Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Today’s reader, more accustomed to flawed heroes (or antiheroes) might find S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance insufferable. Indeed, even during Vance’s heyday, some, including Dashiell Hammett, loathed him: “There is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory; he manages always, and usually, ridiculously, to be wrong... His conversational manner is that of a high school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary.” But Vance’s aristocratic, rugged good looks, sophistication, and encyclopedic knowledge of the arts, painting, religion, and music won him great favor with readers. And in 1926, while Hammett, Caroll John Daly, and Erie Stanley Gardner were breaking new ground in the pages of Black Mask, Van Dine was, according to Howard Haycraft, “breaking all modern publishing records for detective fiction” with the publication of The Canary Murder Case. Vance was so fashionable that literally dozens of movies were adapted from books in which he appeared, and eight different leading men played the role of Vance on the screen. And as you are about to find out, true crime editors, too, seeking to capitalize on this fictional hero, thought up strange new ways of incorporating him into seemingly unrelated yarns.

Germany’s Mistress of Crime

“I see that Madeleine Smith, the tarnished heroine of the famous old Glasgow poison drama, died yesterday in New York.”

John F. X. Markham, New York’s district attorney, was enjoying his post-prandial cigar in the lounge room of the Stuyvesant Club. With him were Philo Vance and I. It had long been our custom to forgather at the club for dinner and chat on Sunday nights; and it was here that Vance had related to us many of the more famous criminal cases of Europe, with which he had familiarized himself during his criminological studies.

“I could never quite understand,” Markham asked, “why the jury permitted Madeleine to escape with a verdict of ‘not proven.’ Perhaps it was because they could find no sympathy for the victim.”

“Don’t be so legalistic, Markham old dear,” Vance drawled. “What can one expect when a defendant is young and attractive? Even Scotchmen are of the genus masclinum... Still,” he went on, “a fascinatin’ culprit of the unfair sex sometimes gets her just desserts. For instance, there was Grete Beier — the last woman to be executed publicly in Germany. I’ve always considered the blond and toothsome Grete the most accomplished woman criminal of modern times.”

And then Vance told us the astonishing story.

Grete Beier (he began, settling himself comfortably) was a genius in both the broadest and narrowest definition of that term; for there can be criminal genius as well as aesthetic genius. Was she sane? Well, Nordau tells us that all genius is insane. But Grete was legally sane beyond any doubt. In the deeper sense, however, her sanity can well be questioned.

The fact is, Markham, that a few more, or a few less, or a few different glandular secretions might have made her a great writer, or a great musician, or even a great painter. Her talents and her imagination were misdirected.

In the field of forgery alone she was most remarkable. She could look at any person’s handwriting for a few moments, and then, through some instinctive process of memory, record the calligraphy so accurately that not even an expert could detect the imitation.

In the course of her criminal career she forged the handwriting of no less than eight different people, not once but many times; and in each instance she completely deceived the nearest relatives of her victims. These voluminous forgeries are still preserved in the German police archives, a constant source of study and amazement for the experts.

But forgery was only one of her accomplishments. After she had been arrested and accused of murder, she told a series of stories each of which was so plausible and logical, so carefully worked out to the most minute detail, that it was obvious she could have become a great writer, if she had directed only a part of her genius to literature.

Moreover, she bolstered up these stories with the most elaborate and convincing evidence, which she herself concocted. Her instinctive histrionic gifts were amazin’ — she might even have been one of the world’s greatest actresses. And her power for plotting was positively Machiavellian — the execution of her criminal acts was almost perfect.

For sheer talent and unscrupulousness, for ingenuity and boldness, for cold, calculating deviltry, for unadulterated wickedness, for subtle and farsighted chicanery, Grete was perhaps the most astounding figure of criminal history. And, as I say, she might have been a great creative artist and left us an enviable heritage of beauty, if her endocrines had been different. A staggerin’ number of books and pamphlets have been written about her by psychologists and criminologists in Europe.

(Vance lay back in his chair and blew a spiral of smoke upward.)

Marie Margarete Beier — to give this resourceful gel her full name — was born on September 15, 1885. She was the daughter of the mayor of Brand, a small town in Saxony. The upholders of the theory of heredity have long pointed to her as a triumphant vindication of their doctrines, for not only was her father a grafter and a criminal, who at the time of his death was under arrest for the embezzlement of the city funds, but her mother had been sentenced to several years in jail for abortion and perjury.

Grete’s youth appears to have been the somewhat uneventful existence of the daughter of an influential citizen in a small town. In passing, it may be mentioned that she had an extraordinary musical talent. She was an accomplished pianist and did a considerable amount of composing even as a child.

