On Murder (Oxford World's Classics)

by Thomas De Quincey

  Immediately upon the disappearance of Coenen, Schröder, in conjunction with the friends and relatives of the unfortunate man, set on foot a rigorous investigation: nobody could assign any reason for his disappearance; and the suspicion arose powerfully that he had been put out of the way on purpose to get rid of an obstruction to some guilty design; in which case no person stood open to the charge of having any interest of that nature, excepting only Fonk. Whilst these thoughts were gathering strength in the public mind, three friends of Coenen from Enfeld on the 21st of November paid a visit to Fonk: and his behaviour on that occasion was powerfully adapted to corroborate the existing suspicion. He read to these persons a letter which he had written upon this melancholy event; wept upon reading it; and formally solicited their attention to the tears which he was shedding. He displayed a note before them, exclaiming at the time—See here the hand-writing of poor Coenen: and upon examination it turned out not to be Coenen’s hand-writing! He called his bookkeeper, assuring the visitors that they would hear from him such things as would set their hair on end; and—after all it appeared that the bookkeeper had nothing to tell!

  As yet however the body had not been found; and as yet therefore no legal measures could be adopted against Fonk. Meantime the police exerted themselves greatly to find some traces for guiding their inquiries. A brothel, which Coenen had occasionally visited and where he was known to have made assignations with a Florentine girl, was searched; but no grounds of suspicion were discovered there. Coenen, it was affirmed, had not been there at all on that evening; and all the neighbours as well as the inmates of the brothel bore testimony that, on the 9th of November, no noise had been heard; a circumstance of considerable weight; because, from the situation and the construction of the house, no uproar could possibly have escaped notice, had any happened. A reward of 3 thousand francs was offered, but to no purpose. Fonk and Hahnenbein were vigilantly observed by the police; and with respect to the latter it should be here mentioned—that, on the same day on which he had received the visit of Coenen’s three friends, he called on the police-officer Guisez, and begged his advice as to the most eligible course under these difficult circumstances: that advice had been to throw himself into the arms of justice; which however Fonk had not thought proper to comply with. The public anxiety had now reached it’s height: curiosity, terror, and pity, divided the minds of men: nothing was talked of—nothing thought of but the too probable fate of poor Coenen; when at length a discovery was made which put an end to all further doubts on that subject, and greatly strengthened the suspicions as to the guilty author of the catastrophe.

  On the 19th of December, that is just 40 days after the disappearance of Coenen, his body was found in the Rhine below Cologne. It’s condition and appearance were as follows: the dress was perfect, only that the two uppermost buttons of his coat, which he usually wore closely buttoned, were torn off. A breast pocket, in which it was his custom to carry his pocket-book, was empty; and the pocket-book itself has never been discovered. On the other hand his gold watch was safe in his fob. Severe injuries had been inflicted on the head; a contused wound above the left eye, a violent contusion on the back of the head, an open wound upon the crown of the scull (which however had probably been occasioned by some accident in the water), and upon the throat marks of strangulation. The finding of the examiners was—that these injuries had been inflicted during life-time, and had been sufficient to produce death; and that the wound on the forehead had been inflicted by some sharp-edged instrument, such for instance as the back of a cooper’s knife.* Some doubts thrown out by Dr Walther a celebrated anatomist at Bonn, and a consequent hypothesis that all these injuries might have been received in the water, were of no force to mislead any unprejudiced person, or in the least degree to unsettle the conviction of the public that Coenen had received his death from the hands of a murderer. How impossible it was for him either designedly or by accident to have met his death in the Rhine—appears from this, that he could not have reached the river without going through the city gates; but on that night no person whatever had applied to have the gates opened.

