On March 17, 1883, the royal Residenz in Munich awoke to find a strongbox forced open. The door to the Lord Marshal’s office stood ajar; in the adjacent room, the iron chest, shifted from its pedestal, bore the unmistakable marks of a burglary. Exactly 9,310 marks were missing. Initial suspicions fell upon a locksmith and several workmen who had recently been employed on the premises. The inquiry yielded nothing against them. Two months later, another explanation was already circulating among the court retinue: the culprit could only be Joseph Schmid, the Hoffourier known as Ferrari.
This accusation rested upon proximity, not proof. Schmid was thoroughly acquainted with the departments and chambers of the marshal’s bureau; he had been present in the offices on the very evening of the theft. The man, then forty-one years of age, had been born in Rome, had authored an Italian grammar, and had served the royal household for twenty years. Married to the daughter of Professor Lauth, a father of five children, he enjoyed multiple sources of income. Nothing in his record of service, according to Marshal von Malsen, indicated the slightest misconduct. Yet, in March 1884, he stood before the criminal chamber in Munich, charged with having rifled the chest either alone or with an unknown accomplice.
The evening of March 16 provided the prosecution with its tightest thread. A court dinner scheduled for the following day had been cancelled, yet Schmid had returned to the office around half past six to remain at disposal. Two footmen on watch were stationed in an adjoining room. On several occasions, according to the trial chronicle, he urged them to return home. Shortly after seven, he departed on an errand into town. Three-quarters of an hour later, he returned. The footmen overheard the chinking and rolling of coin in the office. As they took their leave, Schmid reportedly instructed them not to have him summoned should anyone ask for him.
His own account was far less mysterious. He admitted to having rolled two hundred marks from journalistic earnings along with other sums, the morrow being payday. He stated that he had gone to the Bühlbräu to seek out a friend, and had subsequently taken a glass at the Franciscaner brewery until past nine o’clock; he had arrived home at about ten minutes past nine. His mother-in-law and a housemaid could, he asserted, attest to his return. His wife had been at the theatre. The chronicler provides no independent reconstruction of these movements: the court heard Schmid’s deposition, while the prosecution dwelt upon the duration of time he had spent alone within familiar walls.
The interior doors had been found unlocked; the difficulty regarding skeleton keys, however, concerned the chest itself. A witness stated that the locks of the strongbox could not have been picked with such implements. It was therefore necessary to explain how the chest had been removed from the office: the prosecution alleged it had been transported to the Hoffourier’s bedchamber, across service corridors and up a narrow flight of stairs, and then forced open within his private dressing room, dark and secluded. Angular indentations attributed to the heavy iron chest were observed in several floors. In Schmid’s bedchamber, marks upon the floorboards appeared to replicate the impression left by the strongbox on its accustomed stand. He countered that these were merely the marks of a boot-scraper. The presumed displacement of the chest would have required one or more confederates; the chronicle leaves this physical difficulty entirely unresolved.
The wound upon the right wrist soon occupied the centre of the proceedings. Two parallel gashes might, it was thought, have been sustained while prising open the strongbox. Yet several witnesses recalled having observed them prior to the theft. A former subordinate testified that Schmid had first attributed the injury to a bout of fencing, and later to a scratch inflicted by his wife. The latter explained that during a domestic quarrel on March 9, she had grazed him with a pair of scissors he had attempted to wrest from her grasp. Her father, Professor Lauth, had likewise noted the mark several days before the burglary.
The medical experts failed to dispel the uncertainty. Dr. Martin considered that the scar could not have been caused by a fingernail and that there were perhaps two separate wounds. Dr. Helferich, on the contrary, deemed that the lesion was unlikely to correspond to a cut sustained while rifling the chest, and could very well be explained by fingernails. He held the wife’s nails close beside the scar; Dr. Martin maintained his disagreement. The former insisted he had never claimed that Schmid had cut himself on the chest, merely that the wound was not attributable to fingernails. An expert examination intended to illuminate suspicion thus produced two irreconcilable readings of an old mark.
The witnesses from the palace brought forward memories of uneven weight. The cleaning woman Dischler testified that Schmid had long refused her the key to his dressing room, where she had previously cleaned. She had noticed hollows in the floorboards there several days after the theft. But why had he kept the room locked? Schmid replied that he kept the kitchen staff’s gratuities from the Nymphenburg wedding celebrations within, and that the lock on his escritoire was defective. Marshal von Malsen recalled no impressions of a chest in that room; he deemed it utterly improbable that men could have carried so ponderous a box through the rooms and staircase described.
As the rumour gathered substance, it transformed everyday occurrences into incriminating evidence. A police officer reported having discovered two thousand marks at Schmid’s lodgings; the defence countered that his revenues and his ledger fully accounted for the sum. Mention was made of his brother, alleged to have been present in Munich at the time of the crime, yet an official certificate from Rome attested that neither of his brothers had left the Papal city during the period in question. It was reported that Schmid had jested, naming a footman as his accomplice; he disputed the phrasing, explaining that others were merely repeating what gossip had already spread abroad. Anonymous letters were circulating; his superior had advised him to pay them no heed.
The defence directed its sharpest attacks against the manner in which the suspicion had been constructed. Advocate Bernstein maintained that the examining magistrate had denied the defence access to the case file prior to the close of the preliminary inquiry, depriving his client of the means to answer the depositions. He recalled that the earliest searches had targeted the workmen, and subsequently the locksmith Arzberger, without every corner being searched with equal diligence. The marks upon the floorboards had been neither preserved nor measured conclusively; the ground plan of the premises, he argued, depicted a doorway that had long been walled up and omitted any verification of the office window. This line of reasoning did not establish who had taken the marks. Rather, it exposed how many links in the prosecution’s chain depended upon belated observations, frail memories, and conjecture.
State Prosecutor Zimmerer nonetheless called for a conviction and a sentence of five to ten years’ penal servitude. In his eyes, the thief had to be familiar with the Residenz, Schmid had possessed access to the rooms and ample time to act, and his subsequent conduct had been suspicious. Bernstein replied that no one had even established with certainty that the 9,310 marks were inside the chest at the material time. He invoked his client’s twenty years of faithful service and denounced the hostility borne by certain menials toward this cultivated foreigner. The closing speech, at times virulent toward the witnesses, was interrupted by the presiding judge when it turned to personal attacks. The chronicler notes that the gallery applauded the advocate; this public favour was no proof of innocence, but it demonstrated the degree to which the trial had become the contest of a reputation as much as that of a burglary.
After an hour’s deliberation, the court returned a verdict of complete acquittal. In its statement of grounds, it ruled that the cardinal elements of suspicion had been dismantled: the marks in the bedchamber were by no means proven to be those of the chest, the wound failed to demonstrate that Schmid had received it during the theft, and his brother was established to have been absent from Munich. The judgment restored to the former Hoffourier his civil liberty, without ever bringing the true author of the burglary to light. The strongbox had indeed been breached; the indentations and the testimonies had proved insufficient to show by whose hand.