Frederick Kleinschrot vanished from the Black Mill on the 9th of August, 1817. His family declared that he had departed taking his ready cash with him. After whispers of murder began to circulate in 1818, the local magistrate opened an inquiry, only to let it lapse without transmitting the dossier to higher authority. Three years later, during an inspection of the archives following a fire at the courthouse, the former records came to light once more. They brought the investigators back to the mill and to a disappearance that several inhabitants had long suspected to be a murder. Feuerbach’s narrative follows the depositions, the exhumations, and the rigorous boundaries of Bavarian law, which ultimately precluded a conviction for consummated murder.
The Black Mill, or Schwarz Mühle, stood beside a stream in the depths of a narrow valley. Frederick Kleinschrot was roughly sixty years of age and master of a thriving enterprise. His wife Barbara, two grown sons, Conrad and Frederick, and two daughters lived beneath his roof. A day-labourer, John Adam Wagner, lodged in an outbuilding in the courtyard alongside his wife Anna. The miller also had an elder son established elsewhere. According to the accounts audited following his disappearance, the family possessed an estate of considerable value.
The household had long been rent by violent altercations. Two months before the disappearance, the miller had petitioned the magistrate to restore to him the mastery over his funds and his domestic hearth. His wife and sons had wrested his keys from him, so they claimed, because he squandered their common livelihood and neglected his kin. He, for his part, accused them of having laid hands upon him and flouted his authority. The court ordered that they submit to his rule and surrender the management of the house. A commission dispatched to the premises failed to quiet the strife: before the commissioners, the children openly declared their intention to seek judicial redress for their father’s brutalities and extravagances.
On the 9th of August, 1817, the miller vanished. Two months thereafter, Barbara declared to the provincial court that her husband had decamped with his coin, and petitioned that he be publicly gazetted as an absentee. The authorities issued the public citation and placed the estate under administration. Within a year, rumours of foul play were already rife. A day-labourer named Wiedman reported to a gendarme that Wagner had boasted of holding a secret over the family: should he speak, he claimed, the mill would shut its doors and every one of them would be cast into prison. He was alleged to have added that the family were compelled to furnish him with money whenever he demanded it.
The magistrate ordered the arrest of Wagner and Wiedman, then repaired to the mill to interrogate Barbara and her sons. Wagner and the kin maintained that the miller had departed of his own free will. A shepherd recalled having accompanied him on a prior occasion, at Kleinschrot’s bidding, carrying a sack so heavy that it must have contained at least two thousand florins. Yet the inquiry broke off before Wiedman could be examined under oath; the daughters were never questioned, and the sawmill wherein the corpse was rumoured to lie buried went unsearched. The magistrate forwarded no report to the central court. For three years, the dossier gathered dust.
In the autumn of 1821, this magistrate was suspended upon suspicion of malversation, and a commissioner from the central court arrived to examine his official acts. On the night of the 11th of November, a fire broke out in the archive room—ordinarily kept under lock and key—destroying a great portion of the records. While searching for documents pertaining to the former magistrate’s suspect transactions, the commissioner came upon the papers concerning Kleinschrot’s absence. He also caught wind of the rumours alleging that the family had paid to stifle the matter. On the 6th of December, Wiedman was at last examined under oath. Anna Wagner thereupon declared that the sons had solicited her husband to assist in slaying their father, and that he had ultimately yielded to their design.
John Wagner was interrogated separately. He recounted how Conrad had spoken to him of the family’s bitter hatred and promised him money should he rid them of the miller. According to Wagner, the sons assisted him in killing Frederick within the kitchen; the body was subsequently buried beneath the sawmill before being transferred to a rocky cleft in the Krumacker field. On the 8th of December, 1821, the day following the arrest of the family, Wagner led the investigators to the designated spot. Beneath a cover of stones, leaves, and moss, they uncovered shreds of clothing, a portion of a cranium, ribs, and diverse other bones. A physician concluded that these were indeed the remains of a man. Wagner identified the bones as those of the miller, professing to recognize, among other marks, his peculiar dentition.
The sons and daughters were brought separately before the remains. Conrad cried aloud that it was his father, before hastily adding that he was no murderer. Frederick answered that he could not even distinguish human bones from those of a beast. Margaret declared that she had learned of the plot only upon hearing her father’s cries, professing that it had then been too late. The youngest, Kunigunda, protested that she knew nothing of what had transpired in the field. While these reactions lent weight to the inquiry, they could not supplant the requisite individual examination of each person’s complicity.
The record laid bare Kleinschrot’s long history of domestic violence and the utter subjugation of his household. Neighbours and former servants corroborated the incessant brawls and brutalities. Several of the children recounted that the miller denied them food, clothing, and coin, while lavishing his substance upon mistresses. Before the magistrates, however, each member of the family was compelled to answer for specific acts, apart from their shared animosity. The daughters, in particular, were examined apart, and their accounts diverged from those rendered by the sons and by Wagner.
The judicial proceedings established that Wagner had actively participated in the homicide, and that Conrad had hired and abetted him. The depositions assigned to Frederick, the younger son, a more circumscribed role; the mother had consented to the design and aided in its concealment. Conversely, the allegations brought against Margaret and Kunigunda could not be substantiated. Anna Wagner admitted to having known of the impending deed without seeking to avert it. She pleaded obedience to her husband; yet the court convicted her nonetheless for having failed to intervene when she might have done so without peril to herself. The tribunal thus drew strict distinctions between the material perpetrator, the instigator, the accomplices, and those whose mere prior knowledge was proved.
A formidable legal hurdle, however, barred the court from designating the crime as consummated murder. The remains were too incomplete and decayed for a medical examination to establish the precise cause of death. The concordant confessions detailed the violence and the concealment, and none doubted that Kleinschrot was dead. Yet the Bavarian Penal Code, as Feuerbach elucidates, inexorably required proof that the wounds observed were of necessity mortal. In the absence of remains capable of sustaining such a finding, or of an independent witness to the demise, the court was constrained to convict upon the charge of an attempt against life rather than consummated murder. This judicial distinction did not signify that the judges believed the miller to be alive; it reflected solely what they deemed capable of proof under the letter of the law.
Wagner and Conrad were condemned to imprisonment for life in chains, preceded by public exposure upon the pillory. Frederick was sentenced to fifteen years’ confinement; Barbara, to eight years in a house of correction. Margaret and Kunigunda were acquitted for want of sufficient evidence. Anna Wagner received a sentence of one year for having failed to prevent the crime. On the 16th of November, the superior court confirmed the sentences of Wagner and Conrad. Prior to their conveyance to the gaol, both men were exposed upon the scaffold with an inscription affixed to their breasts. Feuerbach depicts Conrad standing with bowed head, whereas Wagner held his placard aloft toward the assembled crowd. Frederick had initially contemplated an appeal, likening the fifteen years before him to the domestic prison his home had always been. Yet he ultimately abandoned the suit, trusting that he might one day obtain his release through good conduct.