Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  That servant girls had been relegated to “less-dead” status in European society was evident in the French press, especially in the conservative national newspaper Le Figaro, which published jokes related to the Dumollard case, most of them bad sexual puns on the French word for “maid,” which is “bonne,” the same as “good.”26

  While it is not inconceivable that Dumollard murdered his victims literally for the “clothes off their back”—for some in that epoch clothes were the only thing of value they had (even today murders are not uncommonly committed for merely an iPhone or a pair of Nikes)—the fetishistic totem as which the clothing of his less-dead victims seemed to operate for him, and his retention of the items in his house, suggests that Dumollard was indeed driven by a psychopathological fetishistic compulsion rather than by money.

  Martin Dumollard was himself, as a peasant, relegated to the less-dead. When in 1862 the painter Jean-François Millet exhibited his famous depiction of a peasant in the field, Man with a Hoe, many assumed it was literally a portrait of Dumollard. In 1863 the French critic and essayist Paul de Saint-Victor, inspired by the Dumollard case, wrote of the painting, “Imagine a monster without a brow, dim-eyed and with an idiotic grin, planted in the middle of a field like a scarecrow. No traces of intelligence humanize this brute at rest. Has he just been working or murdering? Does he dig the land or hollow out the grave?”27

  Andreas Bichel, the “Girl Slaughterer,” Germany, 1808

  While the Dumollard case in 1861 was something unique and completely new to France, it was not all that new to the territory of Europe. A very similar case of servant-girl-clothing-fetish killings had unfolded in Bavaria, Germany. Just like Dumollard, Andreas Bichel targeted servant girls, his motive ostensibly the theft of their clothes, and his wife was reported wearing and selling some of the victims’ clothing. And just like Dumollard’s, Bichel’s murders were in their time perceived as primarily motivated by money, with sexual or fetishistic overtones as opportunistic and secondary.

  Unlike the Dumollard case, however, the Bichel case was revisited several times during the century and reshaped and rethought until it went from being considered serial robbery to serial lust mutilation fetish murder; it is an excellent example of how we construct our concepts of what serial killers are by redefining what we once thought they were. We are told that the past cannot be changed, but any historian knows that the past is infinitely changeable. The more we research and learn about the past, the more the past changes for us.

  Andreas Bichel, forty-eight years old when arrested, was a familiar figure in his small town of Regendorf. Like Dumollard (and many serial killers) he had a record of petty thefts—in his case, of vegetables from a neighbor’s garden and an attempt to drive off some hay from his employer’s barn. Otherwise, Bichel did not attract unfavorable attention. He married, and he maintained a small cottage. After he was fired for his attempt to steal hay, he and his wife ran a tailor shop and secondhand-clothing store. (Before the rise of industrial manufacturing, most ready-to-wear clothing and shoes sold in shops were secondhand.)

  Bichel was perceived as a town character, a wheeler-dealer running all sorts of little businesses—from his tailor shop, and directed at female customers—including an employment agency for servant girls and a fortune-telling service that promised unmarried girls a glimpse of their future husbands (his “crystal ball” was an ordinary magnifying glass that he had propped up on a wooden board).

  In October 1806, Barbara Reisinger, a young peasant girl, told her parents she had an appointment with Bichel in his tailor shop to discuss finding work as a servant. Bichel’s wife was in the shop when Barbara arrived, but she had to leave shortly afterward for work in another village. When the wife returned home, the shop was soaked with water. Bichel told her he had spilled a bucket of water. Barbara Reisinger, in the meantime, failed to return home.

  When her father came looking for his missing daughter, Bichel said he had found a position for her in nearby Nuremberg. A few weeks later he sent a message to the father stating that Barbara had married an ambassador and had asked Bichel to collect her finest clothing from her parents and forward it to her. When her parents did not comply, Bichel turned up at their home to chide them for not passing on the clothes. Apologetically, Barbara’s mother packed her daughter’s best dresses, and her father helped Bichel transport the clothing back to his shop. In a world without telegraph or telephone, and with a high rate of illiteracy, perhaps Barbara’s simple peasant parents never thought it odd that their daughter had not even sent them a letter reporting her good fortune and marriage.

  In any case, there were no “police” with whom to lodge a missing-person complaint. A family suspecting foul play had to collect their own evidence and present it before a magistrate and secure warrants, all at their own expense. It was beyond the comprehension and means of a typical peasant. When the father heard that Bichel had been seen selling his daughter’s clothing, he confronted Bichel, who denied it and threatened him. And there it ended, until another missing girl’s family was not as easily dismissed.

  On February 15, 1808, Katherina Seidel told her sisters she was going to Bichel’s shop to have her fortune told. Bichel, she said, had told her that for the magic glass to work, she needed to change her clothes three times during the fortune-telling session and to bring only her finest dresses. Katherina Seidel never returned from her appointment.

