On February 6, 1855, at about eight o’clock in the evening, a figure clad in the uniform of a soldier approached the powder magazine of Frankfurt an der Oder. Fusilier August Schröter was standing his first turn of guard duty amidst the snow-covered fields, nearly six hundred paces from the nearest inhabited dwelling. He raised his voice: “Halt! Who goes there?” The stranger offered no answer. Drawing a needle-gun from beneath his greatcoat, he fired, then fled across the snowy waste. The ball tore through Schröter’s abdomen. The young soldier remained standing long enough to watch his assailant vanish into the dark.
The chronicler of Der neue Pitaval followed the tracks left about the outpost, yet he raised a question that the legal instruments could not resolve as decisively as his narrative might wish: was this a murder committed to facilitate robbery, an assault born of some other motive, or a fatal error of identification? Schröter had only recently entered the ranks and, according to the chronicle, enjoyed the goodwill of his comrades. He expired the following morning in the military hospital, at about five o’clock, after having described the assailant as a man of his own stature, though he could furnish neither a name nor a cause for the deed.
Fusiliers Stahr and Schubert discovered him around nine o’clock, having left the guardhouse to effect the relief of the watch. Schröter related the assault to them; Schubert assisted him back to the post, while Stahr stood guard beside the magazine. During the night, Police Inspector Schulz arrived to cast up the footprints. The snow preserved the imprint of an approach originating at the edge of the town, leading across the fields to within fifteen paces of the post. The retreating tracks followed almost the identical line. Both coming and going, they traversed a water-filled ditch. There, submerged in the water, Schulz discovered a needle-gun, recently discharged and devoid of its bayonet.
The weapon had been set down only a few hours earlier in the corridor of Barracks Number Three, alongside fourteen other muskets. It belonged to Fusilier Klimpsch, who lay sick and had not quitted his quarters that evening. Its absence had not been perceived until half past six. The principal piece of physical evidence thus pointed to no individual man; it merely linked the shot to a rifle abstracted from a military barrack wherein scores of soldiers were free to come and go.
The effects found upon Schröter’s person introduced yet another perplexity. Upon dressing that morning, he had hung a silver watch about his neck and slipped a purse into his pocket. At the hospital, nothing was found upon him save the small regulation pouch containing a few groschen. Yet neither the watch nor the purse ever came to light. The soldier’s greatcoat had remained buttoned down to the waist, and the tracks in the snow did not extend to the exact spot where he had stood. Nothing proved that he had been rifled as he lay wounded; neither was there any explanation for the disappearance of his valuables.
The chronicler conjectured that Schröter might have entrusted these effects to a comrade prior to mounting guard, in which case their disappearance might have furnished the marksman with a motive. Yet nothing established that W— had ever held these objects before the attack. The chapter’s title—“Premeditated Murder or Murder for Robbery?”—preserved a hesitation that the narrator subsequently professed to resolve.
Several inhabitants had observed, around seven o’clock, a man in a military greatcoat and cap inquiring after the road to the powder magazine. Beneath his mantle, he carried a musket without a bayonet; one bystander believed he discerned the numeral twelve upon the shoulder strap. The inquiry seemed to point toward the garrison of the Twelfth Regiment, yet some six hundred soldiers were paraded before the witnesses without result. Thereupon, those who had previously done duty at the magazine were brought forward. A witness named Edstein paused before Fusilier Eduard W—, whom he believed he recognized, yet he departed without offering a conclusive description. Edstein alone could not swear to the identity. Other observers noted points of resemblance in the stranger’s height, voice, or countenance, while concurrently pointing out perceptible differences.
An inspection of the garrison’s ammunition opened a narrower trail. On February 17, it was discovered that a single cartridge was missing from the pouch of Fusilier Hoffert, a messmate sharing quarters with both Schröter and W—. Experts examined the paper wrapping and the linen bag. In their judgment, the packet had been intact when issued to the regiment; the stitching of the sack appeared to have been unpicked and subsequently resewn with a different thread. From this, the chronicler deduced that a comrade in the barracks had abstracted the cartridge. The discovery linked an item of ordnance to the inquiry, yet it failed to establish who had fired it, or the precise hour of its removal.
Soldier W— fell under active suspicion only after an entirely distinct affair. On March 31, he was drinking in a tavern where an engine-driver had dozed off after displaying his purse. W— was seen approaching the man’s coat, which lay draped over a barrel. On the following day, a ham that had vanished from the pocket was found in W—’s lodging; the stolen money was never recovered. He maintained that he had discovered the meat lying upon the ground. On April 27, the tribunal sentenced him for this theft to four weeks of medium-severity military arrest and the suspension of his civil rights for the space of one year. This conviction remained a distinct matter of fact. It demonstrated nothing as to his participation in Schröter’s death, yet it weighed heavily in the narrative of the Pitaval and colored the portrait that the chronicler drew of the accused.