  The wound upon the forehead had been thought to point pretty clearly to the instrument by which it had been inflicted—viz. a cooper’s knife, such as was constantly lying in Fonk’s counting-house, and hence, by a very natural following out of the suggestion, pointed to an accomplice in the person of one Christian Hamacher, a cooper in the service of Fonk, who was always at hand and bound to his interests by the closest ties. Against this man some circumstances of suspicion had already arisen; such as particular conversations which he was alleged to have held, and unusual habits of expense: but unfortunately these and other allegations had not been inquired into at the time. Enough however was now established to warrant the police in stronger measures against both Hamacher and his master: accordingly, on the 22nd of December, Fonk was confined to his house by a military guard; and, on the 31st of January 1817, Hamacher was taken into custody at a tavern. From the very first this man was openly reproached by the police as an accomplice in the murder of Coenen: endeavours were made to draw him into declarations which might argue a guilty knowledge of that transaction: a fellow prisoner was instructed to steal into his confidence; persons were set to overhear him: and finally he was confined in a dark and damp dungeon. Under this system of treatment on the 10th of March Christian Hamacher began to confess. His confession was made to the Procurator General von Sandt, and amounted to this—that on the night of the 9th of November William Coenen had been murdered by Fonk in Fonk’s house and with his assistance. It was not however until the 16th of April that this confession was reduced to legal form; and the circumstances of it were in substance these. As early as the 4th of November Fonk had tampered with him to murder Coenen; but at that time he had lent no ear to Fonk’s proposals. On the 9th of November he was again working at Fonk’s, and received orders to attend at 9 o’clock in the evening. He did so, was conducted by Fonk into the counting-house, and wine was there set before him. Coenen, he was informed by Fonk, had gone from the house at 8 o’clock; but (having left something behind him) was sure to return; and, upon his ringing the bell, Hamacher was to let him in. Rather more than a quarter after 10, or it might be as much as half after, there came a ring at the doorbell; upon which Hamacher went to the door, and found Coenen there, who inquired for Mr Fonk. Fonk immediately came forward: the two gentlemen exchanged salutations; and Coenen said that he had left something behind; to which Fonk replied—Aye, so I thought. (Here it should be explained that some people have thought it very unnatural that Fonk should know beforehand that Coenen would return, and return too at a particular hour, to fetch something which he had left behind: but, in answer to this, it may be said that, if (as Hahnenbein represented) some clandestine appointment had been arranged between Coenen and Fonk, this pretence about leaving something behind was the very best mode which they could concert for masquing the real purpose of the interview: for Hamacher, it must be recollected, was in Fonk’s confidence, but not in Coenen’s.) Fonk and Coenen then went up together to the room in which Schröder and the rest had conducted the business of that evening’s conference; and, upon coming down, Fonk was talking of a particular brandy of Schröder’s and comparing it with some very old French brandy which he proposed to Coenen that he should taste. Coenen at first declined; but upon that Fonk pressed him, and said—Now, pray do me the favor to try it; do, I beg of you; I am confident you will say, upon trial, that you never tasted any thing like it before; and at the same time he desired Hamacher to bring a glass, himself taking the cooper’s knife which lay upon the table, and hiding it under his coat. All three then went into the packing room, which lay directly under the maid-servants’ bed-room; and immediately upon arriving there the tragedy began.

