The master and mistress had gone to a wedding. Such was the answer the farmhand gave to callers, offering that particular convenience of falsehoods that require no immediate elaboration: an invitation, a journey, an absence of a few days, and everyone may return to their business. Yet the postman had money to deliver; neighbors grew uneasy; the owners’ two daughters remained locked inside the house. For Otto Schöne, it became vital that the village believe in this celebration of which he alone held the secret.
The feast had never existed. Franz Kallies, his wife, and their maidservant Anna Philipp had been slain on the morning of January 8, 1913, at Ortwig, in the Brandenburg countryside. As for Otto Schöne, his true name was August Sternickel. The police had pursued him for years, often searching far afield while he labored under the very noses of those who entrusted him with their livestock and their keys.
A Most Satisfactory Hand
The name Sternickel had circulated ever since the burning of a Silesian mill in 1905. The miller Knappe had perished; two brothers, the Pietsches, were prosecuted. One received ten years’ penal servitude, while the other was acquitted. Sternickel, suspected of having directed the plot, remained nowhere to be found. To verified crimes were soon joined those imputed to him for want of any other culprit. His name became a ready-made explanation for every barn fire and every suspicious stranger glimpsed upon a country lane.
Yet he had by no means chosen to live perpetually in the depths of the woods. He hired himself out. The New Zealand journal that recounted his capture in March 1913 expressed astonishment at seeing him seek out the company of gendarmes, join local associations, and keep his posts for months on end. At the trial, a former employer came to confirm a fact far less picturesque, yet infinitely more troublesome: the farmhand had been an excellent worker. His departure had even caused regret in the household. Labor faithfully performed served him as an armor against suspicion.
At the Kallies homestead, where he entered service in October 1912, difficulties arose from his missing papers and unheralded journeys. The master demanded an accounting. During one of the servant's absences, he searched his belongings. Sternickel discovered this and, by his own admission before the judges, resolved upon revenge. But Kallies was a vigorous man. Retribution would require reinforcements.
Three Lads for a Fortune
On January 7, in a tavern at Müncheberg, he approached Willy and Georg Kersten, alongside Franz Schliewenz. The three young men were seeking work and penniless. The stranger who took a seat beside them might easily have passed for a landowner in search of hands. He began by proposing something else entirely: an easy venture, a wealthy peasant, thousands of marks for the taking.
The considerable legacy of which he spoke was purely invented. Yet Kallies held local responsibilities concerning taxes and a savings bank; his servant had reason enough to believe that money was kept on the premises. Between genuine fact and the promised riches, Sternickel threw in just enough golden bounty to make the expedition irresistible.
The youths followed him and passed the night in his quarters. In court, all would maintain they had agreed only to robbery, never to murder. The following morning, however, they intervened in the cowhouse where Sternickel had set upon Kallies. The farmer was throttled. Anna Philipp, arriving to milk the cows, was slaughtered in her turn. The men then made their way to the farmhouse and fell upon Frau Kallies, who was still abed. An undertaking announced as a simple robbery had just extinguished three lives.
The daughters of the house heard their mother's cries. A man stepped into their bedchamber brandishing a revolver; they were threatened, then locked inside a wardrobe. The elder girl was forced to reveal where the chest keys lay hidden. The fifty thousand marks conjured up on the road dwindled to some five hundred. Their shares divided, the three lads departed for Berlin, where they purchased new attire and sought out acquaintance. The fortune lasted them far less time than it had taken their victims to amass it.
The Return of the Farmhand
Sternickel conveyed the bodies of the husband and wife to a strawstack near Ringenwalde and set it ablaze. Anna’s corpse remained upon the property. He then returned to Ortwig to fodder the cattle and carry food to the children. To the girls asking if their parents were dead, he replied that they were alive and well. For callers, he reserved the wedding tale.
The convergence of two reports shattered the pretense: human remains had been discovered in the embers of a fire, and the Kallies couple were missing from their hearth. Before he could be seized, the servant fled. A gendarme ran him to ground at Zellin. He tried yet another alias, then confessed to being the servant in question, while shifting the blame of the slaughter onto the young Berliners. Fingerprint records at last bound the captive to the fugitive Sternickel.
In Berlin, the accomplices’ lavish purchases had aroused the suspicions of a publican. A travel itinerary, compared against the accounts of the crime published in the press, did the rest. What four men had divided inside a lonely farmhouse was now pieced together across police stations, depositions, and goods they had imagined they could squander with impunity.
The Daughters Face the Accused
The trial opened at Frankfurt an der Oder on March 13. Hugo Friedländer preserved an exhaustive record of the proceedings: examinations, witnesses, arguments over criminal agency, and the verdict. The mill affair of 1905 was mentioned merely as an independent inquiry; it was not to serve as proof for the killings at Ortwig.
Sternickel admitted to some of his physical acts, contested the intent, and shifted responsibility onto others. He claimed he had meant only to stun the victims. His accomplices echoed this explanation each in his own fashion, striving to erect between the consented robbery and the carnage a boundary that might yet preserve their necks.
Then Margarete and Marie Kallies were brought into the courtroom. The defense had petitioned that Sternickel be removed during their testimony; the bench refused. Margarete recounted the threat, the wardrobe, the keys demanded at gunpoint. Marie recalled her mother’s cry. Before these unsparing recollections, the scholastic distinctions regarding a supposedly bloodless burglary met with two listeners whom no forensic formula could ever restore to their parents.
Counsel pleaded the youth and gullibility of the lads beneath Sternickel’s sway. The prosecution pointed to the repeated nature of the assaults: after the first victim, none among them could have failed to grasp what was being done. The jury returned a verdict of guilty against Sternickel for three murders. Georg Kersten and Schliewenz likewise received sentence of death; Willy, a minor at the time of the deed, was condemned to fifteen years’ imprisonment. The penalties thus did not form the uniform block that the ringleader’s infamy might have presaged.
Sternickel chose not to petition for a review of his sentence. He went to the scaffold on July 30, 1913. The other convicts pursued their own avenues of appeal; their ultimate fate does not merge with that day. The long hunt for the fugitive had reached its term, yet the final lie he had left behind at Ortwig remained the most pitiless of all: two children brought bread in their imprisonment, assured that their parents would soon return home.