In Councillor Wlassow’s apartment, the beds remained unmade only in appearance: no one had slept in them. The candles, however, had burned down to mid-length. Upon the calendar, the twenty-fifth of May stood marked; the latest issue of the newspaper Novoye Vremya bore the very same date. When the two corpses were discovered, these ordinary household objects became the earliest timepieces of an inquiry that possessed neither an eyewitness to the crime nor a forced lock.
The aged civil servant lived with his housekeeper, Alexandra Semenidova. The neighbours seldom saw him receive company. From his drawers, the valuable papers had vanished; yet the locks offered not the slightest mark of violence. It was necessary to seek someone familiar with the dwelling, its daily habits, and the confidence of its master. Among the councillor’s visitors was Karl Christoforovich von Landsberg, a young officer of the Guards, received there with a benevolence from which he had derived far more than mere familiarity.
The judicial record sets the affair in Saint Petersburg in the year 1879. It relates that Wlassow and his housekeeper were slain on the twenty-fifth of May, their bodies discovered only several days later. The date of that day was reconstructed from the calendar, the newspaper, and the councillor’s final appearances in public. It did not proceed from any witness who had seen the blows struck. The physicians, the neighbours, and the objects scattered about the bedchamber were left to fill that silence together.
Landsberg was twenty-five years of age and belonged to the Sapper Battalion of the Guards. In the service, his superiors deemed him steady and punctual; General Kaufmann spoke favourably of his conduct. Yet garrison life proved dear to any man bent on keeping up his rank. The young man had fallen into debt, had spent far beyond his pay, and dreamed of an advantageous marriage. A hoped-for alliance had come to naught. Such reverses scarcely suffice to explain a murder; they merely provide the measure of the straits in which the officer was bound to find himself when his debt fell due.
A few months earlier, the councillor had lent him five thousand rubles, without interest. The repayment was appointed for the twenty-fifth of May—a date chosen by Landsberg himself. Wlassow kept the promissory note and certain securities in his lodgings. The creditor appeared in no way an adversary: he had aided the young officer and shown him genuine affection. Thenceforth, the question was not merely who might have entered the apartment; it became necessary to understand why a man received with such kindness should have chosen blood over an entreaty for delay.
The earliest clues came from the blood. Traces led from the room where Wlassow had been assailed toward the bedchamber and the kitchen; the investigators judged that these stains could not have come from the victims alone. Landsberg had a wounded hand. He quitted Saint Petersburg on the twenty-sixth of May, having obtained leave of absence, and had procured at an apothecary’s shop a remedy intended to staunch the flow of blood. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, beneath a heavy rain, an officer of the Guards had been seen entering through the courtyard gate. Taken in isolation, each of these facts might admit of an innocent construction; brought together, they traced a path.
The examining magistrate Holzinger followed this scent. Landsberg was placed under arrest. He did not confess at once. The chronicler attributes his silence to the dread of being hauled before a military tribunal and condemned to death; this interpretation belongs properly to the retrospective narrative. Proofs accumulated nonetheless, and following his retirement from the army on the seventh of June, the officer acknowledged his hand in the two slayings.
In his confession, Landsberg related the interview appointed for the discharge of the debt. He admitted having come armed with a hunting knife and a loaded revolver; he claimed to have hesitated between slaying his creditor and taking his own life, before losing all mastery over himself. He was unable to explain with any precision how the housekeeper had met her death. The prosecutor, in his closing address, described the sequence of acts as something far removed from a blind panic: according to his thesis, Landsberg covered the bodies, ransacked the furniture and the pocketbook, took the promissory note and the securities, washed himself, bandaged his hand, went in search of a styptic draught, and then locked the apartment behind him before taking his leave. This reconstruction belonged to the prosecution, founded upon physical traces and admissions, rather than an explicit confession made by the accused.
The housekeeper had gone out at his own bidding, under the pretext of fetching lemonade. She returned while Landsberg was still upon the premises. In his confession, the officer could not account for the second death with the same precision as the first. This omission weighed heavily upon the reading of his words: he acknowledged the essential deeds, yet his narrative failed to dispel every question regarding their sequence and his true intent toward Alexandra.
The stolen papers were identified. The knife and the revolver were fished from a canal in the Tauride Garden; the garments and the securities were discovered in the home of Landsberg’s family. The physicians examined Wlassow’s wounds and concluded that the old man had been standing when the blow was dealt to his throat, attempting to shield himself with his hand. Confronted with a weapon resembling the instrument of the crime, the prisoner displayed a fierce aversion and refused to take it into his hands. These observations supplemented the physical traces without turning the confession into a perfectly transparent tale.
At trial, the witnesses and experts confirmed, according to the chronicle, the principal elements of the admissions. The prosecutor recalled the date, the beds left undisturbed, the consumed candles, and the absence of disarray: the crime had been committed in the evening, and the theft was bound up with the slayings. He portrayed Landsberg as a man who had prepared his weapons and chosen his hour. He maintained that the officer sought not merely to recover his promissory note, but desired to lay hands on ready money to sustain the lavish existence to which he had grown attached. Such was the thesis of the prosecution; the exact scope of his design cannot be separated from the speech that framed it.
The defence did not dispute the horror of the deeds. Counsel urged the jurors to look upon the man whom military society had fashioned: a young officer drawn into expenditures he could not sustain, he argued, and cast into despair by debt. He compared the habits of the Guards to the retinues of debtors whom polite society nevertheless continued to receive. This plea sought to divide the guilt between the accused and his milieu; it did not challenge the deaths themselves, nor Landsberg’s responsibility for them.
The officer spoke in his own turn. He declared that he wished not to justify himself, and accepted the judgment in advance. He spoke of the torments endured since the twenty-fifth of May. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on both counts of murder. The court stripped him of his civil rights, his decorations, and his rank, and condemned him to fifteen years of penal servitude in the mines of Siberia. In its sentencing remarks, the bench took into account his youth, his confession, and his repentance, mitigating the penalty by the degrees prescribed by law.
The account that follows the judgment shifts in tone. Its chronicler waxes indignant at such leniency, depicts the proceedings as a fashionable spectacle, and mocks the onlookers who arrived with opera glasses, fruits, and sweetmeats. He construes the assassin as a man who chose murder merely to preserve the outward airs of an elegant horseman. This moral broadside is no piece of judicial evidence. It reveals, rather, the fascination and contempt that hemmed the trial about: the public gazed upon an officer of good breeding, even while the proofs bound him fast to the corpses left behind in the apartment.
Landsberg was conducted to Siberia to undergo his punishment. In Wlassow’s chamber, however, the two beds had remained in neat order, and the candles had burned halfway down. The calendar and the journal had withstood falsehood far better than the young man’s explanations: they fixed a single day, while the trial measured what a benevolent creditor, a note for five thousand rubles, and a life lived above one’s means had ultimately come to cost.