  The circumstances were these: — Fonk drew out the cooper’s tool, and adjusted his hand as if going to strike the cask open; but all at once, whirling round, he struck Coenen upon the head, exclaiming ‘The
re, fellow, take that for your sample!’; thereupon Coenen began to bleed; and, upon receiving another blow from Fonk upon the breast, fell backwards; striking his head in falling against a large stone weight belonging to a steelyard. Hereupon Fonk said to Hamacher, Lay hold of the fellow’s throat, that he shall not sing out; which he (Hamacher) did, and continued to do, until he had satisfied himself that it was no longer in Coenen’s power to make any alarm. This done, Fonk drew the pocket-book out of Coenen’s breast-pocket: Hamacher packed the dead body into a cask, enveloping the head in a sack, then filling up the cask with straw, and finally closing it up. After this they agreed with each other to have the cask carried out of the city by Adam Hamacher, the brother of Christian; and accordingly on the following day (Sunday) Adam had orders to attend on Monday with his cart at Fonk’s house very early in the morning. Monday came; and by 4 o’clock in the morning Adam was with his cart at Mr Fonk’s door. Mr Fonk was himself in attendance to see the cask regularly delivered, and everything done correctly. Mr Fonk opened the door, assisted to back the cart into his court-yard, and saw the cask carted; after which Adam set forward with his load to a place near Mühlheim* on the Rhine. Up to the time of his arrival at this place, Adam knew nothing at all of the contents of the cask; and, having unloaded it, was on the point of driving off: but, upon that, Christian called out to him in great agitation—‘Adam, you must not leave me yet: there is a dead man packed up in the cask.’ ‘A dead man!’ said Adam: ‘had I known that, it should have been long before I would have carted a hogshead for Mr Fonk.’ These were all the words that passed. Christian Hamacher, the cooper, took out his tools, and knocked the cask open; after which he and Adam took out the corpse between them; and Christian, attaching a heavy stone to it by a leathern thong, sank it in the Rhine; and in executing this part of his commission, in order to shove off the body into deep water, Christian waded in so far from the shore that his boots were filled with water. Meantime, what became of Coenen’s pipe and hat? According to the confession of Hamacher, immediately after the murder Mr Fonk carried them both into the counting-house; then went to the door with them; and, after 10 minutes’ absence, returned without them: so that Hamacher was not able to say what became of them. (Some reports stated that a pipe was found with Coenen’s dead body on the 19th of December; but, as it was never produced judicially until the year 1822, it could not be identified, and therefore no stress is to be laid on that part of the case. As to the hat, a neighbour of Fonk’s, one Engels, a baker by trade, sometime between Easter and Whitsuntide drew up from the common sewer a hat, but whether the hat or no—there is the question.) To Christian Hamacher, for his assistance and to purchase his silence, Mr Fonk promised a hundred dollars; and had in fact immediately paid him 30 upon account.

  Such was Hamacher’s confession; all which he repeated, for a second time, upon the 9th of May: but soon after he began to vacillate, and retracted first that part which related to his brother (who, together with Fonk’s book-keeper Hahnenbein, and some others, had by this time been arrested); and finally he retracted the whole. He now alleged that the Procurator General, von Sandt, had seduced him into this false confession; had even composed it for him; and had taught it him by heart. Upon this recantation it is that the defenders of Fonk rely.

  The judicial management of the affair now travelled a very lingering and unsteady course. Up to the 4th of October 1817 it remained in the hands of the authorities at Cologne: but upon that day it was transferred to the military tribunal at Triers,* from a jealousy of the undue influence exercized in the former city by the very respectable and extensive connexions of the family of Foveaux. In this new court however much more anxiety was discovered for censuring the proceedings of the former judges than for ascertaining the guilt of Fonk and his alleged accomplice. At length, on the 23rd of June 1818, a judgement was pronounced entertaining the charge against Christian Hamacher, but setting Fonk and Hahnenbein at liberty. Soon after, upon new grounds of suspicion, Fonk was again arrested: but, by a decree of the Senate of Cologne, was again discharged. Hamacher’s trial meantime came on before the Assize court of Triers; and on the 31st of October 1820 he was convicted as an accomplice, but without premeditation, in the murder of Coenen, and was condemned to hard labor for 16 years.

  On the 3rd of November 1820, Mr Fonk was again taken into custody: the preliminary investigation lasted until June 1821: on the 22nd of April 1822 the public and solemn trial of the case came on before the Assize-court of Triers; and on June 9th of the same year it closed,—the jury, by a majority of 7 against 5, finding Mr Fonk guilty of wilful and premeditated murder upon the body of William Coenen on the night between the 9th and 10th of November 1816; and thereupon the court proceeded to award sentence of death against Mr Peter Fonk. The trial lasted 7 weeks; and no less than 247 witnesses were examined in the course of it.

  Upon this unpleasant turn in the affair Mr Fonk appealed against the sentence to the court of revision at Berlin: arguments were heard, and the case underwent another sifting before this court: however the issue of the matter was that the court rejected his appeal, and affirmed the judgement of the court below. This judgement however, before it can be carried into effect, must receive the Royal ratification; and, as that had not by the last accounts, as yet reached Cologne, the matter may be considered as still in suspense.

