On 20 January 1860, in Rzeszów, a trunk returned intact from Lemberg emitted so foul an odour that the freight forwarding house of Reich & Kraus summoned its apprentice locksmith to force it open. The waybill had declared chandeliers, porcelain, and delicacies, estimating the weight at one hundred and sixty-one pounds and the value at two hundred florins. The young locksmith sprang the lock. Inside the chest, pressed against linen and raw cotton, lay the decomposing body of a man whose skull had been shattered.
Nearly a year earlier, Karl Hurk had departed from his kin without leaving an address. On 14 March 1859, his brother Joseph had seen him in Vienna, where he oversaw the accounts and cash ledgers for the family business. The firm operated an iron foundry and machine works in Leobersdorf, a gilding manufactory, and a sales depository in the Bischofgasse. Karl was to gather the funds required for the following day’s settlements. At Pichikal’s establishment, he drew 6,200 florins in banknotes alongside a bill of exchange for two hundred florins; towards five o’clock, another witness observed him presenting a bill for a thousand florins at Pollak’s on behalf of the house.
He was not seen again. On 15 March, he failed to appear for midday dinner. Rudolf Schönwetter, the firm's director, made inquiries among the staff, searched the places where drowned bodies were customarily identified, and telegraphed Leobersdorf. Joseph Hurk hastened to Vienna. His brother’s garments, linen, and personal papers remained in order; Karl alone was missing, together with his pocketbook, watch, chain, signet ring, and the funds he had collected. In the eyes of the creditors, flight with the till soon appeared plausible, for Viennese commerce was enduring a severe crisis; Joseph himself feared that this disappearance might hasten the firm’s ruin. Yet he refused to credit the notion that his brother had abandoned his own blood.
Initial suspicion fell upon Johann Schmidt, the clerk who served under Karl’s direction at the warehouse. When Joseph questioned him as to his superior’s whereabouts, Schmidt grew visibly discomposed. He claimed, however, to have spent the evening in the company of Maria Bichl, his mistress; both she and her sister Rosa confirmed that he had joined them after the warehouse had closed. A police officer interrogated them. At first, Maria and Rosa denied any knowledge of Schmidt, before admitting they knew him under the name of “Jean.” When the constable returned in Schmidt’s company, the sisters maintained that he had called upon them as was his custom. This testimony temporarily diverted the course of the investigation.
Schmidt persisted in asserting that Karl had absconded with the cash. To different listeners, he spoke first of six to eight thousand florins, then of twenty thousand; to the portress, he swore that his former master had set sail for America. To the anxious Joseph, the young clerk presented himself as a devoted friend of the vanished man. Schmidt presently departed for Moravia, where he spent lavishly and gave out that Maria was the daughter of a wealthy landed proprietor. Upon his return to Vienna, he was retained in his post, despite the whispers of embezzlement that already attached to his name. Joseph still harboured the hope that the clerk might shed light upon his brother’s fate.
It was no denunciation that revived the inquiry, but a forgotten consignment. In Vienna, a trunk purchased near the warehouse had been entrusted to the railway. On 15 March, it had departed in the name of Joachim Poppe, consigned to Prague, marked “chandeliers, porcelain, and delicacies.” The designated recipient was not Joachim Poppe, but Johann Treffler, landlord of the Blaue Stern hotel, who awaited no such merchandise and left the advice notice unanswered. A letter bearing the forged consignor's signature subsequently instructed that the chest be forwarded deeper into the empire, to Galicia. From Prague it journeyed to Rzeszów, and thence to Lemberg; yet no claimant appeared. The merchant David Mahl finally directed it back to the forwarding agency of Reich & Kraus.
When the chest was returned to Rzeszów, the red transit mark affixed in Vienna remained visible, and the padlock had not been tampered with. The post-mortem examination determined that the victim had sustained several violent blows to the head, inflicted during life with a blunt instrument, presumably an iron bar or a heavy implement of forged metal. One blow had crushed the left parietal bone. Upon the linen, the surgeons observed the initials and figure “C. H. 20”; a napkin bore an identical mark. An official acquainted with the Hurk family noted these signs and sent word to Joseph. The latter identified his brother by his build, his moustache, his hands, and above all by a recently stopped tooth. The marked shirt had been missing from his wardrobe since the day he vanished.
The handwriting upon the consignment note and the letter of reforwarding closely resembled that of Schmidt. Joseph also identified the trunk as one purchased by his clerk. Karl’s watch and chain were recovered from Schmidt’s possession; soiled garments had passed through the hands of Maria Bichl, who, as the magistrates later held, was aware that these effects derived from the homicide. The alleged “Michael of Berlin,” whom Schmidt accused of striking the fatal blows, dissolved under scrutiny. He had described a Prussian confederate, yet the trail led merely to Friedrich Tuschhof, a commercial traveller encountered in Vienna. Tuschhof recounted that Schmidt had offered him two hundred florins and his travelling expenses to convey an unopened trunk to the Russian frontier. Tuschhof had declined; he subsequently learned of Karl’s disappearance.
The convergence of material facts linked the warehouse, the gold, the chest, and the clerk. Conversely, no direct eye-witness to the murder could be produced. The judicial record placed the crime within the commercial premises on the evening of 14 March, while the evidence firmly established Karl’s final movements in the city, the mortal violence, the conveyance of the remains, and the theft of his possessions. Schmidt denied having killed his superior. He persisted in declaring that Karl had been struck down by the “Berliner” and that he had merely assisted in concealing the corpse; his contradictory statements found no favour with the bench.
Maria Bichl confessed to having received bloodstained garments and other personal effects, which she had subsequently destroyed. The tribunal concluded that she knew Schmidt had slain the victim and dispatched the corpse, yet it was not established that she had possessed prior knowledge of the murderous design. Rosa Bichl stood accused of assisting in the concealment of the crime; the court held that the evidence was insufficient to prove she had overheard their exchanges or understood the origin of the articles. The two sisters thus shared neither the same degree of culpability nor the same verdict.
The trial opened on 30 May 1860 before the Vienna Criminal Court. Witnesses reconstructed Karl’s final hours, the movements of the till, the railway manifests, and Schmidt’s dealings; the medical experts detailed the fractures observed at Rzeszów. On 5 June, the five judges of the criminal tribunal delivered their judgment. The public considered the sentence overly lenient; according to the legal analysis of the chronicler, the statute of the period precluded the death penalty where guilt rested upon circumstantial evidence rather than a confession. Schmidt was convicted of murder committed for the purpose of robbery and of embezzlement, receiving a sentence of penal servitude for life under conditions of severe confinement. He was further ordered to indemnify Joseph Hurk.
Maria was convicted of complicity in the robbery, though cleared of the murder, and sentenced to four years of severe imprisonment in a fortress; she was acquitted of complicity in the homicide for lack of evidence showing prior knowledge of the plot. Rosa was discharged, though the insufficiency of proof was not framed as a formal declaration of her innocence. Both the prosecution and the convicted prisoners appealed. On 24 July, the Superior Court affirmed the substance of the verdict, altering only the wording regarding Rosa: she was held not liable to conviction for want of sufficient evidence, rather than definitively exonerated from all suspicion of complicity in the theft.
The railway lines had borne the chest far beyond the towns where men still sought Karl among the living. Yet the iron tracks had failed to efface the marks upon his linen, the penmanship on the letters, or the recorded itinerary of the freight. Before the court, the phantom traveller from Berlin remained an unconvincing fiction; the punishment was governed strictly by the proofs that could be established, and by the limitations which the law of the era imposed upon circumstantial certainty.