The insured capital was to revert entirely to the mother. Within a Vienna office, in January 1857, an aging woman inquired whether one might insure the life of a fifteen-year-old child. Her daughter was upon the point of marriage, she declared; a dowry of five thousand florins had been pledged to her. She wished merely to secure this sum. Yet, in the event of the maiden’s demise, she alone would receive the funds. The company admitted the principle of the contract. A few months later, the second premium having scarcely been discharged, a notice of death reached the agency: Marie Nickl had passed away within the family home at Staatz.
The company had demanded to see the insured party; a supplementary fee would have been exacted had she failed to appear. On the 18th of January, Peter Braun accordingly presented himself alongside his stepdaughter Marie, without his wife Therese. The antique record insists upon the striking contrast between this man in his sixties, of sickly aspect, and the smiling young girl who accompanied him. The policy was signed, the first premium paid. When intelligence of the death arrived, the director of the agency, Benvenuti, recalled this visit vividly. He dispatched an employee to Staatz to gather information upon the ground.
The New Pitaval, which published the narrative in 1871, names the mother Therese Braun and the daughter Marie Nickl. The former had wed Peter Braun, a military surgeon who had declined into a rustic general practitioner. He had lost a substantial portion of his clientele after a grave mishap, followed by his stewardship upon a noble estate; debts had accumulated around them. Marie, born of Therese’s first marriage, was on the contrary depicted as robust, gracious, and well-liked by the townspeople. The chronicle exhibits her at the very center of a household whose pecuniary horizon was inexorably narrowing.
On January 18, the policy was executed for the sum of five thousand florins. The initial payment was made. In May, the second fell due and was likewise met. Between these two dates, the girl fell ill on two separate occasions. In April, she had vomited after drinking a beer poured by her mother; several days afterward, she appeared restored. In May, the crisis returned upon the heels of a cup of coffee. The village physician, Dr. Ladner, observed the pains and the retching, yet did not then deem the peril mortal. On May 18, during a visit, Therese spoke to him of her daughter’s impending marriage to a supposed physician from Vienna, and inquired whether her condition were perilous. Ladner answered in the negative. According to his subsequent deposition, she replied with cool composure: “You shall see, Doctor; my daughter will die.” Three hours later, Marie was dead.
The insurance underwriters alerted the physician to the ominous proximity of dates and symptoms. Following exhumation, the autopsy failed initially to establish the cause of death. Viennese chemists, commissioned to scrutinize the viscera, nonetheless announced that they had detected a lethal quantity of arsenic. The tribunal of Korneuburg instituted a criminal inquest. Suspicion shifted heavily onto the Braun couple: arsenic was discovered in Peter’s apothecary stores, and the record asserted that Therese alone prepared the food and drink administered to her daughter.
The prosecution assembled a constellation of circumstantial proofs. The domestic finances were wretched; the policy money was to revert to the parents; the premium had constituted a heavy drain upon their resources. Therese had solicited a certificate of health from the doctor for the policy’s inception. In an intercepted letter, she had allegedly explained her desire to avoid destitution as she and her husband advanced in years. Both seizures of illness had directly succeeded drafts served by her hand, whereupon she had foretold the decease. The physician noted, moreover, that she had appeared singularly unmoved following the fatal outcome. To this was joined the matter of the betrothal and dowry: Therese had maintained that a certain Dr. Maje was to marry Marie. The chronicle depicts this promise as an idle fabrication concocted to justify the insurance policy; no inhabitant had ever met or heard of such a suitor.
On January 14, 1858, the public trial drew an eager throng and correspondents of the press. Peter Braun had perished in custody two days prior; he was thus spared appearing beside his wife in the dock. Therese denied having poisoned her daughter. She maintained that Marie might well have destroyed herself, alleging that she shrank from marriage and fretted over the family debts. Dr. Ladner and other witnesses, conversely, described a cheerful, flourishing maiden who had whispered neither of an admirer nor of any desire to quit this life. The chemists swore that arsenic had been extracted from the bodily tissues; the public prosecutor perceived therein the unmistakable motive of a murder premeditated to lay hands upon the five thousand florins.
The first judgment fell with crushing severity: Therese Braun was convicted of murder by poison and of insurance fraud, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The defense lodged an appeal. It assailed the methodology of the initial analyses, appending an opinion from the chemist Adolf Schauenstein. The Superior Court of Vienna remitted the dossier for examination to the medical faculty. The faculty did not deny the presence of arsenic, but ruled that the original procedure was too defective to afford a reliable basis for a capital finding. The judgment was set aside, and a fresh toxicological examination decreed.
The bodily tissues preserved for this second investigation were far less plentiful. Two other chemists detected antimony therein, along with an infinitesimal, though measurable, trace of arsenic. The four experts ultimately reached an accord regarding the existence of at least two grains of arsenic within the remains. Yet the medical men could not agree as to the actual cause of death: one attributed the fatal collapse to poison administered during Marie’s lifetime; the other maintained that no certainty could be attained. The court nonetheless pronounced a second life sentence. The Superior Court again quashed the conviction: the discord between the two medical authorities had to be resolved before sentence could be pronounced. The prosecution contested this remand; the Supreme Court confirmed it. The Vienna medical faculty was accordingly consulted a second time. It concluded that, in light of the materials preserved, it was impossible to declare that Marie Nickl had died of arsenic.
Two full years had elapsed since the policy was sealed. The contract remained, as did the arsenic found in the domestic pharmacy and the testimony concerning the drafts administered to Marie. Yet, at the conclusion of all the analyses and remands, the judges no longer commanded the medical certainty upon which the first conviction had reposed. One and the same dossier had thus twice brought down a sentence of perpetual incarceration, before the objections of the defense compelled the courts to reconsider the very nature of the demise.
The distinction was narrow, yet decisive. The presence of a substance did not, of its own force, prove that it had occasioned death; an unascertained cause made conviction for fatal poisoning impossible in law. On August 30, 1859, the court brought the prosecution to an end and ordered the discharge of Therese. The chronicler of the New Pitaval revolted against this issue: he deemed the mother guilty beyond doubt and reviled the initial chemical survey as having been bungled. His indignation colors the narrative throughout, down to his portraits and moral judgments. Yet the legal record he relates does not permit his personal conviction to be converted into an historical verdict.
The epilogue of the volume adds that in 1860, Therese was convicted of the theft of a pearl necklace belonging to her landlady and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. This later judgment concerned a separate deed, established by distinct evidence. It resolves nothing concerning the death of Marie. The purloined necklace received its judicial reckoning. The death of Marie remained without condemnation.