Here we have the genius motif. Perhaps if her creative will had continued to function along the lines of the tonal art... but something went awry with her internal secretions.

When Grete was sixteen, she attended a dance and met there a young man who became her beau. For several years her parents permitted their — I speak technically, of course — innocent association. Finally, though, her mother objected to the youthful swain on financial grounds.

This maternal interference quite naturally resulted in the usual clandestine meetings of the lovers; and within a few weeks Grete became the lad’s petite amie. But aside from the fact that it vexed her mother, whom she had always disliked, her Fruhlingserwachen was a dismal failure; and young Fritz — or whatever his name was — received his walking papers.

In February of 1905, when Grete was barely twenty, she met at a masquerade ball a young salesman, Hans Merker, who was destined to play an important and contemptible role in the coming tragedy of Grete’s perverted genius. And here enters Grete’s dominant sex instinct — an instinct which, Freud and Stekel tell us, is at the bottom of all creative genius. Grete and Hans were immediately attracted to each other, and a month later became secretly engaged.

In July, Merker was caught in a series of embezzlements from his employer, and Grete was able to persuade her father — who undoubtedly had some sympathy for this sort of pastime — to advance half of the stolen sum in order to save Merker from criminal prosecution. Papa Beier even went so far as to find a good position for him at the Saxonia Mines in Brand, after having extracted from him a solemn promise not to see or communicate with Grete.

Did he keep his promise? Alack for human frailty! I regret to say that Merker promptly became Grete’s lover; and that Grete rented a pied-à-terre where she could meet her adored Hans in comparative security.

This river of bliss, however, did not run a halcyon course for long. Merker, alas, was a polygamous soul, and Grete herself felt that a change of amorous association would do her no harm.

Early in 1906, just a year after her meeting with Merker, she went to another ball — this time in Chemnitz — where she met Chief Engineer Kurt Pressler. At the end of a short courtship, conducted strictly along what we euphemistically call “honorable lines,” Pressler was able to announce their engagement, the date of the nuptials being set for October, 1907.

Grete’s parents were enthusiastically in favor of Pressler, who was a quiet, studious, hard-working bourgeois Johnny in good standing. A perfect son-in-law.

But Grete, with the proverbial perversity of woman, now began to turn her eyes longingly back to Merker, who was reported to be pining away for his lost love. And in an incredibly short time her emotions for Pressler passed from tolerant affection to aversion.

Grete made various efforts to break off the engagement, but Pressler refused to be dislodged. Even when Grete prompted Merker to write to Pressler and tell him of their former relations, he clung stubbornly to his determination to marry the unwilling lady of his choice. Frau Beier assured him that her little Innocenza did not know the meaning of such things as Merker had caddishly revealed, and Pressler — staunch, trusting soul — believed her.

In the summer of 1906, Grete, having renewed her amour with Merker, became pregnant. She was elated, for she felt that now Pressler would agree to break off the engagement. She confided her condition to her mother, and was straightway advised to become Pressler’s mistress so that the joyous event could be credited — or is it debited? — to him.

Grete, who evidently was somewhat under her mother’s domination despite her antagonism for the older woman, reluctantly fell in with this plan and began seeing her loving Kurt regularly. But to her chagrin he nobly rebuffed her advances and remained to the end the chaste Teuton.

Incidentally, Grete’s child never arrived in this vale of tears; it would be indelicate to inquire into its fate, but I might mention that a certain midwife in the neighborhood was sent to jail.

Merker was furious. I can’t say, y’know, whether he felt that he had been cheated out of his paternal office, but it’s certain he had counted on Grete’s condition to foster his own matrimonial ambitions. He wrote an indignant letter to Papa Beier, threatening to inform the authorities; and he was placated only after the ingenious Grete had unfolded to him a most amazin’ fairy tale.

It was at this point that the diabolical creative genius of the gel was set in operation. She told him of secret potions that Pressler and her mother had administered in her food, and even produced a letter ostensibly from Pressler, giving instructions to Frau Beier about the dosage necessary to forestall the childbirth.

This letter was her first forgery, and it constitutes one of the most astonishin’ documents in the modern records of criminology. Grete naturally had seen Pressler’s handwriting, but when she wrote the letter she had no original before her. And yet this letter — now in the German archives — is considered one of the most perfect imitations of another’s penmanship in existence.

In the meanwhile, Grete’s engagement to Pressler was left dangling — an unsatisfact’ry state of affairs which irked the ardent Merker. He objected violently and Grete began to evolve a scheme wherewith to pacify him.

