On September 28, 1849, between half past ten and a quarter to eleven at night, a cry for help pierced the air of a small town in the Saxon Ore Mountains. “My God, my wife!” shouted St…, a barber and surgeon. A magistrate, roused from sleep in a neighbouring house, leaned out of his window. An usher of the court came hurrying from the barber’s lodgings, crying out that a murder had just been discovered. In the upper chamber, an infant lay in its cradle, its skull crushed. Its mother, stretched upon the bedclothes, was still drawing breath. Night had not yet finished its grim work.
The father had been out at the tavern. When he returned, the door to the room was bolted fast. His elder son emerged from the chamber opposite, carrying three-year-old Luise, and handed the child to him without a word. Then he hurried down the stairs. The father knocked and called out to his wife; hearing a faint rattling groan, he feared she was suffocating from coal smoke from the stove. Together with a neighbour, the tailor St…, he forced his way in through the kitchen. Inside, he found his wife and infant bathed in blood. An axe was still buried in the woman’s skull; the father wrenched it free and cast it into the middle of the floor.
The boy, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm St…, surrendered himself of his own accord at the guardhouse. He was fifteen years of age and stood before the watchman clad only in his shirt and trousers. He declared that he had struck his mother. To account for his presence, he spoke of a dreadful dream: he had envisioned his mother beating him, whereupon he had struck her in return until she bled. He begged to be placed under lock and key. The usher hastened to the dwelling, where the father had just entered with his neighbour, and then went to alert the magistrate. When he returned to the post, the youth had already confessed to having felled his kin. The mother bleeding in that nocturnal tale was no mere phantom of slumber: the physicians found her expiring in her bed.
The physicians attended to the stricken woman. Several wounds to the head had pierced the cranium; each of them, they pronounced, was mortal. She never regained her senses. They could do no more than soothe her dying agony with cold compresses. The child, a babe of fourteen weeks, had been killed instantly. The mother expired in the fourth hour of the morning. Investigators discovered an axe covered in gore upon the floor. Certain wounds upon the woman’s head, however, appeared to have been inflicted by a sharper implement, perhaps a hammer. One was duly found, stained with blood, beneath a bed in the small chamber from which the son had emerged with his sister; the bedding itself bore telltale marks.
On the following day, the magistrate visited the Frohnfeste where the boy lay confined, and announced to him that both his mother and his brother were dead. Turning upon his straw pallet, the prisoner buried his face for a time, then answered the interrogator’s questions. He claimed he had quarrelled with his mother the previous evening, and that she had upbraided him with great severity. When she returned to bed, he had allegedly followed her with a piece of firewood seized from the kitchen and struck her down. During the forensic inspection, he identified the corpses and the tools. Before his mother’s remains, he moaned for a few minutes, then recovered sufficient composure to answer his examiners.
On October 2, the day of the obsequies, the funeral bell tolled at noon. The boy was conducted to a chamber in the town hall whose windows overlooked the square. From there, he could watch the cortege assembling before the paternal house. As the coffin was carried forth, he burst into tears and implored the magistrate to take his full confession. His eyes followed the procession as long as it remained in view. That day, he confessed to having struck down his mother and infant brother in their sleep, executing a resolve long harboured in his mind. An emotion may well have flitted across his features, but the observers present knew not how to gauge it; the chronicler, for his part, deemed his remorse far too brief. That moral judgment belongs to the chronicler alone.
The boy had not grown up devoid of instruction or intellect. Born in Dresden in 1834, he was reared by his grandmother until the age of five, then rejoined his parents in the small town. At first he learned with difficulty; around his ninth or tenth year, his faculties unfolded. His parents provided him with sustained schooling, including private lessons in Latin and Greek, and he gave proof of natural gifts. The official record, however, reproached him with mischievous and malicious pranks, as well as conduct that his parents and schoolmasters regarded with growing alarm.
He could not bring himself to settle upon a trade. He was apprenticed first in a shoe-last workshop, then in an engineering works, where he was likewise granted the opportunity to further his studies. He gave satisfaction for a season. In May 1849, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, he joined a band of free corps volunteers marching upon the capital; his kinsmen overtook him upon the road and brought him home. He would later declare that this single hour was the only truly beautiful moment of his life. After being caught in possession of a pistol belonging to his landlord, he left his place, pawned his watch, and ran into debt. By the end of the summer, he lived in idleness beneath his parents’ roof, wandering about or fishing, while domestic rancour mounted daily.
Before the double murder, he had already set fire to a field watchman’s hut. He claimed he had merely kindled a small fire to dry and warm himself after gathering berries, and had fed the flames only when he found he could no longer quench them. Three witnesses testified to the contrary that the weather was fine. One had seen him carrying burning embers upon two sticks and setting light to the four corners of the shelter. The hut, constructed of turf and a few timbers, was of trifling value and stood in the open field; the danger of the fire spreading was negligible. The youth later ascribed to bitterness against his mother an act he had initially passed off as an accident.
