On 13 July 1825, beneath the freshly disturbed moss of the Britzer Haide, searchers uncovered first two blood-stained knapsacks, and then the corpses of two young wayfarers. A few paces away, tracks in the sand bore witness to a struggle, yet yielded no name. On the morrow, in the courtyard of a Berlin barracks, a bandsman was brought before the dead. He recognised his companions. He did not yet acknowledge the crime.
The Britzer Haide, a pine heath lying south of Berlin, was no trackless wilderness: from the highroad, one could readily perceive movement between the trunks. In July 1825, this thoroughfare became the theatre of a double murder whose underlying motives were to remain an enduring subject of dispute.
A forest keeper traversing the wood observed that the moss had recently been turned up. Within a hollow, he found two large packs of black leather and a pair of boots. Their contents confirmed what he had suspected: they belonged to travelling journeymen. A travel-book bore the name of Burchard, a journeyman baker. Presently, blood was espied upon the packs and boots. The estate distiller returned to the spot with the keeper and several labourers. A few paces from the first hiding-place, beneath another mound of moss, lay two men.
Their craniums had been shattered; their faces, necks, and chests bore gashes and stab wounds. One of the bodies was clad back to front, the rear of his coat pulled over his breast, his arms thrust into the wrong sleeves. Two cudgels rested upon them: a stout, iron-shod walking staff, smeared with blood and matted with fair hair, and a cane. The preliminary findings placed the concealment of the corpses some ten paces from the spot where the assault had occurred. In the sand, the investigators noted the telltale signs of a struggle and dragging, the deep imprints of boots, and blood spattered upon the underbrush.
The post-mortem examination, as summarised in the Pitaval, concluded that the victims had perished of severe head trauma inflicted by a hard, blunt instrument. The stab wounds had, in all likelihood, been dealt while they were still living. The report did not resolve the question destined to dominate the proceedings: had money been the object of the slaughter? In one pocket, a clasp-knife was found; a few coins had remained in the pit. A small red pouch, discovered subsequently, contained papers in the name of Wilhelm Lange and a small, notched hatchet, likewise stained with blood.
The police presently reconstructed a portion of the travellers’ final journey. On the morning of 13 July, two journeymen had been seen in the company of a musician of the 2nd Guard Regiment, near the Cottbus Gate. All three had taken the road to Britz. In the afternoon, a military bandsman returned alone, spent or overcome by the heat, bearing a bundle beneath his arm. A non-commissioned officer learned that the bandsman Gustav Heinrich Julius Markmann had accompanied two compatriots the previous day. The witnesses identified one and the same man.
On 14 July, the entire regiment was drawn up in the courtyard. The lieutenant-colonel ordered Markmann to step forward. Upon the hilt of his sabre and his belt, traces of blood were detected. The drummer reported that he had returned intoxicated the previous evening and had cast aside several articles that did not belong to him: a tobacco pouch marked with the initials W. L., a silver pipe-mounting, and a black neckerchief. It was whispered, moreover, that he had possessed a purse containing five thalers. At eighteen years of age, he had hitherto passed for a punctual soldier of unblemished conduct. No prior complaint had ever singled him out.
Brought before the bodies, Markmann at first hesitated. Once the faces were cleansed, he identified the one as Wilhelm Lange, a journeyman hatter whom he had known since childhood, and the other as Burchard, a journeyman baker whom Lange had met upon the road. He admitted to having bade them farewell upon quitting Berlin. He could not explain away the bloodstains upon his accoutrements. The physical evidence, the witnesses, and the articles recovered from the heath weighed heavily against him; yet, during his initial examination, he did not yet offer a complete account.
The narrative recounts thereafter how Markmann’s statements grew more explicit. He described a ramble toward Britz, the heat, the travellers’ weariness, and a proposal of play which he represented as a sham duel. The sticks took the place of blades: Lange was struck down, and then Burchard. Markmann acknowledged the blows dealt with the heavy iron-shod staff and the wounds inflicted with the knife. He explained that he had concealed the bodies beneath the moss and removed the dead men’s effects. In these first declarations, he linked the murder to robbery. The money was said to have served to discharge pressing debts; the remainder had been swiftly squandered.