Anon she hit upon a plan, which, fantastic as it appears, was successful for a long time and almost permitted her to reach her goal.

She invented a purely fictitious wife of Pressler, and named her “Leonore Ferroni.” Then she began writing a series of letters to herself, in which the forsaken “Leonore” warned her weepingly against the wiles of the unspeakable Pressler, whom she vividly described as a sort of Minotaur who fed on young, innocent maidens.

I might remark that here, too, the girl’s creative genius was apparent; for while these letters from the nonexistent Leonore were not precisely forgeries, they were written in a consistent imitation of a feminine hand entirely unlike Grete’s own handwriting or that of any of her actual victims. Indeed, they were purely creative efforts, conceived and executed in the most masterly fashion.

Merker read these communications with gloating satisfaction. Let his rival Kurt press his suit now, if he dared! But the exaltation was short-lived. Before long he began to doubt the authenticity of these lurid epistles — not, however, from any intrinsic evidence — and taxed Grete with wanting to get rid of him in order to marry Pressler. Grete indignantly denied the charge, and instantly evolved another scheme more bizarre than the first to convince Merker of her innocence.

She proposed to go to the hymeneal altar with Pressler, and have the deserted “Leonore” appear and dramatically denounce the bridegroom for his perfidy, accuse him of attempted bigamy, and thus turn the ceremony into chaos. Grete could then, she assured Merker, abstract heavy damages from Pressler; and she and the skeptical Hans could live happily forever afterwards on the proceeds thus acquired.

(“But how was she to produce her fictitious Leonore?” asked Markham.)

The whole scheme (Vance answered) was a kind of psychological hallucination; and it’s a question in my mind whether Grete did not actually believe her own fantasies. Certainly the term “lying” seems hopelessly inadequate for her astonishin’ inventiveness. Having fabricated an imagin’ry wife for Pressler, she eventually thought her real. If she had been confronted with the actual necessity of going through with her outlined melodrama at the altar, she no doubt would have concocted still another tale to account for “Leonore’s” failure to appear.

But events soon shaped themselves so that there was no necessity, or even opportunity, for her to meet the conditions of her proposed extravaganza.

In April of 1907 an uncle of Grete’s mother, named Kastner, died in Freiberg. Among his belongings was a steel box containing seven savings-bank books, 500 marks in cash, and two wills. In one of the wills Kastner’s sister, a Mrs. Schlegel, was named the sole beneficiary; in the other the sum of 3,600 marks was left to his grandniece, Grete.

A few days later Grete’s mother took possession of the box and Mrs. Schlegel retained the key — a kind of check on each other’s honesty. I imagine — until the estate was legally settled, which, according to German civil procedure, would require about a month.

Grete at this time was behaving herself according to her kaleidoscopic lights. Her affair with Merker was going merrily on, and Pressler apparently had taken a distinctly second’ry position in her scheme of things, although she saw him occasionally.

And then on the fourteenth of May — three weeks after Uncle Kastner had been gathered to his fathers — Kurt Pressler’s dead body was found by his landlady, who immediately notified the police.

The dead man was reclining on a couch, a napkin wound about his eyes, and a revolver, with one chamber discharged, lying beside his right hand. The bullet had passed through his mouth and embedded itself in the back of the brain. On a table by the couch were two liqueur glasses and a bottle of egg cognac.

The post mortem was performed by the police surgeon in Chemnitz, who turned in a report of suicide — a verdict with which the assisting physician fully concurred. Thereupon, in accord with the known wishes of the departed, the body was cremated.

Now, on the table near Pressler’s body resting against the bottle of egg cognac had been found an envelope addressed to Fraulein Grete Beier. The contents consisted of a will, dated five days before, in which Pressler left all his belongings to his beloved fiancée. The letter begged her to forgive him for his deed; stated that neither his wife nor any member of his family had any claim whatever on his estate; and divorce him so to choose this road to forgetfulness.

Among his effects was found another letter purporting to come from Leonore Ferroni, wherein this mythical lady indicated her intention of resuming her marital life with Pressler, and bitterly reproached him for his villainous deception toward the innocent Grete. Since the authorities knew little of the dead man’s past, this letter was not questioned.

On the day of Pressler’s death, Grete and Pressler’s brother Otto deposited the will with the civil court. Otto, as well as Pressler’s mother and one of his sisters, swore that the will was genuine and in Kurt’s handwriting. Whereupon Grete at once took possession of everything she could find in Pressler’s apartment, including the couch on which he had died!... Need I mention that the will and the letter from the stubborn Leonore were both elaborate and perfect forgeries on the part of our skillful heroine?