  When her sisters went to the shop to inquire about Katherina, Bichel said she had left in the company of a male stranger. The sisters were aware of the rumors about Barbara Reisinger’s disappearance, and in fact, several women since then had been approached by Bichel and invited to bring changes of clothes to fortune-telling sessions, but their intuition had warned them off. A few months later, one of the sisters saw in another shop a tailor sewing what she recognized as cloth from a dress belonging to Katherina. When she inquired about it, the tailor told her he was filling an order for Andreas Bichel.

  The Seidel family was more affluent and better educated than the peasant Reisingers, and they lodged a formal complaint with the magistrate. On May 20, 1808, Bavarian gendarmes arrived at Bichel’s shop armed with arrest and search warrants for both Andreas Bichel and his wife. When Bichel was arrested, police noticed that he was attempting to dispose of a handkerchief he had in his possession. Seized from him and shown to one of the sisters, it was immediately identified as Katherina’s.

  When questioned, Bichel claimed he bought the handkerchief at a market and that he had invited Katherina to the shop when a young man, whose identity he did not know, entered and asked him to introduce him to Katherina. He claimed that Katherina had gone off with the stranger and that he heard she was now living in another town and was seen dressed in “French clothes.” When asked about the “magic glass” Bichel denied telling fortunes and stated that another man had conducted fortune-telling sessions in his shop the previous year.

  A search of the shop revealed trunks of female clothing, some of which was identified by the two missing girls’ families. It was ascertained that Bichel’s wife had sold some of the clothing, but she denied knowing where it came from. A further investigation identified several girls who had been invited for “magic glass” sessions with their three best dresses but had at the last minute changed their minds. The police now had a good idea of what they were dealing with, but how to prove it without a body or even signs of blood?

  One of the Bavarian gendarmes was accompanied by his dog, which he noticed kept sniffing and pawing near a shed at the back of Bichel’s house. On May 22, police began digging around the shed. Under a pile of straw and litter in a corner, they unearthed what looked like human bones. When they dug deeper, they discovered the lower half of a human torso and legs wrapped in cotton rags. In another corner, they unearthed the upper part of a headless torso and a decayed severed head. These were later identified as the remains of the missing servant girl Barbara Rei
singer. The second corpse was found nearby, also cut in half. The body was identified as that of Katherina Seidel by a pair of earrings still worn by the dead girl.

  Physicians who examined the corpses were puzzled by evidence that both upper torsos had been split open longitudinally down the chest and thorax with a knife driven in with a hammer, like a chisel. The arms were still attached to the torsos, but the feet had been severed at the ankles. Reisinger’s body was too decomposed for the doctors to determine a cause of death, but Katherina Seidel’s corpse was in a better state and revealed minor head trauma and a stab wound to the neck among the other injuries. The physicians reported that there was no reason to suppose that Katherina . . .

  . . . was dead or even mortally wounded before she was cut up. She might have been stunned by a blow on the head, but it could not have been mortal, neither was the stab in the neck sufficient to have produced death . . . her death was occasioned by cutting open and dividing her body.28

  Confronted with this evidence back in the police barracks, Bichel now offered to tell “the truth.” He first concocted a lame story of how Katherina had been murdered by strangers in his house; then, after demanding assurances that he would not be punished for it, he confessed that in the heat of an angry argument with her, he struck Katherina on the head with a log but had never intended to kill her. Bichel built one layer of falsehoods on top of the last. But when asked about the second corpse, Bichel obstinately denied any knowledge of it.

  Had this happened two years earlier, Bichel would have been put to torture. But Bavaria had joined the Napoleonic Empire and introduced the enlightened laws and policies advanced by Napoleon, including the abolition of torture on July 7, 1806.

  The technique adopted to replace torture was to take the suspect to the scene of the crime, and if possible to interrogate him in view of the corpse. Police believed this technique never failed, especially with child murderers. (It’s a technique police were still using in 1957, when they took Ed Gein to see the body of his mutilated victim to persuade him to confess. It worked.)29

  Bichel was immune to the approach; confronted with the sight of the two dismembered corpses, he continued to deny knowing anything about the second corpse. But two days later, Bichel relented and admitted to murdering Barbara Reisinger, declaring his wife’s complete innocence. She was released, which is a hint perhaps as to why Bichel might have made the confession.

  Bichel stated that Barbara Reisinger had come into his shop in September 1806 for the purpose of finding employment as a servant. While they were talking, he was “struck” by an impulse to murder her for the dress she was wearing.

  He offered to give her a glimpse of her future husband through a “magic glass,” which she accepted. Bichel put before her a board with an ordinary magnifying glass attached to it, and warned her not to touch it under any circumstances. He explained that to ensure she did not, in her excitement at seeing her future husband in the glass, reach out for it, he had to blindfold her and tie her hands behind her back before beginning the session. The naïve girl eagerly agreed. Bichel confessed that he then killed her with a knife stab to her throat and that she “instantly fell” with a single sigh. He was then suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to see her insides, and he cut her open from chest to sternum, exposing her internal organs. Afterward he chopped her body into pieces, to conceal it more easily, and buried the pieces at the shed. He strewed sand and ashes in the shop to absorb the massive pools of blood, and washed the mess away with water.

