trial rolls. The extant dossier thus permits us neither to accept the confessions of the accused as unvarnished truth, nor to resolve the medical dispute. Above all, it leaves an enduring void: the voice of Marianna herself, preserved only in that single reported lament, that she could no longer bear to be called a witch.