On August 13, 1858, while the families of Darnstedt took advantage of the fair weather to bring in the harvest, a child vanished from a farmstead bordering the Ilm. By evening, none yet knew where to search or what calamity had transpired. The voice overheard by a blind man, the imprints of a shoe upon the damp earth, and the shifting accounts of a young labourer soon turned a simple theft of coin into an affair of murder.
Karl Friedrich Jährling had set out for the fields alongside his three elder children. There remained at the house his wife, occupied in preparing coffee before carrying it to the reapers, little Ernst, aged five and a half years, an infant slumbering in its cradle-cart, and Karl Friedrich Fleck, a man of sixty-four years, sightless since childhood. Fleck had long found shelter beneath the Jährlings’ roof. He could not behold who entered, yet he knew the voices of all who were accustomed to frequent the house.
Following the father’s departure, Fleck caught the sound of footsteps issuing from the covered passage. A stranger inquired of Ernst whether his parents were within, and thence where the key to the house might be found. The boy replied that they were away in the fields. Fleck arose, protested against such an intrusion, and heard the man withdraw through the courtyard. He closed the door, leaving the key in the lock, and lifted the crying infant into his arms. Some ten minutes thereafter, the key turned once more. The intruder made his way into the living quarters; Fleck followed him to the threshold, commanded him to await Jährling’s return, and believed he had secured him inside by turning the key from without.
The blind man withdrew toward the entryway to listen for the rumble of the returning wagon. When he went to test the door, the key had vanished. The door was fitted with a small glazed pane through which a man of long reach might, from the inside, extend his arm to the lock and withdraw the key. Of this detail Fleck was unaware. He sat waiting for the family’s return, ignorant that the trespasser had already fled.
When Jährling returned with his laden wain, the household fell to unloading the grain. His daughter Emma then entered the dwelling. The inner door stood closed but unbolted; the glazed casement of the door and the writing-desk stood wide, a hoe propped against the woodwork. The desk-chest had been forced, and a drawer containing money was gone. It held the proceeds of a recent sale of grain: at least forty-four thalers, according to the bill of indictment. Only then did Fleck recount what his ears had caught. Ernst, however, did not return.
They sought at first a wandering child who might have hidden himself or strayed in play. Then, in the dark passage behind the barn, the father caught sight of two spots of blood. The day’s searches proved fruitless. On the morrow, men rowed up the Ilm. Near Darnstedt, stranded upon a sandbar, they came upon Ernst’s corpse, washed up by the river’s current.
The judicial autopsy revealed three narrow punctures to the neck, inflicted with a pointed and cutting instrument. None was mortal. In the judgment of the physicians cited in the record, the child had entered the water alive and perished of drowning; they estimated that his body had lain in the stream between twelve and twenty-four hours. The theft and the death were henceforth intertwined, yet it remained to discover who had vaulted the garden wall, crossed the yard, and borne away the silver.
A footprint pressed near the water’s edge drew the gaze of the magistrates. The heel bore an iron plate of uncommon shape; about the sole, heavy hobnails formed a distinctive pattern, from which two nails were missing. A minute rivet protruded from the rim of the heel. The selfsame marks were discovered atop the low garden wall and along the passage used to gain the premises. Other tracks led toward an alder tree beside the Ilm, where cabbage leaves were found discarded; bloodstains were thought to be discerned upon several—a circumstance noted with judicial caution. The prints then reappeared in a field of barley that Bernhard Stempner had been mowing on the day of the crime.
Stempner, nineteen years of age, was then labouring upon the land of his stepfather, Gottfried Treuter. He had been an esteemed scholar in his youth, but for months past the inquiry disclosed debts, unredeemed borrowings, and sums purloined from his kin. Such reverses did not explain the atrocity, but they afforded the investigators a precise motive to scrutinize him when his expenditures far outstripped the wages he claimed to have received. Jährling knew that the young man’s shoes were shod with nails. On August 17, Gendarme Knabe required him to draw them off. The heel-iron, the protruding rivet, and the two missing nails matched in every particular the imprints traced along the path.
Stempner admitted that his footwear bore a resemblance to the tracks, but denied having quitted the field. He gave several contradictory accounts regarding the money he had spent in the days that followed. He contended first that he had drawn his pay from the railway works; the registers proved that he had failed to appear on pay-day and had claimed nothing of his due. He subsequently altered his figures concerning the sums delivered to his stepfather. A one-thaler piece, recognizable by its provenance, had been abstracted from the stolen drawer. A portion of the stolen coin was discovered concealed within hollow bricks of clay; the remainder was missing.
The chain of time tightened with the deposition of the musician Kober. Setting out on foot from the Apolda railway station at two o’clock, he had met Stempner near the river-path at about four. The young man maintained that the encounter had taken place an hour later, and that he had come from the field by another way. Yet the distances, the hours, and the road described by Kober made such an alibi impossible to sustain. The prosecution saw therein a desperate contrivance to gain an hour and efface the course of the footprints.
One piece of evidence remained singular: Fleck had not recognized the intruder in his initial deposition. He had then declared the voice unfamiliar. Some days later, during a confrontation arranged by the magistrate, he was made to hear several men speak without beholding them. He set aside one voice, then another. When Stempner was brought forth, Fleck recognized his tone. At the trial, the old man was examined before the jury. When Stempner, hitherto silent, uttered several words during an interchange, Fleck drew himself upright and cried out that it was indeed that voice. The scene produced a profound impression upon the court; it did not supplant the material proofs, but it rendered it impossible to dismiss the recognition as mere village gossip.
The trial took place at Weimar from November 11 to 13, 1858. Stempner faced the witnesses and persisted in his denials. The defence challenged the evidentiary worth of the footprints and the physical likelihood that a single man could have accomplished the burglary and slain the child. Fleck recounted anew what he had heard; Kober stood fast by his reckoning of time; the hobnail marks and the deceits touching the money were rigorously weighed. The jury pronounced Stempner guilty by unanimous verdict. The court sentenced him to suffer death.
Following the verdict, Stempner at first persisted in asserting his innocence. On the morrow, after an interview with his advocate, he admitted having broken into the house and slain Ernst, but claimed initially to have committed the murder after the theft, when the lad threatened to betray him. A fortnight later, he recanted this sequence of events. He then declared that he had slain the child prior to forcing the desk, fearing to encounter a witness. He confessed to having choked the boy, stabbed him thrice in the throat, and cast him into the Ilm; only then, he insisted, had he rifled the money. To his pastor, he offered a different shade of truth: his intent had been solely to rob, he maintained, and he had harboured no premeditated design to kill; catching sight of Ernst, he had succumbed to a sudden frenzy whereof the coveting of money had been the underlying spring. The compilation esteems this pastoral narrative nearest the reality of the crime, while preserving the earlier confession upon the record.
Stempner was executed on December 8, 1858. According to the chronicle, he received the summons with composure, begged that no petition for clemency be preferred, and met his death without retracting his confessions. The initial clue had been the voice which Fleck had at first declared unknown; the conviction, however, rested upon a web wherein that voice joined the path of the footsteps, the shifting explanations, and the recovered coin. In this dark affair, the aged blind man had seen nothing. Yet he had heard the man whom none other had yet thought to suspect.