  Great and earnest as were the pains taken with this case before the court, yet it may be truly affirmed that the extrajudicial examination of it, both during the trial and after it, was pursued with still more heat, passionateness, and of opinion. The public mind in that part of Germany is yet agitated with the question of Mr Fonk’s guilt. And certainly the grounds for suspension of judgement are unusually strong. Except a confession afterwards retracted, and the internal presumptions against him (slight or strong) from the circumstances of the case which brought him under a liability to two motives for committing the alleged murder—viz. revenge and pecuniary interest,—these excepted, there is positively no shadow of evidence against Mr Fonk. No article of Coenen’s apparel or other property, no traces of blood, were discovered upon searching Fonk’s house. As to the hat, which was found so near to it, that certainly would wear a very suspicious appearance, had it been identified as Coenen’s hat: but this was not done. It is true undoubtedly that the murder is not only a most mysterious but absolutely an unaccountable one, if we suppose Mr Fonk not to have been the murderer: that Coenen was murdered in the brothel, is a hypothesis quite untenable: and that he could not have been murdered for the sake of plunder, is clear as well as on other considerations as particularly because his gold watch was not taken. Yet surely it would be a most precipitate line of argument to load Mr Fonk with the dreadful charge of murder merely because no other person could be produced who had any apparent interest in that act. On the other hand it cannot be denied that Fonk’s behaviour, upon the first disappearance of Coenen, was liable to a most sinister construction: and again it is certain that one circumstance which has weighed much in his favor with the public, has been entirely misapprehended. A jury of merchants, on examining Fonk’s books, declared that particular book, which Hahnenbein had pointed out as the fraudulent one, to be perfectly correct. But by ‘correct they meant only self-consistent: all the parts were made to tally with one another: but this by no means proved that it was consistent with other books known to Coenen and Hahnenbein: entries might have been transferred to this book, that separately taken were not open to any suspicion, but which may have been evidently fraudulent in the eyes of Hahnenbein who had inspected all the books—and would have been so in the eyes of Coenen, had he also been allowed to go through them.

  The whole stress of the evidence therefore, after all, lies in the confession of Hamacher. Yet here again there is a great perplexity besetting us. If we suppose Hamacher’s recantation to have been sincere, we are then obliged to load the memory of the Procurator von Sandt (a man in the rest of his life of irreproachable character) with the odiu
m of a crime more atrocious even than the murder itself. Yet again, if we decide for the truth of the confession, difficulties arise that are hard to get over. Some writers indeed have insisted that this confession is in some of it’s circumstances absolutely contradictory. That is saying too much: yet undoubtedly the improbabilities are considerable. Mr Fonk appealed to the evidence of his servants on the question of time; and this evidence certainly goes near to invalidate the accuracy of Hamacher’s statement. It is proved that he supped with his family after 9 o’clock. The nurse-maid and two other servants swear to the fact of his retiring to rest about 10, or (as one of them thinks) a little before 10. At half past eleven another servant carries the key of the house-door to his bed-side, and sees him in bed. This statement therefore leaves a bare possibility, and no more, on considerations of time that Hamacher’s story might be true. That the maid-servants again should not have heard either the ringing at the door bell or the inevitable hurly burly* of that dreadful tragedy performed in the packing-room, (that is—immediately below their own sleeping room) is certainly within the verge of possibility, but must be allowed to be improbable. Laying all this together, most unquestionably no reflecting person would venture upon any evidence yet laid before the public, to pronounce the condemnation of Fonk; and even the Jury were so little satisfied with it, that their sentence of guilty was carried by the smallest majority of which the number 12 is capable—viz. 7 against 5. One man’s voice turned the scale: will any person pretend that it was anything more than an accident which carried this man over to the 6 who were for condemning him rather than to the 5 who acquitted him? But not to insist upon the grievous defects which beset the jury system of trial, — even upon the German system the difficulties in the present case were unusually great1 because, from the long interval between the disappearance of Coenen and the finding of his body, too much time was inevitably left to the accused persons for clearing away all traces of their crime. Two points however there were, and capital points, which a skilful administrator of the German system would have sifted far more elaborately: and these were