The initial alarm was raised not by a cry, but by an open door. In the early morning of February 16, 1857, the maidservant at the Meisdorf inn entered Christian Heidecke’s chamber to set down a few chairs. The man was no longer in his bed; his coat and boots were gone. His daughter Marie, eight years of age, appeared to be still asleep. At seven o’clock, the innkeeper’s son observed that the child had not yet risen. The innkeeper went to look upon her and found her dead. A red mark circled her neck.
The account in the Neue Pitaval opens its chapter upon this striking contrast: the father vanished, the child abandoned within the room. Yet flight alone could not account for her demise. An autopsy was ordered. The examining physicians recorded a circular ecchymosis and ascribed the death to strangulation by means of a pliable object, most probably a cloth. Heidecke was no longer there to answer. The inquest had first to lay hands on the father, and then to shed light upon the events of that night.
Christian Heidecke had spent many years toiling in the mills. Born in 1806, he had married Dorothea Gräger in 1831, a union blessed with four daughters. The eldest died young, and the mother succumbed in October 1851. The three surviving children grew up, yet Heidecke no longer possessed an established hearth. For nearly twenty-six years, he had served a mill owner named Rohbe, first as a laborer, then as the overseer of the establishment. In 1852, falling into ill health, Rohbe sold the mill. He offered Heidecke a position in another of his properties, but the latter refused: he wished henceforth to work on his own account.
Heidecke then endeavoured to establish his independence. He sold a parcel of inherited land, purchased an inn, and subsequently disposed of it to lease another, coupled with a trade of which he knew little. His means diminished further still. In 1853, he remarried, taking as his wife Johanne Scharfe, a widow and mother of three. Harmony did not long prevail in the new household, strained in particular over the children. Louise, Heidecke’s eldest surviving daughter, departed the house; Marie, born in 1848, remained beside her father. The chronicle records that, when the couple separated, each spouse took separate lodgings.
Father and daughter had nevertheless found some measure of support. In 1856, the miller Ganse hired Heidecke as a helper and received Marie into his household. The young girl was clothed and sent to learn her letters and duties with the joiner’s wife. When word came that she was neglecting her lessons and harboring lice, Ganse resolved to place her elsewhere to shield his own family. The plan to entrust her to a couple in Weissdorf met with Heidecke’s stubborn refusal. He declared that he would never leave his daughter with such people and that, if she were to remain, he would stay by her side.
Heidecke tendered his own notice; Ganse accepted his departure. On January 21, 1857, Heidecke quitted the mill with Marie and their belongings. He took with him only the remainder of his wages, fourteen thalers and a few groschen. He engaged a room at the Meisdorf inn, declaring that he would stay no more than eight to fourteen days. Every Monday, he faithfully paid his rent. The days slipped by, devoid of new employment.
On February 3, he paid a visit to his wife in Oberdorf. Rather than confessing the truth of his destitution, he claimed to be working as a mill hand, earning enough to lay something by. He spoke of a prospect in the district. His wife, according to the chronicle, explained that dire necessity compelled her to hire herself out anew as a domestic servant. He offered no assistance, departing under the pretext of sleeping at a neighbouring tavern before returning on the morrow. Return he did, repeating his hollow reassurances, only to depart once more. Between the lines of the narrative emerges a man unable to admit that he had lost his livelihood, yet powerless to reclaim his place beside his kin.
In early February, he presented himself once more at Ganse’s door, inquiring whether he might be taken back. The miller refused. Heidecke answered that he would return to his wife; if she received him, well and good, otherwise he would move on. Yet he did not return to her. On Saturday, February 14, he wandered through the surrounding countryside; his coin was by now exhausted. He spent the Sunday at the inn, drank two tankards of beer, and watched the others play at cards. Toward nine or ten o'clock, he went up to bed.
At two o’clock in the morning, the innkeeper’s wife went into the room to fetch some provisions. She caught sight of a rope beneath the bed. Heidecke and Marie seemed fast asleep, the child turned toward the wall. She did not linger, and drew the door closed behind her. An hour later, as recorded in Heidecke’s subsequent confession, he awoke upon hearing the night watchman call three o’clock. He leaned over his daughter, kissed her, and told her that she must go to join her mother, even if he could not bear her company. He then took a neckerchief, knotted it around the child’s neck, and pulled it tight. Marie uttered no cry; death came almost instantly.
The father fled on foot. In the night, between three and four in the morning, two workmen and their wives observed him near a tree, a rope cast over a bough. He held the noose and seemed bent on hanging himself. One of the men accosted him; Heidecke denied any intention of self-destruction, gathered up his rope, and walked away. The witnesses did not know him, and knew nothing yet of the murder. Later that morning, a parish constable sent to raise the alarm recognized him upon the road. Heidecke slipped away before he could be apprehended.
Four days later, on February 20, a woodcutter came upon him sleeping behind a bush. The man had eaten almost nothing for days. Aroused by the merchant Berg and the workman Michael, Heidecke did not conceal his identity. He related that he had repeatedly attempted to hang himself, only to be interrupted each time. They offered him dry bread, which he devoured ravenously. This scene, related with a tinge of irony by the chronicler, preceded his conveyance back to Meisdorf under guard.
During his initial examination, Heidecke admitted having slept beside his daughter and having awakened around three o'clock. He claimed he might have unintentionally suffocated her with his arm in his sleep, discovering her lifeless body upon waking. Only then, he asserted, had he taken the rope to hang himself. He maintained at first that he did not know how the child had died. For days, he explained, he had repeated that he no longer wished to live and could not endure the thought of leaving Marie alone among strangers. This recounting of his despair did not palliate the deed; it merely underscored his resolve that the child should perish with him.
In the course of a later interrogation, he furnished a more precise account. Poverty and the lack of work had driven him to contemplate the death of both; he would neither beg nor abandon Marie to the hands of others. He had brooded upon this design for several days, wavering only as to the means of execution. On the night of the crime, he said, the resolve had seized him all at once. He confessed to the strangulation, professing this time to have acted with a clear mind. At the trial on July 3, he nonetheless retracted this claim of clear-headed deliberation: if he had spoken thus, he stated, it was merely to hasten his own capital conviction. He explained his act by the love he bore her and the dread of leaving her to face a life of sheer penury. Such was his explanation; it fell to the court to determine whether it extinguished his criminal responsibility or confirmed a cold, premeditated murder.
The defense argued that he had acted under an absence of discernment. The prosecution countered that he had methodically prepared his flight, that he had long contemplated Marie’s death, and that he had deliberately chosen to strangle her as she slept. The witnesses bore out the circumstances of his flight and destitute condition; the medical examination accorded with his confession. The jury found Heidecke guilty of premeditated murder, rejecting any plea of mental incapacity. The court sentenced him to death.
Heidecke petitioned for clemency. He wrote that he wished to dedicate the remainder of his days to repentance and the expiation of his crime. The jurors themselves joined in the prayer for mercy. On October 26, 1857, the Prince Regent commuted the capital sentence to penal servitude for life. Heidecke was incarcerated at Halle on November 18; he died there on March 15, 1861. The chronicle preserves his parting justification: he maintained that he had sought to spare Marie from misery, unable to bear the thought of her being left alone. This professed intent altered neither the verdict nor the law. Rather, it leaves the reader before the harrowing crux of the affair: a father pleading terror for his child’s future, after having ruthlessly severed that future with his own hands.