The resentment that preceded the killings was detailed by the boy himself and by the witnesses examined. On September 2, a quarrel had broken out at the midday meal because there was no butter for the bread. The boy had insulted his mother; she had boxed his ears. His father, apprised of the affront upon his return, had beaten him unsparingly. The youth stated that he had resolved to avenge himself upon both his parents, and that very afternoon had entertained the thought of slaying them. His account varied regarding his shifting schemes, but he admitted that the design of striking his mother had ripened over the preceding weeks.
On the evening of September 28, a friend of his mother, named Auguste, came to visit. The mother was indisposed and lay in bed. At the table, the son, his cap pulled low over his eyes, sat copying out parts for an amateur staging of the play *Thirty Years, or the Life of a Gamester*. Toward nine o’clock, he ceased writing and stretched himself upon the floor, at the foot of the sofa. The two women fell to conversing about child-rearing. The mother lamented having sacrificed so much for her offspring, while this son, returned to the family hearth, earned nothing and had even pawned his personal effects. He retorted that she would do better not to prate of her sufferings. Toward half past nine, the visitor took her leave.
The son would later assert that his mother’s reproach had driven him to act that very night. He had concocted a stratagem to simulate the intrusion of housebreakers: he would kill his mother while his father was away, shatter a windowpane, ransack the escritoire and the bread chest, throw the room into disarray, and then lie down with little Luise as though nothing had occurred. He maintained that he had formed no plan to murder his father that night, nor any intention of harming his sister. He had assumed his father would return and retire straight to rest without entering the room. The first deeds of the evening were thus contrived to mask the slaughter and shield himself from suspicion.
Once the women had parted company, the mother rose to extinguish the candle. She turned back toward her bed and, in passing by the prostrate youth, trod upon his foot. She murmured that it was an accident, but he was persuaded she had done it out of malice. Little Rudolph began to stir and whimper in his cradle. St… attempted to soothe him, got up, moistened his teat, and rocked the cradle. The axe lay out in the kitchen. He took it up, hid it, moved it several times; he faltered, laid it aside, and took it up anew. He declared he was alternately spurred on by fury and held back by terror of the gallows. When his mother stirred beneath her covers, he fancied she was waking to discover the weapon in his grasp. He struck her above the right eye.
He recalled the stupefaction that seized him after that first blow: his knees shook, he recoiled, and the horror of what he had done broke upon his senses. But the infant began to scream. Fearing the cries would raise an alarm, and frantic at seeing his mother still moving, he acted again. According to his confession, he struck down the child, then returned to the mother, who was still drawing breath. His deposition demonstrates that the blows rained upon his mother were premeditated; it does not warrant the conclusion that the death of the child had been compassed by the same settled design. The state of the chamber, the bloodied implements, and the confessions established the deed; the question of intent regarding the infant was reserved for the separate deliberation of the judges.
He admitted to having broken the windowpane by striking from without inwards, the better to feign the entrance of a stranger. He subsequently closed the casement when he resolved to surrender himself. The bloodstained hammer was flung beneath the bed; the axe was left beside the mother. As for little Luise, he had carried her into the adjoining room and awaited his father’s return before placing her in his arms. He said he could not bear to leave her alone in the dark house while he ran to the guardhouse. Within those walls, the tender solicitude he professed for his sister stood side by side with the atrocities he had just perpetrated upon his mother and infant brother.
The court held the murder of the mother to be premeditated. It ruled the death of the infant to be manslaughter, declining to conclude that the youth had conceived a distinct design upon the child’s life. Nor did the court accept that he had resolved, on the night of the crime, to murder his father and sister; though he might earlier have harboured a wider scheme, he had evidently abandoned it. The chronicler voiced indignation at the sentence imposed and at the perceived shallowness of the lad’s contrition; yet the strictures of a moralist must not be confounded with the measured distinctions of the law.
The sentence of penal servitude was confirmed upon appeal, and the youth was conveyed to the house of correction in September 1850. His tender years had spared him the scaffold. The chronicler lamented this reprieve, demanding that the sheer atrocity of the deed should have swept aside the bar of age. Between the boy gazing out upon the funeral cortege and the man he was to become within those prison walls, the law determined that long years should intervene.
Little Luise remained in the care of the surviving family. During the preliminary inquiry, the jailer reported that the mere sight or mention of a hammer threw the child into convulsions of terror, and that none could pacify her. St… flew into a fury when these reports were repeated to him, most of all when his father voiced the suspicion that he had meant to slaughter his sister as well. The child he had carried into the adjacent chamber had remained untouched. Yet the blows struck that night had left an imprint upon her which no physical inspection could ever reveal.
At the window of the town hall, the son had watched his mother’s body until the cortege passed out of sight. He had asked to speak, and the magistrates had transcribed his words. They could well distinguish premeditated murder from sudden homicide, pronounce a term of imprisonment, and docket the weapons among the court’s exhibits. What they could never do was restore to that household what the father had discovered behind the bolted door.