On 7 April 1889, a ten-year-old lad, Emil Steinfatt, left his parents’ house to deliver an order to an inn on the Hammerlandstraße. Towards the close of the afternoon, certain auxiliaries of the Rauhes Haus came upon his body in a ditch upon Horn Moor. They ran to alert Police Constable Anders; presently, the tracks of a man led from the scene of the crime towards the Wandsbek rifle range, and thence into the miry lanes where nightfall swallowed all trace. By the morrow, the child’s name was on every lip in the city. That of his slayer remained concealed for a fortnight.
Emil had set forth between three and four o’clock, accompanied for a time by Georg Borries, aged six. The boys met a man who offered them fifty pfennigs to carry a parcel. Outside David’s inn, Adolf and Heinrich Clasen saw the two children enter, then emerge again in the company of this stranger. The man repeated his offer; Heinrich Clasen observed that he carried no parcel whatever, and that his demeanour inspired distrust. Borries soon parted company with them. Emil went on with the stranger.
Several persons subsequently caught sight of them proceeding towards Horn Moor. Between half-past four and five o’clock, some lads saw Emil running with the man along the paved lane that formed the continuation of the Horner Weg. One of them called out to ask whither he was bound; the stranger answered curtly. A few minutes later, the child was slain. The auxiliaries of the Rauhes Haus discovered his body towards half-past five. His garments lay beneath him; his wounds, notably to the throat and shoulder, bore witness to an attack of extreme ferocity. The medical examiner concluded that death was due chiefly to haemorrhage, and partly to suffocation, and that only the wound to the neck had been inflicted while the child still lived.
The initial search followed a trail of footsteps leading towards the rifle range. Witnesses described a young, lean man, pale of visage, slightly stooped, with the right shoulder higher than the left and a shuffling gait. He wore a dark coat, a black hat, and half-boots with pronounced heels. The descriptions did not agree in every particular. Certain lads who had pursued the fugitive saw not his face; one believed he discerned a light-coloured lining, another was mistaken as to the hat. The path was sodden, and the man ran swiftly enough to outstrip those in pursuit.
On 21 April, a constable apprehended Johann Adolf Christian Benthien, who went also by the name of Ahrens. He had suffered several convictions for vagrancy and forbidden return. His early years had been marked by penury, abandonment, and violence; those who had known him described him as untruthful, cruel to animals, and averse to labour. These testimonies depicted a wretched past, yet they could not suffice to establish the crime committed upon the moor. Benthien at first denied having been in the district. He maintained that he had passed the afternoon near the Rothenburgsort water tower and in a dance hall, and had subsequently gone fishing with his landlord. No one came forward to confirm this story.
The examining magistrate, Dr Sudeck, required nearly three weeks to break down this narrative. On 6 June, Benthien admitted that he had walked towards Horn, but fabricated another pretext: an unknown man, he claimed, had asked him to carry a trunk and to engage a lad for the purpose. He alleged that he had met Emil and Borries, and had then waited in vain for the boy, who had gone off to obtain his mother’s consent. This partial confession accorded with certain facts—he had indeed received coffee and a groschen at the house of the painter Biedermann—but it cast the crime upon an elusive stranger.
The investigators next gathered several material clues. On the very evening of the murder, before suspicion had fallen upon him, Benthien had given his landlord, Wulff, an account widely at variance with his true movements. He had spoken of a cat that had scratched his hand; on the following day, two persons observed fresh marks whose shape suggested fingernails. On 6 April, he had borrowed a shoemaker’s knife from Wulff. The day after the homicide, he insisted upon keeping it longer, then returned it clean. A cutler noted scratches upon the blade, consistent with recent sharpening; the physician deemed it possible that the weapon had inflicted the wounds, though he could not affirm it with certainty.
The footprints likewise appeared to inculpate Benthien. The impressions taken near the ditch measured some twenty-three centimetres and exhibited a high, narrow heel. His boots corresponded, particularly at the heel; yet the defence caused his foot to be measured at twenty-four centimetres and pointed out that another individual suspected during the inquiry possessed shoes that fitted the tracks with equal precision. The discrepancy in measurement, the absence of blood upon his garments, and the divergences between the descriptions furnished his counsel, Herr Schröder, with grounds for doubt. He contended moreover that the fugitive had not limped, whereas Benthien dragged one leg—or appeared so to do.
The identification witnesses were numerous, yet of unequal weight. Borries failed to recognise Benthien. Other children and adults affirmed that they recognised the man who had accompanied Emil; some had viewed him from near at hand, others had merely glimpsed him in the dusk. Certain boys recollected a coat or a hat differing from those belonging to the prisoner. The widow Zander, at Horn, identified Benthien as the man who, on the evening of the murder, had come to take food at her house, spent with fatigue and muffled in a coat. She had warned him that a child had just had his throat cut; he had departed without answering. Benthien subsequently swore that he had never seen the woman, before stating that he must have forgotten.
The proceedings of the Schwurgericht opened on 17 December 1889; though the hearings had been appointed for three days, from the 17th to the 19th, the case concluded on the evening of the second day. The court heard eighty-eight witnesses for the prosecution and nineteen for the defence. The depositions contained contradictions, but also demonstrated falsehoods and repeated identifications. The medical testimony was itself divided. The prison physician perceived in Benthien an intellectual deficiency and an instinct he could not resist; the forensic examiner found no mental disease and judged him capable of distinguishing right from wrong. The public prosecutor urged the jury to follow the chain of encounters, the knife, the wounds, and the fabricated alibi. The defence laid stress upon the errors of identification, the footwear, the absence of blood, and the peril of condemning an innocent man under the sway of public horror.
After an hour’s deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, by more than seven votes, of having slain Emil with premeditation. The court pronounced sentence of death. His counsel lodged an appeal, which was rejected in December by the Reichsgericht; the Senate of Hamburg subsequently refused a pardon. On 15 January 1890, the Chief Public Prosecutor attended upon the condemned man to announce that the execution would take place on the morrow. Benthien continued to protest his innocence.
It was then that Pastor Ebert, who had come to afford him spiritual comfort, reminded him that he could not receive the sacrament with a lie upon his soul. The chronicle relates that Benthien ended by confessing. He imputed his act to resentment against mankind and admitted also the part played by lust; he stated that he had held the child at bay with one hand and severed his throat with Wulff’s knife. He did not retract his explanations concerning the scratches. This confession, recorded by the pastor and the chronicler, was made on the eve of the execution, and not before a court of justice.
Benthien passed part of the night in writing, received communion, and slept for a few hours. On 16 January 1890, Benthien entered the prison yard at nine minutes past eight; at ten minutes past eight, the blade of the guillotine fell. The compilation concludes that justice had been satisfied. The reader must keep in view the singular nature of the record: testimony from children, contested footprints, untruths, divided psychiatric opinion, and a final admission reported in the prisoner’s dying moments. The tribunal delivered its decree; the sole confession preserved to us rests upon the chaplain’s word and the retrospective narrative that gathered it up.