At daybreak on the 29th of March 1883, the stable-hand of Georg von Majláth came to warn the aged valet de chambre that a draft of air was sweeping through the apartments. The French casement of the study, which ought to have remained barred, stood ajar. A moment later, the man returned running: the master lay upon the floor of his bedchamber. When the police entered the palace on the Paradeplatz, they found the President of the highest court of Hungary bound hand and foot, gagged, and lifeless. He wore nothing save his nightshirt and trousers.
The alarm, raised at first as a mere matter of an unfastened window, turned into a scene of murder. Majláth’s wrists and ankles had been drawn tight with cord that ran up toward his neck. A twisted cloth had been forced deep into his mouth. The physician observed rigor mortis and estimated that death had occurred several hours prior. Scratches upon the body and a long laceration across the right palm bore witness to a struggle. Yet the bedchamber exhibited scarcely any marks of disorder: the bedclothes were untumbled, and the lamp still burned upon the night table.
Majláth was not merely a wealthy landowner. He presided over the Curia Regia and the Upper House of the Hungarian Diet, and his violent end threw the civil administration into no less disarray than his kin. This exalted station weighed heavily upon the inquiry before ever a suspect was named. The gazettes and the streets bandied about talk of family vendettas, discharged retainers, and mercenary designs. The chronicler of the time soon deemed robbery the most plausible motive; yet that deduction could not supply the place of tangible proofs.
The first officers retraced the path the intruders appeared to have taken. From the study, one reached the balcony through a glazed casement; an iron clamp affixed to the balustrade and a knotted rope had served for the descent into the street below. Outside, investigators retrieved a black glove stained with blood and a new knife whose blade likewise bore red smears. The missing effects supported the simpler theory of theft: a gold watch, a purse holding some fifteen hundred florins, two rings, loose coin, and cigars were gone. The thieves had attempted to force the iron safe, though without success; another sum of money, lying in an adjoining drawer, had escaped their notice.
The palace was no unfamiliar ground to the perpetrators. Majláth’s family was then residing in Vienna. The valet Berecz was intimately acquainted with the keys, his master’s nocturnal habits, and the repository of his valuables and strongbox. One of the neighboring chambers belonged to the private secretary, who might well have overheard the fray had he retired earlier; but, detained by his labors until two in the morning, he had caught no sound. In the eyes of the magistracy, the silence of the palace was explained as much by circumstance as by the complicity of the valet.
Berecz was the first taken into custody. He denied everything, yet his account of that morning’s events rapidly fell to pieces. He had told the servant that the balcony door had been found open; in truth, the draft arose from a shattered pane. The casement had been bolted from the inside after the flight. The keys were in his keeping. Moreover, he had been observed prior to the crime conversing in low tones with a man whose eyes were fixed upon the palace balcony. The judge’s personal effects had vanished, yet the intruders had left behind the monies lying near the keys to the safe: they knew the house, but their haste had caused them to abandon treasures far richer than the spoils they carried away.
Two former servants, Paul Spanga and Michael Pitely, were soon sought by the authorities. In Spanga’s lodgings, the police discovered a glove that formed an exact pair with the one found outside the mansion. A likeness of the fugitive was struck off and circulated; a reward was proclaimed. Thereupon ensued a pursuit that took on the proportions of a public panic. Fair-haired men, short in stature or marked by scars, were stopped merely for bearing a fleeting resemblance to Spanga. The fugitive, meanwhile, went under an assumed name, frequented inns, coffee-houses, and pleasure gardens, and had quitted Budapest with a wounded hand.
The scent led to Vienna. A porter recognized Spanga from his photograph under the guise of Michael Szabó, a merchant of Zenta. He had lodged at the Hotel of the Golden Sheep, though he slept elsewhere, leaving behind a portmanteau. The bag held shirts marked with his initials, gloves, and a Hungarian hat. Then the fugitive vanished once more. On the 12th of April, a dispatch from Pressburg announced his capture following an armed encounter near a public bath-house. Struck by a ball, Spanga was conveyed to the hospital. The chase was at an end; the interrogations could begin.
Under examination, Spanga at first denied any part in the deed. He protested that he had passed the night of the murder at the playhouse, in a café, and over a game of cards. He accounted for his injuries by a fall, and the stained glove by a cut upon his finger. The magistrates confronted him with the fact that he had himself emptied his wash-basin on the morning of the crime, with the bloody glove, and with his longstanding relations with Berecz. On the 18th of May, he at last confessed to having taken part in the murder alongside Berecz and Pitely. Pitely broke down in his turn. Berecz, despite his tears and the contradictions laid bare by the examining magistrate, retracted an initial admission and persisted in asserting his innocence.
The assizes opened in Budapest that October. Spanga’s testimony cast Berecz as the contriver of the plot: the valet, he swore, had chosen the hour, opened the palace, and assigned to each his part. He had commanded them, so Spanga alleged, to bind Majláth, gag him, and seize his purse and keys, adding the admonition that the master must not be killed if it could be avoided. Once inside the bedchamber, Spanga had demanded money of the judge. Majláth started from sleep, wrenched the knife from his assailant, and defended his life. Pitely, according to Spanga, bore him to the floor; the linen was forced into his throat, his legs were secured, and the cord was wound about his neck. Thus had the man entrusted with guarding the thresholds brought about the encounter that cost his master his life.
Pitely offered a more circumscribed narrative. He admitted that Berecz had spoken to them of the money and had let them into the house, but maintained that Spanga alone had begun the struggle and choked Majláth before he himself tied the victim’s legs. Berecz accused his former confederates of having drawn him into the snare. The procurator demanded the penalty of death for all three, whether as principals or instigator of robbery and murder. The advocates for the defense disputed above all the charge of murder: the men had entered, they pleaded, merely to rob and overpower the master; his demise had occurred in the heat of the scuffle, devoid of any premeditated design to kill. Berecz’s counsel urged, furthermore, that Spanga had every motive to thrust the chief guilt upon the valet.
The court, however, pronounced sentence of death upon all three prisoners. The appeal altered Berecz’s fate: the Royal Court of Appeal cleared him of the charge of instigating the murder, holding him guilty only of complicity in the theft and the death, and commuted his sentence to fifteen years’ penal servitude. But the public ministry appealed in its turn. The Curia Regia restored the original judgment; the Council of Pardons declined to recommend clemency, and the King suffered the law to take its course.
At dawn on the 23rd of February 1884, three gibbets were erected in the courtyard of the prison. Spanga and Pitely begged the forgiveness of the Majláth family; Berecz maintained his innocence to the last and called down curses upon his judges. Those final words could undo neither the decree of the courts nor the contradictions of the condemned. They served only to recall that, in this dark business, the palace door had been unbarred from within, and that earthly justice had been forced to decide among men who, even in paying their final reckoning, still pointed the finger of accusation at one another.