The barber Kirchmeier swore before the magistrates that he had seen the stolen strongbox in the lodgings of the gilder Mannert. He described its green lacquer, its painted blossoms, its wooden plinth, and even the openwork foliage flanking the lock. This testimony possessed all the force of an exact likeness; it possessed likewise the finality of a closing door. Within a matter of weeks, Schönleben, the porter to the merchant Sterbenk, the artisan Beutner, and the gilder Mannert were caught in the gears of an inquest that appeared already to have condemned them. The chest itself remained undiscovered.
On the morning of the 30th of June, 1790, Katharina Kamm, a housemaid in the service of the merchant Johann Marcus Sterbenk, found the street door ajar. That of the counting-house stood open as well. The heavy iron chest that customarily rested there was gone. Sterbenk at first estimated its contents at two thousand florins; he later proved, ledger in hand and under oath, that it had held 1,828 florins and 20 kreuzers. In the dead of night, an intruder had forced the door, removed a pane of glass from the office window, and carried away the treasury.
The deed was plain enough in its execution, yet its particulars soon gave rise to speculation. The dwelling possessed no lock and key upon its outer door, but merely a bolt that Kamm affirmed she had drawn the preceding evening. No officer, however, inspected the bolt or the premises immediately upon the discovery. Several days earlier, a pane had been removed from an inner casement to unlatch a door whose key had been mislaid. The domestics remembered this circumstance well; from it they drew the inference that someone familiar with the house had turned the expedient to his own account.
The initial examinations yielded neither the stolen property nor any decisive witness. The milk-girl, who had found the house open on her morning round, was never summoned, according to the narrative of the Pitaval. Common rumor, however, already ran through the streets of Nuremberg. It fastened upon the man who stood nearest to the coffer: Johann Georg Schönleben, Sterbenk’s messenger. He had chanced to say that he would gladly go and identify the box if its whereabouts were known. This remark, for which he offered an innocent explanation, was deemed suspicious. His brother, a husbandman, had visited him on the day of the theft and had subsequently quitted the city with a cart laden with manure. Suspicion swiftly hardened into a tale: the strongbox must have been concealed beneath the dung.
Schönleben denied the charge. His dwelling was ransacked; the floorboards were pried up and the packed earth beneath was probed. Nothing was found. Yet this absence of material proof did not check the inquest. The magistrates examined Beutner, a Flitterschläger who beat and wrought thin leaves of metal, and who had assisted Schönleben in unloading firewood at Sterbenk’s house a few days before. On that occasion he had mounted the stairs leading to the counting-house; witnesses alleged that he had paused there to peer inside. He became the natural accomplice of the first suspect: the chest was ponderous, and the authorities held that no solitary man could have borne it away.
Before the posting of the notice offering a hundred florins for the recovery of the chest or the apprehension of the thief, Kirchmeier had secretly imparted to Sterbenk what he believed he had witnessed. The chronicle notes an interval of eight days: the promised bounty therefore does not account for this first disclosure. He related that on the morning of the burglary, while in the workshop of the gilder Johann Schweikhard Mannert, he had observed a box resembling the one subsequently advertised. It stood near the stove, beneath a small table. Kirchmeier provided so minute a description that, to Sterbenk and the examining magistrates, mere coincidence appeared impossible.
Mannert was a master craftsperson of good repute, the father of two boys, though his affairs were in a straitened state. He denied ever having had such a chest in his keeping. His wife and sons made the same deposition. Yet Kirchmeier reiterated his testimony at the confrontation. In Mannert’s house, the magistrates observed a loose board in a small closet; they conjectured forthwith that the chest had been hauled out of the adjoining building through an aperture opening onto a narrow passage. The hypothesis served to explain the transport; it offered no proof that such a thing had occurred. The searches brought nothing to light.
Suspicion narrowed nonetheless. Kirchmeier insisted that the chest, painted green and adorned with flowers, had stood in Mannert’s room. His initial report had preceded the arrests; his formal deposition under oath, dated the 27th of July, followed the apprehension of the gilder and his wife. Mannert’s sons were questioned, though spared imprisonment. They did not recognize the chest; their father continued his denials. When he persisted in rejecting the accusations, the authorities had him beaten with a bull’s-pizzle, as the chronicle records. He confessed nothing. The spiritual reports preserved by the compilers of the Pitaval show that the confessors were likewise expected to wring an admission from the prisoner. Mannert and his kin steadfastly maintained their innocence.