  In the year after murdering Barbara, Bichel said, he attempted to lure other girls into his trap, but failed until he came upon Katherina Seidel.

  On the day of the murder, I sent for Katherina, and when she arrived, I said to her, since we are quite alone, I will let you look in my magic mirror. But you must go home and fetch your best clothes, so that you may be able to shift yourself several times. When she had returned in her common working clothes, carrying her other things in her apron, I rolled a white napkin round a board, and brought a spyglass, both of which I laid upon the table, forbidding her to touch either that or the glass. I then tied her hands behind her with a bit of packing string, the same which I had before used for Barbara Reisinger, and bound a handkerchief over her eyes. I then stabbed her in the throat with a knife which I had in readiness. I had a desire to see how she was made inwardly, and for this purpose I took a wedge, which I placed upon her breast bone, and struck it with a cobbler’s hammer. I thus opened her breast, and cut through the fleshy parts of her body with a knife. I began to cut her open as soon as ever I had stabbed her; and no man, however quickly he may pray, could get through his rosary, or say ten Hail Marys in the time it took me to cut open her breast and the rest of her body. I cut up this person as a butcher does a sheep, chopping the corpse with an ax into portions which would go into the pit which I had already dug for it on the hill. The whole time I was so eager that I trembled, and could have cut out a bit and eaten it. When Seidel had received the first stab, she screamed, struggled, and sighed six or seven times. As I cut her open immediately after stabbing her, it is very possible that she may still have been alive when I began cutting. I buried the fragments of the body, after having carefully locked the doors. I washed the bloody shift and gown belonging to Seidel twice, and hid them from my wife, as a cat tries to hide its young, carrying them about from one place to another. I put the other bloody things into the stove, and burned them.

  My only reason for murdering Reisinger and Seidel was desire for their clothes. I must confess that I did not want them; but it was exactly as if someone stood at my elbow, saying, “Do this and buy corn,” and whispered to me that I should thus get something without risk of discovery.30

  In February 1809, Bichel was sentenced to death by being “broken on the wheel from the feet upward, without the previous mercy-stroke, and his body to be afterward exposed on the wheel.” It was a cruel and barbaric sentence, and under the enlightened Napoleonic influence in Bavaria, it was commuted to a quick death by beheading—not as an act of mercy to Bichel but “out of regard to the moral dignity of the state, which ought not, as it were, to vie with a murderer in cruelty.”31

  “THE STRATEGY OF SERIALIZATION”: TRANSFORMING BICHEL INTO A SERIAL-KILLING FETISH RIPPER

  Andreas Bichel became known as the Bavarian Mädchenschlächter—“maiden slaughterer.” In the Dumollard case, the psychiatric debate on his motive had focused on the question of whether it was sexual or material gain or both, while in the Bertrand case the debate was as to whether his motives were “erotic” or “destructive.” But in the trial of Andreas Bichel fifty years earlier, those kinds of questions were not raised immediately.

  The case of Bichel was first described in a book of unique forensic cases published in 1811 by Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, a Bavarian judge.32 Feuerbach describes Bichel as a weak and timid individual who secretly rages at those he feels offended him but is too cowardly to express himself. He is portrayed as subjecting himself to the social order because his “effeminate” character is too weak for him to act out openly against the society he secretly despises and feels wronged by; this is perhaps an early attempt to describe psychopathy. Feuerbach writes, “If these characteristics of cruelty, harshness, avarice, and timidity joined by the rudeness of the mind, the lack of education and formation, even a limited intelligence, which tends to stare stupidly at one point, then the character has achieved a state in which crimes such as the ones committed by Bichel are possible.”

  Focusing on Bichel’s stubborn lying and determination to confess to no more than what was exposed of his crimes, Feuerbach argued that Bichel was an example of the fallen man, who succumbed to crime out of weakness. Feuerbach saw Bichel’s cowardly timidity, combined with greed, as the cause of his criminality. His motive was material gain, while his timid psychopathology allowed him to pursue that objective through murder while maintaining a respectable civil identity (a mask of sanit
y) in front of his neighbors and the community. As for Bichel’s pathological dissections of the victims’ chest cavities, Feuerbach hardly mentions them, and he dismisses them as secondary opportunistic acts of no importance to the nature of the crime itself.33

  After his conviction, Bichel was forgotten and faded from public memory. When the Dumollard case broke in 1861, the press drew no parallels with Bichel, despite the remarkably similar circumstances: multiple murders of servant girls, allegedly for their clothes.

  Bichel suddenly reappeared on the record in 1886, two years before Jack the Ripper, in the pages of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Krafft-Ebing includes Bichel along with other case studies of sexual-lust murder, but rejects and abridges the conclusion of Feuerbach and the court, that greed was the motive for the murders. Historian Peter Becker recently accused Krafft-Ebing of falsely constructing the notion of a serial sexual psychopathology through what Becker calls “the strategy of serialization.” Characterizing Krafft-Ebing, who was the Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, as an “author,” Becker alleges bad scholarship and flawed science: