On this date in 1809, Andreas Bichel lost his head.
This killer’s strange m.o. was to entice young women with the promise of divining their fortune in a magic mirror.
His victims were two young women unwise enough to accede to his request to bind their hands on the pretext that the wrong gesture would ruin the spell. With such lamblike naivete, what could Bichel do but clobber the poor maids over the head, strip them down, and butcher them still-living — slicing open their bowels, and cracking their breastbones open with a wedge.
Torture having recently been outlawed with the Napoleonic conquest, Bichel was pressured into coming clean by the novel expedient of moving his questioning ever-closer to the scenes of his crimes — to the Regendorf town hall, at first, and thence to his own home where the two exhumed bodies were stretched out before him.
Visibly affected, Bichel admitted all.
“I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body,” Bichel said. “Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had dug up in the mountain for burying it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.”
It was not cannibalism but cupidity that cut Bichel’s spree short: he was foolish enough to sell the women’s distinctive stolen clothes. (An occasional petty thief before he turned Ripper, Bichel said he’d been seduced into homicide by the fine clothes of his first victim.)
According to Lady Duff Gordon,
The sentence of breaking on the wheel from the feet upwards, which had been pronounced in accordance with the laws still in force, was commuted to beheading. This was done, not for the sake of sparing the criminal, whose crimes deserved the extremest punishment, but out of regard to the moral dignity of the state, which ought not, as it were, to vie with a murderer in cruelty.
On this day..
- 1980: Ten Hafizullah supporters - 2020
- 2010: Melbert Ray Ford, abusive partner - 2019
- 1944: The Massacre of Tulle - 2018
- 1863: Lawrence Williams and Walter Peters, bold CSA spies - 2017
- 1741: Cook, Robin, Caesar and Cuffee - 2016
- 90: Cornelia, Vestal Virgin - 2015
- 1715: Margaret Gaulacher, Cotton Mather ignorer - 2014
- 1944: Johanna Kirchner, Frankfurt antifascist - 2012
- 1904: Mart Vowell, aged Civil War veteran - 2011
- 1716: Banda Singh Bahadur - 2010
- 1864: Doctor Edmond-Désiré Couty de la Pommerais, poisoner - 2009
- 1983: Simon Thelle Mogoerane, Jerry Mosololi and Marcus Motaung, anti-apartheid soldiers - 2008