The populace had already passed judgment. The casements of the Schönleben home were shattered with stones. In one such riotous assault, an infant held in its mother’s arms was struck dead, according to the archival account cited by the compiler. The three accused households already bore a penalty that the tribunal had not yet decreed. Schönleben, his wife, and Beutner languished in gaol; Mannert and his family underwent repeated searches and interrogations, while the gilder himself was subjected to the lash. The strongbox was still missing, yet every fresh conjecture seemed fashioned to uphold Kirchmeier’s tale rather than to test its truth.
The entanglement was unraveled only in the autumn. A journeyman, known as “the Berliner,” taunted Magnus Melchior Blösel with having grown rich overnight. The master locksmith Christian Gottlieb Gösser and his man had purchased watches and fine new clothes, though they had hitherto lived in penury. Words overheard in an alehouse brought suspicion upon their heads. On the 30th of October, Magistrate Harsdorff examined a witness who repeated these boastful remarks. This time, the investigators pursued the scent instead of casting it aside to preserve their former theory.
Schönleben was examined once more. He recalled that Gösser had repaired Sterbenk’s door and that, shortly before his arrest, the locksmith had inquired whether he would soon be commissioned to make a new iron chest. The remark now took on a sinister cast. An initial search of Gösser’s workshop yielded suspicious ironwork, though he denied that the fragments had ever belonged to the missing coffer. Further examinations and accumulating clues broke their resolve, leading at last to full confessions from Gösser and Blösel. A second search uncovered upwards of two hundred florins. Additional iron remnants were dredged from the waters of the Pegnitz, and the scrap-dealer Albrecht confirmed that he had bought old metal from them. Gösser’s wife corroborated parts of their narrative, though her account differed as to when her husband had first revealed the crime to her.
The locksmith confessed that he was well acquainted with the vulnerabilities of both door and counting-house from his employment on the premises. He had first attempted to force the chest alone; failing, he had returned home to fetch his journeyman. Together they carried it to Gösser’s house, broke it open, and divided the coin. Gösser had concealed the gold and spent the silver to discharge his debts and provide for his family. They had then smashed the strongbox to pieces and cast the debris into the river. The particulars of their confession agreed in every point with the recovered fragments and the material findings of the inquest. The Pitaval thus ascribes the burglary to Gösser and Blösel, and not to those who had endured months of wrongful imprisonment.
On the 5th of November, Schönleben, Beutner, and Mannert were set at liberty upon taking the Urphed, the ancient oath foreswearing all retribution. It was not yet their final acquittal. Mannert had lost his wife: she had perished in prison on the 28th of September of an affliction described by the chroniclers as miliary fever. Her husband had not been permitted to attend her; their young sons had been left to the charity of strangers. No discharge could remedy this bereavement, nor wipe away the violence of the mob and the blows inflicted upon the artisan. Only on the 8th of April, 1791, did the tribunal formally proclaim their complete and untainted innocence; the authorities thereafter endeavored to provide some relief to the ruined families, particularly Mannert’s.
There remained Kirchmeier. He continued to swear that he had seen the strongbox in Mannert’s lodgings, even after the thieves had confessed and the broken iron had been recovered from the riverbed. The magistrates were never able to determine whether he had lied with malice aforethought, had fallen into an honest error, or had suffered some delusion of the senses. The compiler of the Pitaval notes the medical conjectures of the day, among them a mind unsettled by a recent fever; these remain retrospective speculations rather than an established diagnosis. In February 1791, the barber was discharged from the criminal proceedings. He departed from Nuremberg bowed beneath the weight of public execration; though he paid a sum of money to Mannert’s children, his trade was ruined beyond recovery.
Final judgment was pronounced on the 8th of April, 1791. Gösser was stood in the pillory, flogged, and consigned to the house of correction; Blösel likewise underwent corporal chastisement and imprisonment. The locksmith’s wife was released upon taking the oath. Years later, Gösser and his man were pardoned for good conduct, under perpetual banishment from Nuremberg. The law had at last named the culprits and absolved the innocent. It had not resolved the most disquieting enigma of the trial: why Kirchmeier had sworn to seeing, in its minutest particulars, a coffer that had never crossed the threshold of the Mannert house.