Yet this explanation failed to satisfy the chronicler. Markmann was not portrayed as a hardened malefactor. His masters, kin, and superiors described him as diligent and rather mild of temper. He had hoped to advance in the ranks of military music. A few weeks prior to the murders, he had pleaded in his letters for a reconciliation with his father and had exhorted his younger brothers to pursue the study of music. He had mentioned debts, but his brother considered them manageable and stood ready to assist him. This disparity between his ordinary conduct and the ferocity of the deed does not, in itself, establish another motive.
The court-martial convened on 7 November 1825 before a tribunal of soldiers and officers of various ranks, presided over by a major. Markmann appeared without irons; apprised of his right to challenge his superiors, he did not avail himself of it. After five sessions devoted to the reading of the documents and the defence memorial, he confirmed his prior declarations and added nothing further.
The military auditor moved that he be drummed out of the army and condemned to be broken upon the wheel from below—a capital sentence reserved for murder accompanied by robbery. Nearly every category of judges concurred in this recommendation. A few lieutenants called for breaking upon the wheel from above, or that the condemned youth be commended to the royal clemency on account of his tender years. The sentence was handed down by majority vote, and subsequently confirmed by the King. In the chronicle, the debate over the penalty pivots upon a narrower issue than that of motive: had Markmann killed in order to possess himself of his companions’ goods?
In prison, he sought no royal pardon. On 18 February 1826, he addressed a letter to the fortress chaplain at Küstrin. This epistle, known to the chronicler through a contemporary transcript, fundamentally altered Markmann’s account of the crime. In it, he asserted that the need for money had not been his principal motive. He claimed to have experienced for years an insatiable bloodlust, nurtured, in his view, by the hunt, and he described a violent impulse which he alleged he was powerless to master. He recounted, moreover, that at Putbus he had once sought to incite a musician to murder a companion, before being thwarted by the arrival of travellers.
This prison document constitutes no medical diagnosis. It does not convert the accusation of robbery into a miscarriage of justice, and nothing in the pages of the Pitaval permits an independent verification of the recollections Markmann recorded therein. The letter nonetheless exposes a stark contradiction between his initial judicial narrative, wherein robbery accompanied the slayings, and his eleventh-hour confession, wherein he attributed the deed to a homicidal impulse. The chronicler vigorously defends the authenticity of the letter, interpreting it as an unvarnished revelation; he ventures even to speculate upon Markmann’s childhood, his family, and a purported morbid predisposition. Such conjectures belong to the author alone, not to the official records he cites.
His elder brother, Johann Christian Friedrich, had been executed in 1822 for murders perpetrated in 1815 during a robbery and arson at Kühlenhagen. The Pitaval draws a parallel between the two causes célèbres, whilst conceding that one could scarcely deduce therefrom a hereditary propensity for slaughter. The precedent looms over the reading of the case without in any way establishing the state of Gustav’s mind.
The letter reached the authorities on the eve of the execution. The pastor delivered it to the auditor, who entertained hopes that it might warrant a stay of execution. The fortress commandant, having perused it, refused to postpone the sentence: Markmann still acknowledged the deeds for which he stood condemned, and the altered motive did not, to his mind, diminish the established crime. The chronicler expounds at length upon this determination and the missed opportunity for a further medical inquiry; yet this remains his retrospective commentary, not a judicial finding.
On the following morning, Markmann received the ministrations of the clergy. The Pitaval depicts him as calm, speaking of his family. He is said to have copied out five verses of a hymn before being led to the scaffold. His last wish, as recorded by the chronicler, was that the executioners might dispatch their office swiftly and with mercy. He was executed at Küstrin on 21 February 1826.
Two bodies beneath the moss, traces of blood within a barracks, a trial that fastened upon robbery as the motive, and a subsequent letter contradicting that very premise: such are the elements bequeathed by the chronicle of 1859. It affords no direct window into Markmann’s inner soul, and its theory of a ‘bloodlust’ offers no medical explanation. It leaves an enduring question: when a condemned man presents, on the eve of his death, an entirely new construction of his deed, what can such an utterance establish—and what does it leave forever beyond our reach?