Ten days later Uncle Kastner’s steel box was officially opened, and it was discovered that one of the savings-bank books and more than 300 marks were missing. Moreover, the box now contained a third will — ostensibly written by the departed Mrs. Kastner and dated “1905” — leaving her entire fortune to her husband on condition that at his death all the money should go to Grete.

A bit of investigation was instituted, and before long it was ascertained that the missing bank book had been collected by an entrancin’ young lady signing the name of “Erna Voigt, nee Kastner,” who had explained that the book had been given to her by her uncle shortly before his death.

“Erna,” of course, was none other than the wily Grete; and the bank teller positively identified her. Grete thereupon nonchalantly admitted that she had surreptitiously made a wax impression of the key and obtained a duplicate, and that early in May she had opened the box in the very room where her father lay ill in bed and had abstracted the bank book and the 300 marks! That act in itself eloquently reveals Grete’s cool-blooded resourcefulness.

In extenuation she explained that Mrs. Schlegel, who was very poor, had persuaded her to steal the money, which amounted to 4,500 marks, and give it to her — an act of benevolence which she magnanimously performed. And she stated further that she had asked Pressler to convey the money to Mrs. Schlegel.

Grete, who never did things by halves, wrote several letters to Mrs. Schlegel and deposited them in the woman’s desk, where they were discovered when Grete requested that a search be made of the Schlegel apartment. In these letters she discussed the entire transaction, and thanked Mrs. Schlegel for the receipt.

So perfect was the handwriting of Mrs. Schlegel on the receipt that the lady herself was half convinced that she had written it. And Grete had seen only one letter of Mrs. Schlegel’s, yet had recreated the handwriting so well that experts could not say definitely that Mrs. Schlegel had not written the receipt.

(Vance smiled musingly and lighted a Regie.)

It’s very distressing Markham, but the hard-hearted German Polizei looked upon this entrancin’ romance as related by Grete with deep suspicion; and on June 27th they decided that it was the part of wisdom to lodge her in jail for safe-keeping.

But Grete was nowise disheartened. She immediately began a regular correspondence with Merker, smuggling her letters to him in the laundry and clothing that she gave her mother. But all her epistolary attempts to prove her innocence and good faith in the looting of her steel box were in vain. Mrs. Schlegel tenaciously held to the statement that she knew nothing of the whole matter.

Grete then wrote to Merker requesting him, with matter-of-fact calmness, to kill Mrs. Schlegel in such a way as to make it appear like suicide, and enclosed a note to be left beside the body. This note — another startlin’ imitation of Mrs. Schlegel’s handwriting — stated that Mrs. Schlegel had induced her poor innocent niece to commit the theft, and preferred death to the disgrace of a public confession! Grete gave Merker meticulous and expert advice about how to disguise himself and how to commit the murder, and threatened to take her own life if he failed to carry out her wishes.

Merker, however, had no intention of risking his precious hide, and refused to do anything. When his reply to Grete was intercepted by the police he promptly confessed the whole plot, and was straightway arrested as an accomplice to the theft, for he admitted having accepted from Grete a large part of the purloined money.

Hearing of her lover’s predicament, Grete herself indulged in a bit of confession. She alone had stolen the money, she said, and forged all the letters and the receipt, as well as Mrs. Kastner’s will.

This confession was Grete’s first tactical blunder, but then it was undoubtedly the result of her ardent affection for the pusillanimous Merker. It was ex animo, not ex capite.

The effect of her confession at once raised the question in the examining magistrate’s mind whether Pressler’s will and farewell letter and the letter from his wife were genuine. Merker was put on the tapis, and he — a true gallant — was only too willing to assist the police in the hope of escaping from his own precarious position. He turned over to them a number of Grete’s letters, whose contents practically amounted to a confession of Pressler’s murder.

Grete, even now, with the tentacles of the law closing tightly about her, was undismayed. A stout lass! She began to unroll a new series of fairy tales, in which the hypothetical Leonore Ferroni figured conspicuously.

She even produced a long letter from this mysterious lady confessing the murder of her faithless husband — and this letter contained a perfect counterpart of the handwriting that Grete had formerly used in letters supposed to have been written by the fictive Leonore. And she wrote the letter in jail, without any of the former letters to guide her! I tell you, Markham, that if such genius had ever been directed into the field of the graphic arts — but this is not an aesthetic discussion.

