On the evening of 29 June 1840, the forester Scheinert and his assistant were traversing the communal forest of Schmiedeberg when a putrid exhalation drew them, six paces from the path, toward a clearing of young pine trees. There, in a hollow, lay a corpse almost entirely buried beneath earth and sand. A black dog with brown paws appeared to have scratched at the soil before fleeing upon their approach. The initial measures of the inquiry were those demanded by any nameless discovery: summoning the authorities, unearthing the body, recording the wounds, and taking note of every object found alongside it.
The medical examiners noted a fracture of the cranium and a profound laceration across the throat. Either injury, in their judgment, was sufficient to cause death. The body had been enveloped in a length of green linen tapestry, secured with a leather strap; it remained clothed, and several articles lay strewn near the pit. Decomposition had already rendered the face unrecognizable. The whole of the evidence pointed toward an itinerant troupe of showmen who had tarried in the district several days prior. It was soon understood that the corpse had travelled with this company before being abandoned in the wood.
The first person capable of lending coherence to these indications was Marie Magdalene Heinrich. Apprehended several months later in Frankfurt, she related that she had accompanied the troupe of Christian Brand, his wife, and their children. She named Joseph, the son reared by Brand, the two young daughters Karoline and Therese, and Rudolf Wuchinger, a travelling companion. According to her narrative, Christian had vanished during the night of 18 to 19 June. On the following morning, Joseph had asserted that the Richter brothers had slain Christian, and that one of them went by the moniker of Graf. The cart was subsequently driven to the forest of Schmiedeberg, where the pit had been dug.
Heinrich did not confine herself to vague assertions. She guided the investigators along the road she had travelled with the troupe and brought them to the precise spot. Prominent tree roots, she recalled, had caught the vehicle’s wheel at the moment the corpse was laden upon it. This detail agreed with the terrain and with the account of the transport. The cart, the blankets, the clothing, and the effects recovered near the body supplied further corroborations. The widow Brand recognized several garments as having belonged to her husband. The dog, likewise, was identified by those who had known it.
The judicial report assembled these elements to maintain that the corpse was indeed that of Christian Brand. It acknowledged that putrefaction precluded a direct visual identification by the son. It posited instead a convergence of proof: the place pointed out by Heinrich, the personal effects, the description of the deceased, an old injury to the hand, and the interval estimated by the surgeon all corresponded with Christian’s disappearance. The identification of the body thus did not rest upon the face itself: the court’s report relied upon the meeting of the objects, the locality, the physical description, and certain bodily peculiarities.
The inquiry widened as names circulated among post stations, inns, and magistrate offices. In March 1841, a man arrested in the Grand Duchy of Baden under the name of Johann Blum was identified as Joseph Brand. His two young sisters were travelling in his company. Forged papers and altered passports had disguised their identity, but the officers soon recognized the fugitive children. The authorities ordered the transfer of Joseph, his sisters, the cart, and the seized effects to Prussia. The lead concerning the Richter brothers, whom Joseph had initially denounced as the murderers, thereupon collapsed: it had rested solely upon his own word.
Joseph at first denied all culpability. Through three weeks of interrogations, he maintained that the Richter brothers had struck down his father and that he had done no more than bury him. The magistrates confronted him with the objects taken from the pit and weighed his shifting assertions against the verified movements of the troupe. On 29 May, following an encounter with two workmen who had assisted in moving the body wrapped in blankets, he demanded an audience with the examining magistrate. He confessed to having killed Christian, yet described a scene of sudden strife: his father, he claimed, had beaten him; he had seized a cudgel and struck a single blow, which he insisted was involuntary. He admitted subsequently cutting the throat and concealing the body.
This initial confession transformed the proceeding without bringing it to a close. In May 1842, the court of Naumburg sentenced Joseph, for homicide without premeditation, to penal servitude for life. Marie Heinrich was acquitted of the charges of concealment and participation in the spoils. The two sisters, being mere children, were not prosecuted; Wuchinger was deemed entirely foreign to the crime. Joseph received with evident relief a penalty that spared his life. He was conveyed to the house of correction at Halle at the beginning of July.
Some ten weeks after his arrival, he retracted a vital part of his former declarations. He now averred that Christian Brand was his natural father, that his true name was Dilany, and that the murder had been premeditated. The new account shifted the crime from a heated quarrel to the quiet of slumber: Joseph claimed to have waited until the other members of the company were asleep, struck his father upon the head repeatedly with a billet of wood, and then delivered a sabre thrust to his neck. He explained that he had harboured the resolve to kill for several days, linking this purpose to his father’s harshness and his opposition to his union with Heinrich.
Thereupon arose two interwoven questions. The first concerned the veracity of the confession. The defence contended that life in prison had become unendurable to him and that he had fabricated a premeditated murder solely to secure a swifter death upon the scaffold. The court addressed this by scrutinizing the timing of the confession, the conditions of his confinement, the religious instruction he had received, and his statements to the prison chaplain at Halle. The compiler of the Pitaval largely adopts this conclusion, yet his narrative mingles the factual findings of the docket with a moralizing reading of Joseph’s conversion and remorse. Such pious interpretations must not be confounded with direct evidence of his inner state.
The second question concerned his lineage. Joseph now maintained that Christian was his biological father, Wenzel Dilany, and that the surname Brand had been assumed. The widow Brand had at first sworn that Joseph was her own son; she subsequently recanted, declaring that he had been taken in as a foundling, born of another woman. The family papers had disappeared. Inquiries in the registers of Nancy failed to confirm an initial date of birth supplied by Joseph; an act from Bohemia bore similarities to his account, yet fell short of establishing his identity. The court left his biological origin in uncertainty and retained only the bond of foster father, under which Christian had reared him and presented him to the civil authorities.
The physicians were recalled to confront the earlier deposition with the physical remains. In their revised opinion, the fracture of the skull and the facial trauma could not be reconciled with a single blow. Several impacts were indispensable; the sabre cut to the throat remained consistent with the posture of a man already struck down and collapsed. The quantity of blood lost likewise indicated the probable sequence of the injuries. This expert opinion sustained the graver confession, though it could not by itself resolve the question of intent. The tribunal relied further upon Joseph’s successive statements, the preparation of a cudgel concealed near his pallet, and the deliberate measures taken to hide the corpse.
The court of Naumburg rendered its second judgment on 10 April 1844. It declared Joseph Brand-Dilany guilty of premeditated murder committed upon the person of his foster father, and pronounced the penalty of death, according to the procedure detailed in the volume. The judgment, formally communicated in May, could not be carried into effect. Joseph had long suffered from a pulmonary affliction; he died in the prison of Eilenburg on 11 August 1844. The printed record thus does not narrate an execution, but a sentence overtaken by disease.
At the edge of the forest road, what had at first appeared to be no more than an unnamable corpse had called forth material objects, memories, and several irreconcilable accounts. A recognized cart, a tree root catching a wheel, garments drawn from a pit: the inquiry possessed the art of compelling inanimate things to speak. Yet it did not dispel all obscurities. The buried man was linked to Christian Brand only through an accumulation of circumstantial clues; Joseph was condemned first for an unpremeditated killing born of a quarrel, then for murder with malice aforethought after altering his confession. Between these two judgments persist the questions that the historical volume cannot settle: what the son truly knew of his birth, what had resolved him before that fatal night, and what, in his final confession, belonged to truth or to judicial interpretation.