The alibi presented by W— rested upon his presence in his father’s house, within the very window of time during which the stranger had been glimpsed upon the Oder bridge. At first, a young servant girl, Auguste Vogel, corroborated the statements of the soldier’s stepmother and sister. During a subsequent examination, and thereafter under oath, she clarified that while he had indeed arrived for the evening repast, he had taken his departure after about an hour. She could not name the precise hour; she knew only that he had quitted the house earlier than was his custom. The time required to reach the bridge was brief. This testimony undeniably weakened the alibi, yet it did not place W— at the sentry post.
Further suspicions arose from conversations reported by Fusilier Ziegler, who occupied an adjoining cell while serving a sentence for the embezzlement of a trifling sum. Ziegler claimed that W— had spoken of the value of the watch, speculated upon what the murderer must have done after discharging his weapon, and suggested where the prize might have been concealed. He was also alleged to have disclosed the missing cartridge, Schröter’s daily habits, and the passage of a patrol through the suburb. Certain of these particulars were indeed confirmed by the judicial inquiry. Yet Ziegler, on account of the sentence he was then undergoing, was legally disqualified from taking the oath; his jailhouse recollections could not carry the weight of an attested judicial confession.
The tale of these cellblock dialogues was drawn out over several weeks. Ziegler asserted that W— had initially made light of the idea of a “double,” had thereafter voiced a wish that the perpetrator might elude the scaffold, and had ultimately murmured: “It was I.” W— steadfastly denied ever having made such an admission. A neighbor, Frau Schulze, had previously cautioned the prisoner that an attempt was being made to draw him out. The chronicler conjectured that, but for this warning, Ziegler might have secured a full and unreserved confession; yet this remains mere editorial speculation. The reported words, the corroborating details, and their lack of confirmation under oath must be kept strictly apart.
The confrontations arranged for identification failed to dispel the lingering doubt. In early June, Edstein and other witnesses stated that W— possessed the height and frame of the soldier seen upon the bridge. Some recognized the cadence of the voice or the contour of the face; others remarked that the man seen that night bore a ruddier complexion, a fuller visage, or shorter hair. To all these discrepancies, the Pitaval offered an easy reconciliation: W— had endured eight weeks of close confinement, had lost his color, and his hair had grown out. Yet the chronicler’s ingenuity cannot convert hesitant recognitions into positive legal proof.
The report observed that W— had concealed his prior familiarity with Schröter and had neglected to tender his condolences to the father; the military inquisitor interpreted these omissions as signs of guilt, yet they fall far short of confessions. The father and sister continued to maintain the alibi. The chronicler suspected they were either deceived or shields to their kin, though nothing proved they possessed knowledge of his movements that night. The court declined to receive this suspicion as an established fact.
The trial proceeded before a Prussian military tribunal under an inquisitorial, written procedure, which the chronicler pointedly contrasted with a public trial by jury. The military auditor demanded twenty years of penal servitude (Zuchthaus) for murder. The military judges, divided into five colleges according to rank, declined to adopt his conclusion: by three colleges to two—amounting to six votes against seven when the individual judges were tallied—they pronounced a vorläufige Freisprechung, or provisional acquittal. They deemed the circumstantial evidence insufficient to warrant a conviction, and the motive imperfectly illuminated. The petitions for revision and annulment recorded in the chronicle came to nothing.
This adjudication was neither a declaration of guilt nor a demonstration that W— had been mistakenly accused. It left the affair in an uneasy suspension: the trial had failed to demonstrate who pulled the trigger, yet the chronicler continued to maintain that the accused was the true culprit. In the autumn of 1856, having completed his three years of active service, W— quitted the ranks and passed into the reserve. The chronicle could not say whether he subsequently departed for America, as he was rumored to have planned. It records neither a public deathbed confession nor any subsequent judicial verdict upon the slaying of Schröter.
In the snowy night, the tracks had led straight to a discarded weapon; the judicial inquiry linked them to a barrack room, an unstitched cartridge pouch, a tavern theft, and an informer barred from the oath. The military court judged that this chain of circumstance was not forged strongly enough to hold. The Pitaval, for its part, filled every void with an accusing narrative. To weigh the two accounts together does not yield the definitive name of the marksman; rather, it demonstrates how suspicion may be woven into a persuasive tale without ever attaining the dignity of judicial proof.