On the 7th of February, 1817, at about half-past ten o'clock at night, Christopher Rupprecht stepped out of the upper room of a tavern colloquially known as Hell. A stranger had just pulled the bell at the gate, asking whether he was within; the innkeeper had conveyed the summons to descend. Rupprecht rose at once. Not a minute had elapsed before the company remaining above heard groans and hastened down into the entry. The aged goldsmith lay near the door. He gasped out that a “scoundrel” had struck him with an axe, and repeatedly murmured: “My daughter, my daughter.” When his daughter arrived, he failed to recognize her.
This initial utterance turned the magistrates' eyes toward the woodcutters of the town. It was also destined to lead them astray. In Feuerbach’s narrative, the court was forced to weigh the indistinct speech of a dying man, several contradictory answers, and a deed whose commencement no living soul had witnessed.
The town wherein the tragedy occurred is designated merely by the initial M. Rupprecht, aged between sixty and sixty-five years, subsisted upon his trade as a goldsmith and by lending money upon interest. He could neither read nor write, and kept no books of account; whenever a bond or bill required drawing, he had recourse to foreign hands. He lived on ill terms with sundry kinsmen and neighbors, and his son-in-law, the furrier Bieringer, no longer set foot in his house. Such strained relations supplied abundant motives, yet none proved who had drawn Rupprecht out into the lane.
The tavern stood less than fifty paces from his dwelling, at the bottom of a dark cul-de-sac. Feuerbach reconstructed the assault from the position of the body, the direction of the wound, and the architecture of the vestibule. According to his hypothesis, the assailant had lurked in an obscure recess, mounted upon a stone bench, and felled Rupprecht the moment he stepped forth to seek his caller. The stricken man had then staggered back a pace or two and collapsed beside the threshold. This was a deduction of reason, not the evidence of an eyewitness: the nocturnal visitor remained unknown, and no passenger in the street had seen him pass.
The medical officers of the court described a wound inflicted by a heavy, sharp-edged weapon—very possibly a broadsword wielded by an experienced hand. Rupprecht himself, however, had spoken of an axe. His cap bore an incision longer than the cutting edge of the small hatchets subsequently seized. The discrepancy between the dimension of the wound and that of such implements ought to have given pause to the magistrates; nevertheless, the single word “axe” impelled them to interrogate the woodcutters bearing the name of Schmidt.
On the 8th of February, Rupprecht rallied sufficiently to answer the examining judge. To the inquiry, “Who struck you?”, he returned the name of Schmidt, adding thereto the trade of woodcutter. He pointed first to one quarter of the town, then to another. The magistrate caused his words to be set down, and ordered an officer to remain at the bedside to take note of any further revelation. Yet Rupprecht could scarcely articulate. On the morrow, following the trepanning of his cranium, he again reiterated “Schmidt” and “woodcutter,” without ever distinguishing which individual of that name he intended. On the 11th of February, he expired, leaving his deposition incomplete.
Three suspects were apprehended: Abraham Schmidt, an indigent woodchopper who had previously suffered imprisonment for hauling stolen vegetables; John Gabriel Schmidt, known as Tall Schmidt; and Erhard Düringer, his half-brother, styled Little Schmidt. The latter two had in former times frequented Rupprecht’s house. Abraham, for his part, fell into visible confusion when led to the bedside of the dying man. He began by protesting that he did not know Rupprecht, then named him, and presently swore he had never laid eyes upon him. His alibi likewise fluctuated: he assigned several conflicting hours for his return home and that of his wife.
Suspicion appeared to gather weight when stains of blood were discovered upon his axe, near the blade. The court compared the implement with the cut upon the cap and the wound itself. The edge was far too short; such a hatchet could not account for the extensive rent. Abraham declared that the blood came from his chapped hand. The spot lay near the iron, which at first seemed to refute his defense, until it was elicited that he was left-handed, and was thus wont to grasp the wood with his right hand immediately beneath the blade.
Further inquiries undermined the accusation still more. The innkeeper failed to recognize Schmidt’s voice: he recalled a shrill, almost feminine tone, whereas the woodcutter spoke in a deep, hoarse voice. Abraham’s mother-in-law and his wife placed him in their dwelling, occupied in carving wooden pegs, whence he had returned home leading his young child. Their statements as to the precise hour varied, as they possessed no clock, and because the wife had retraced her steps to her mother’s house after conducting her husband. A neighbor, however, corroborated that Abraham was wholly ignorant of Rupprecht’s identity when she imparted the news on the following morning. His trembling irresolution at the bedside, initially construed as a token of guilt, was found to agree with common report regarding his bashful temper, his dullness of hearing, and his utter bewilderment under interrogation. The court discharged him.
John Gabriel and Düringer were examined in their turn, as were two district overseers, Friedmann and Götz, who had formerly been at law with Rupprecht. An ancient grudge supplied a plausible motive: the goldsmith had been judicially condemned to tender an apology to Götz after accusing him of injustice. Yet Rupprecht had himself denied having been assaulted by either overseer; witnesses placed Götz in another tavern, and the neighbors described both men as peaceable citizens. Depositions established that Düringer had remained at home, and the stillness of the house rendered any nocturnal excursion by John Gabriel equally improbable. Two other woodcutters named Schmidt, dwelling on the outskirts of the town, were questioned to no purpose.
There remained the family. Rupprecht had called for his daughter upon hearing the word “daughter”; he was in the habit of crying out for her even in ordinary sickness. Yet certain witnesses found her demeanor unnaturally tranquil, observing that she had demanded her father’s keys. Others explained that she had taken them merely to prepare his lodgings for his reception, upon the counsel of the surgeon, who feared a robbery. She accused Tall Schmidt with marked insistence, but the dying man had indeed uttered that name. The chronicle also touches upon testamentary motives: Rupprecht had been minded to draw up a will that would secure his property to his daughter, beyond the reach of her husband. She, who lived estranged from Bieringer, stood to lose this protection had her father died intestate.
Bieringer himself could not have been the perpetrator of the deed. He had remained at the sign of the Golden Fish until a quarter past ten, and reached his own house about half-past ten; his abode stood upwards of half a league from Hell. Further suspicions attached to three trumpeters of the regiment, one of whom was in Rupprecht’s debt. Their accounts agreed, and their alibis were verified: two were in barracks, and the third had tarried in an alehouse until eleven o'clock before repairing to the hospital.
Two men observed in Rupprecht’s chamber that same afternoon offered another false scent. They proved to be the regimental tailor and a cordwainer; the former had borrowed six hundred florins for three months, leaving cloth in pledge and subscribing a note for six hundred and fifty florins. The cordwainer had attended solely as witness to the transaction. The “two gentlemen” with whom Rupprecht had desired to confer in private were thus no mysterious confederates.
One branch of the medical evidence bore no practical fruit. The surgeons had spoken of a broadsword. Feuerbach believed that an immediate inspection of the weapons of the garrison and the burgher guard, undertaken on the day following the outrage, might have yielded a clue. But the investigation commenced too late for any such measure, and the judge’s colleagues overruled his proposal, holding fast to the certainty of an axe. The inquest was closed once the several suspects had been cleared. In 1828, more than ten years after the event, Feuerbach wrote that the death of Rupprecht remained an impenetrable mystery. The unwritten accounts and the names the dead man had carried in his memory alone had perished with him; and the court had failed to discover who had pulled the bell at the gate.