The Marks in the Fields of Keulos
At six o’clock on the morning of All Saints’ Day, 1855, Johann Adam Maul set out from Künzell carrying his double-barrelled gun. As an assistant forest guard, it was his duty to keep watch over the woodlands where snares had recently been laid. A few days earlier, he had shown these engines to Head Forester Kaufholz, naming the blacksmith Benedict Blösser as the man who forged them. Maul had declared that he would return to the hedgerows of Keulos, vowing that he would no longer suffer the poacher to ply his illicit trade.
He did not return. On the 3rd of November, his body was discovered near Pilgerzell, lying some distance off a roadway. His gun, his pouch, and his hat remained by his side; his pockets still held his personal effects. Theft, therefore, had played no part in his destruction. A post-mortem examination determined that he had sustained a charge of small shot from some distance, followed by severe injuries to the neck and head. The surgeons concluded that the blows to the skull had proven fatal. To the authorities, the sequence of these violences promised to reveal whether Maul had offered any defense, and at what precise moment the encounter had assumed a mortal character.
The spot where the body lay was not the ground of the assault. The clay clinging to the victim's garments was wholly foreign to the soil upon which he was discovered. Officers followed a trail of dragging for nearly five hundred paces, which gave way to the narrow tracks of a wheelbarrow. These ruts crossed the Fulda highway, traversed freshly ploughed land, and ascended toward the Keulos thickets. At one station, the barrow had been set down, leaving the clear imprint of its two iron-shod legs; running alongside the furrow was another line of prints, left by a bare foot with an unusually pronounced great toe.
Within the cover of the wood, the physical evidence drew into a narrower compass. Blue cartridge paper, loose grains of powder, several lead pellets, and two pools of blood were brought to light. A trail of disturbed earth plunged into the undergrowth, wound back toward the path, and met the wheel tracks once more. A second wheel mark appeared to trace the conveyance’s return after the deposition of the corpse. The whole scheme suggested a laborious detour toward Pilgerzell, calculated to divert suspicion from Keulos. The tracks bore no man’s name, yet they offered the magistracy a precise chart to be measured against the habits and implements of the village.
Forester Kaufholz recalled their meeting of the preceding week. Maul had brought him several artfully twisted wire snares. In Kaufholz’s judgment, their manufacture pointed to the hand of a smith rather than the crude bending of ordinary pliers; Blösser was the sole smith in the parish upon whom suspicion of poaching already rested. Kaufholz had pointed out an observation post from which the artisan’s dwelling could be watched. On the morning of his disappearance, Maul had thus gone into the woods in full expectation of encountering the man he suspected.
On that same morning of the 1st of November, village children walking to church heard a distant shot, followed by raised voices and two reports in rapid succession issuing from the Keulos woods. One child believed he recognized Maul’s voice crying out for assistance. A woman, standing near her cottage by the hedges, likewise heard the cry: “Help!” The exact hour remained uncertain, but these depositions placed an affray within the bloodstained sector long before the corpse was discovered.
Blösser denied having quit his hearth that morning, his wife corroborating that he had remained indoors, indisposed. Yet numerous particulars confounded this alibi. On the morrow of the deed, he had crossed the hedges bearing a spade toward his own plot, which lay contiguous to the ploughed field where the barrow had left its marks. Witnesses placed him near the scene of the struggle. A search of his premises discovered a heart-pointed slaughtering knife and a hand-axe. The examining surgeons affirmed that these implements were entirely capable of inflicting the wounds observed on the deceased.
On the evening of All Saints’ Day, contrary to his usual habit, Blösser had paid a visit to his neighbor, the schoolmaster. The latter found him dejected and distraught; he had put off his customary green jacket in favor of a red waistcoat, and one of his fingers was wrapped in linen. His wife explained that she had accidentally struck his hand with a hammer while assisting him at the anvil. The medical examiners, however, disputed that the injury resembled a hammer blow, suggesting instead the mark of human teeth. Upon his apprehension, Blösser was reported to have remarked that Maul lay “up yonder in the hedge,” adding that people would end by accusing him of the killing, though they had been well acquainted. These words fell short of a confession, yet they furnished the prosecution with fresh contradictions to resolve.
Blösser’s wheelbarrow was subsequently brought forth and compared to the impressions in the earth. The iron tyre of the wheel and the metal shoes of the legs fitted the moulds with singular fidelity; no other barrow examined in the surrounding hamlets answered so strictly to the marks. Blösser’s feet, and in particular the configuration of his great toe, corresponded no less accurately to the naked footprints in the mud. His apparel had undergone a recent washing, yet traces identified as blood were detected upon the cloth, notably upon the green coat he had initially denied wearing. Within his house and its immediate precinct were found scraps of blue paper and gunpowder closely resembling the cartridge debris recovered from the wood.
A witness, Adalbert Wiegand, contributed testimony of capital weight. At the hour when the neighbors heard the shots, he had observed Blösser returning from the hedges toward his dwelling. When Wiegand threw open his casement, Blösser crouched down, took to his heels, and disappeared behind an outbuilding. Blösser later explained that he had merely stepped outside to relieve himself and had bent behind a pile of logs; no such timber existed at the spot indicated. Other circumstances, such as abrasions on his finger and leg, were consistent with a violent struggle, though incapable on their own of revealing how the fray had unfolded.
The inquiry did not rest solely upon the question of identity. The jurors were required to determine whether Blösser had harbored a design to kill Maul from the outset, or whether the lethal purpose had been formed in the heat of the encounter. On the 16th of January, 1856, they delivered their verdict: Blösser had willfully inflicted the fatal wounds, but had not conceived a premeditated design of murder prior to the first blow; nevertheless, he had acted with deliberate reflection in the continuation of his violence. The court pronounced sentence of death for murder.
Following the verdict, Blösser made a partial confession. He admitted having gone into the woods to hunt, where Maul had surprised him. In his version, the forester had fired the first shot, precipitating a struggle in which the smith claimed to have acted in self-defense. Yet the medical authorities maintained that his knife could not have produced certain of the head wounds, nor did his narrative agree with his wife’s statements or the broader physical findings. He confessed to having transported the corpse upon his barrow, concealed his gun, and attempted to efface the tracks, though he sought to minimize his culpability in the assault itself.
The appellate court affirmed the sentence, and the sovereign refused the petition for clemency presented on his behalf. Blösser at last admitted that he had lied and that his sentence was just. On the eve of his execution, he begged forgiveness of Maul’s widow, which she bestowed upon him. The following morning, having bidden farewell to his children, he mounted the scaffold. In this cause, the ruts of a wheel, scraps of cartridge paper, washed garments, and the hesitant testimony of neighbors had linked a lonely thicket to a village forge. The verdict, for its part, drew a momentous distinction between the initial intent and the conscious resolve to persevere.