On the 20th of March 1855, a ladder propped against the window of a Berlin outbuilding drew the gaze of passers-by. The inhabitants of the house wished to ascertain whether their neighbour, a seamstress whom they had not seen for several days, was within. The door remained locked; a sudden seizure was feared. Peering through the panes, they caught sight of the body of Dorothea Storbeck suspended by a cord, inside a room where all seemed in order. The first physicians summoned to the scene believed it to be a suicide. The discoveries that followed soon shifted the affair from the realm of despair to that of murder.
Mlle Storbeck, aged about thirty, rented a chamber in a house on the Anhaltische Communication, a thoroughfare then little frequented, running between the Anhalt and Halle gates. The outer door of her lodging was locked, yet the key remained in the keyhole; the inner door was merely pushed to. A cord encircled her neck and was knotted to the latch of a small kitchen cupboard. Her right shoulder brushed against the door, her back was turned toward the stove. A pool of blood stained the floorboards near the doorframe; strands of hair were matted in the gore, and a comb lay nearby.
Upon the left side of the neck, the physicians observed a deep furrow of strangulation, passing beneath the jaw and behind the ears. The knot had not tightened of its own accord. At the autopsy, the experts concluded that Storbeck had been strangled and suffocated. This medical finding flatly contradicted the initial impression, yet it revealed neither who had knotted the cord nor what had transpired in that chamber before her death.
The last known hours of the seamstress belonged to Sunday, the 18th of March. In the afternoon, a client had called upon her to order some work and found her unsettled, her countenance more flushed than was her custom. Shortly after four o’clock, a joiner reportedly saw her in the street on the arm of a man unknown to him. Thereafter, no one could claim to have seen her alive. That evening, a young maidservant in the adjoining apartment heard, towards ten o’clock, a cry or a sob in Storbeck’s room. She supposed the seamstress had perhaps stumbled against some piece of furniture; the night watchman was just then locking the house for the night, and she did not venture out.
The investigation was not long in fastening upon a young man already familiar with Storbeck’s lodgings. Georg Kurt Dietrich Putlitz, aged twenty, had trained as a forester, but led a shiftless existence in Berlin. He had paid several visits to the seamstress; the chronicler supposes they had maintained an intimate liaison, though this point rests upon no direct testimony. His family, of ancient nobility, took umbrage at the public airing of their name. The record specifies, however, that he was neither an officer nor a wealthy heir: he was the natural son of an unwed mother, and both his mother and grandmother lived in straitened circumstances.
Putlitz’s debts weighed far more heavily upon the inquiry. He owed some five hundred thalers to tradesmen and shopkeepers, having returned to Berlin after relinquishing a forestry post. A shoemaker who had delivered footwear was pressing him for payment. Such penury made a quest for money entirely plausible, yet robbery was never demonstrated. Two rings and a pair of earrings were still upon the corpse; it was not known what monies Storbeck possessed prior to her death. A mere seven pfennigs were found in her room. The indictment charged him solely with having wilfully slain the seamstress, and not with having plundered her.
Arrested on the 21st of March, Putlitz made an initial statement to the police three days later. He recounted having entered Storbeck’s chamber around nine o’clock in the evening, whereupon an altercation arose regarding a remnant of cloth sold the previous year for a waistcoat. He confessed to having represented it as wool when it was merely cotton. According to his account, Storbeck’s reproaches turned into violence; she attempted to strike him, and he seized her by the throat in self-defence. Both fell to the floor. He kept his hand pressed against her throat until her struggles ceased, only then realizing that she was dead.
In this first version of events, Putlitz stated that he had moved the body and tied a cord to the cupboard latch in order to simulate a suicide. He swore he had taken nothing, fleeing into the streets before returning to his mother late in the night. Two days later, before the examining magistrate, he reiterated these admissions. The most damning detail was likewise the most verifiable: the disposition of the cord, the bloodstains, and the state of the room corresponded in several particulars to what he had described.