Not content with this new version of the crime, Grete acknowledged soon afterwards that Leonore was but a product of her imagination, and asserted that Pressler had committed suicide in her presence upon her definite refusal to marry him. She also admitted the forgery of the will and the Ferroni letter, explaining that she saw no reason why she should not derive benefit from the self-inflicted death of a man whom she cordially disliked.

(Vance smoked awhile, then continued.)

It’s quite clear, y’know, that all these rococo tales that Grete concocted were in the nature of a compulsive neurosis — but isn’t all artistic creation the result of a compulsive neurosis?

Once Grete had started on her fictions she was unable to stop. Even when her stories could be neither contradicted nor disapproved she felt the irresistible urge to elaborate and alter them. It was, therefore, inevitable that sooner or later she should confess to the murder of Pressler.

The examining magistrate, a shrewd gentleman with a deep understanding of psychology, allowed Grete to talk to her heart’s content. He neither interrupted her nor expressed doubts as to her veracity.

His patience and perspicacity were rewarded early in October when the young lady, of her own accord, admitted the shooting of Pressler. The reason she gave for her act was that she was unable to repulse his amorous advances. No doubt she still harbored a deep resentment for that stodgy Teuton’s chastity when she had attempted to seduce him at her mother’s behest.

Grete’s details regarding the method of killing varied considerably, as was natural. Truth, in the moral sense, was not in her. At first she said that she had administered morphine to Pressler and had shot him while he slept. Then she stated that she had given him potassium cyanide with his egg brandy, and that, when he had collapsed five minutes later, she had shot him in the mouth. The creative litterateur was revising and copy-reading her novel!

In January of 1908 Grete was sent to the Asylum of Waldheim for examination. Here, needless to say, her extravagant tales continued without abatement. Despite all her imaginative efforts she was declared sane but of very low moral repressions — a typical “expert” opinion since it was meaningless and left the real problem of Grete’s creative but twisted mentality unsolved.

An interesting side light on the girl is that during this period she wrote many really beautiful letters of tender love and devotion to her unspeakable Hans. Whether they were true expressions of her feelings or merely the outpouring of a romantic imagination, is another question.

Also at this time she wrote several poems which would not have disgraced the pen of a Heine. Once more we see the basic talent of the girl coming to the fore. Perhaps for a brief period her glandular secretions were functioning normally.

In the asylum she appeared perfectly happy, unrepentant and even proud. The attention paid to her and to her tales flattered her vanity; she genuinely enjoyed being an “interesting case.”

Grete’s trial — or trials, for there were two of them — took place in Freiberg in June. She was first convicted of theft, forgery and incitement to crime in connection with Uncle Kastner’s steel box, and sentenced to five years. Three weeks later she was tried for the murder of Pressler and the forgery of his will.

The result was one of the most thoroughgoing pieces of legalistic absurdity on record. She was found guilty on both counts, and was sentenced in the following ludicrous manner: first, death by beheadal for removing Pressler from this earth; secondly, eight years in jail for forging the will; and thirdly, the perpetual loss of her civil rights!

The fact that Grete with her severed head in a basket, could not conveniently serve the eight years, made not the slightest impression on the judge. And lest she might somehow manage the miracle and later go free in her decapitated condition, he concluded, by some weird and unearthly process of logic peculiar to lawyers, that she should have no civil rights!

The only loophole overlooked by this modern Rhadamanthus was when he omitted to order her to report annually to an officer of the court. Maybe he would have done so had he been acquainted with Ichabod Crane.

The proceedings against Merker were dropped for lack of evidence, and when he stepped out of jail he disappeared completely from the pages of history — Gott sci Dank!

Grete’s last days were passed quietly. She showed neither fear nor compunction. Indeed, she was haughty and cheerful; and her courage held up even under the final ghastly preparations for her death.

On the twenty-third of July, 1908, her scheming blond head fell under the executioner’s knife. (The executioner it seems was partial to blondes.)

A strange and baffling case, Markham. In studying its numerous documents, one is forced to doubt practically everything that concerns Grete herself — except, perhaps, the fact that she murdered Pressler — and even here the motive is obscure. Her impulses, her mentality, her feelings for her parents, for Pressler, for Merker — nothing is wholly certain, for she lied to herself as consistently and vividly as she lied to the world.

In fact, it is problematical whether Grete could ever have been convicted without her own voluntary confession. Nobody could have disproved her first versions of Pressler’s death; and her forgery of Pressler’s will was so cleverly done that his own family acknowledged it to be genuine.

Grete was caught and punished only because of that supreme optimism which characterizes all true egoists. She was unable to keep her triumphs to herself. Her “urge to tell” was irresistible. And this “urge to tell” is the basic impulse of all creative art.