On the 28th of March, he retracted his statements. He maintained that he had fabricated the tale to secure the release of his mother and uncle, whom he believed to be under arrest, and to spare his ailing grandmother. The examining officer denied having ever promised their freedom in exchange for an admission of guilt. Putlitz then asserted that he had not seen Storbeck on the night of the crime, offering an alternative itinerary through various shops and drinking-houses. The witnesses failed to confirm several of the encounters he claimed to have had; the proprietor of one establishment and other persons placed him elsewhere or had no recollection of him whatsoever.
For several weeks, the investigators sought material traces to break this impasse of conflicting narratives. A young man attired in a forester’s coat had purchased a cord from the ropemaker Guttschmidt two days before Storbeck’s death. Before the court, Guttschmidt could not swear with certainty that the customer was Putlitz, though he described a costume resembling his. His servant, Henriette Hamann, however, recognized the prisoner without hesitation when he was confronted with her: he was, she declared, the man who had bought the cord. The cord found about Storbeck’s neck was shown to have come from the very same shop. At that juncture, the public prosecutor expanded the charge to one of murder.
The trial, which opened on the 31st of July, drew an uncommon concourse of spectators. Putlitz maintained a calm demeanour, disputing the facts with notable composure. The physicians repeated their conclusion that this was no suicide. The maidservant from the adjoining lodging confirmed the noise heard shortly after ten o’clock; other elements within the chamber—notably the burnt-out lamp and the remnants of freshly prepared tea—indicated that Storbeck had received a visitor before she died. Taken alone, however, they did not suffice to prove that this visitor was Putlitz.
The prosecution rested its case upon the cord, the positive identification by Hamann, the young man’s debts, his shifting statements, and the initial precision of his confession. The defence countered that identifications made after a crime has gained public notoriety are notoriously fragile, that Guttschmidt had not recognized his customer with any certainty, and that Putlitz had formally retracted his admissions. His counsel contended that the police themselves had supplied him with the particulars of the scene. The investigators replied that he had been kept under strict watch and could not have visited the chamber since the 18th of March. The narrative in the Pitaval collection records these contentions without providing a verbatim transcript by which each exchange might be verified.
The attempt at an alibi emerged belatedly. At the third sitting, Putlitz pointed out among the spectators one Bertha Schulz, a young woman known to the police, and claimed to have spent the hour of the crime in her company. She initially confirmed this account, but subsequently wavered and altered the time; her testimony no longer afforded him an alibi for the crucial hour. She was taken into custody at the close of the hearing on suspicion of perjury. The court could not treat this reversal as proof of the alibi, yet it shed a harsh light upon the prisoner’s eleventh-hour strategy.
The jury was called upon to decide between three qualifications: homicide committed in the heat of passion, wilful homicide without premeditation, or murder. They returned a verdict on the last count. The tribunal sentenced Putlitz to the capital penalty by decapitation. The chronicle notes his composure upon hearing the judgment, mentions an appeal in cassation, and touches upon his conduct up to the time of execution, without furnishing either its date or its particulars. Nor does it state that robbery was ever established. The sentence was pronounced solely for the murder of Dorothea Storbeck.
Thus the affair concluded upon a judicial certainty firmer than the initial medical assessment, yet with a motive that remained shrouded in obscurity. Putlitz had first offered a detailed account, only to disavow it; the material evidence of the cord and the servant’s identification sustained the prosecution, while the ropemaker’s recognition remained hesitant. The Pitaval account frequently transforms the prisoner’s conduct into a moral portrait. The historian must maintain a cautious distance from that voice: that which the jury adjudicated, that which the witnesses recognized, and that which the compiler chose to interpret are by no means the same.
In that neatly kept chamber, the cord seemed at first to offer a straightforward answer: that Storbeck had chosen to die alone. The medical examination shattered that illusion; the inquiry was then forced to determine who had turned the cord into an instrument of deceit. The indictment gained weight through minute clues, then through a confession that subsequently unraveled, and through a witness who recognized the purchaser of the cord. The verdict chose murder. Yet, at the close of the chronicle, neither theft nor an affair of the heart stands as a judicially established fact. A woman was dead, a man was condemned, and the thread that bound them on that fatal evening could never be reduced to a single explanation.