Suicide slips through a loophole, follows the shrewdest path, and ends in a tangle of thorns.
In Germany it was called “indirect suicide” (mittelbarer Selbstmord). Researching the period 1612 to 1838, Kathy Stuart identifies 116 cases in the Holy Roman Empire — about one every two years. She calls it “suicide by proxy”: murder in order to be executed.
The loophole gapes. Augustine established for the Catholic Church that suicides are damned, in part, because they cannot receive the sacraments or forgiveness by the church after committing a mortal sin. Protestantism in general did not disagree, and legal doctrine followed suit.
The Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1554), a handbook on criminal law, establishes: “He who kills himself sins far more than he who kills another; for in the latter case he only kills his neighbor’s body, but cannot harm his soul. But he who kills himself indisputably loses both body and soul.”
The profile of suicides by proxy was the weariness and desire for death, the fear of damnation, and often failed attempts to kill oneself. Logic then follows: murder someone, surrender, confess, and be executed. Stuart writes: “After their sentencing, they were intensely ministered to by clergymen, who heard the poor sinner’s confession, granted absolution, and offered the Eucharist.”
The murderers came from the lower and lowliest strata: beggars, orphans, peasants, a servant, a butcher’s daughter, a bookmaker’s wife, a miller, a journeyman goldsmith.
Of 111 confessional records, 88 were Protestant and 23 were Catholic; perhaps due to record-keeping practices, and perhaps accounted for by Durkheim’s “first law” of suicide: that Protestants do it more than Catholics — the former being of the egotistical variety.
Based on accounts, which include journals and publications, women accounted for 57% of the murderers. Using only administrative documents, a more systematic and objective form of reporting, 83% were women — notable because men typically outnumber women in successful suicides, while women outnumber men in attempts. Of the 89 known victims, 79% were children. Moreover, many of the adults killed would have been seen as “childlike — the deaf, dumb, and simple-minded.”
Stuart observes that this intersection of women and children is striking. It seems to resemble infanticide, mother killing child. She points out, however, that infanticide is almost always bloodless — suffocation or starvation — as is direct female suicide, often by drowning or hanging.
Proxy suicide by a female murderer, by contrast, is extremely bloody. The butcher’s daughter used a butcher’s knife. One woman struck a child six times with a blunt axe. Another, a prisoner at the time, bludgeoned a deaf inmate with a brick. An investigation found that a “girl’s throat had been slashed, ‘severing the windpipe and all blood vessels right down to the vertebrae …’”
The killings seem to indicate rage or frenzy. Yet Stuart notes the deliberateness, the premeditation, and often the sustained deception and dissembling required. Sometimes there is a prayer once it is done. Then, the direct and calm surrender followed by the confession.
One case unfolds as follows: “Throwing the boy to the ground again, she drew a knife and cut his throat so deeply that, as she later described, she could ‘look down into his neck.’” The murderer, named Agnes Catherina, then reports that she said a benediction: “May God protect you, you sweet angel, you are an angel before God.” She then proceeds to inform the first people she met.
Juries often labeled it “cold-blooded” murder rather than rage or madness. The very deliberateness helped to establish sanity and thus guilt. Stuart offers a different understanding. It is ritual. It is expressive and symbolic violence. It conforms to and enacts a narrative.
Often the victim resembles the murderer in sex and background. Often the murderer fed the child or tended to her health, not merely as a lure but as a sign of affection: a kind of last supper and washing of her feet. Moreover,
Stuart writes: “such gifts were designed to elicit and express their victims’ consent”: the receiving of secret permission; a special commission. The murderer sees herself in the child. The child is the embodiment of innocence and purity, guaranteed entrance into Heaven. She was nothing less than a religious offering — she is to be a martyr — and the pre-offering of oneself.
The story offered by the murderer is vital. Stuart cites a study on criminal testimony in early modern English cases that finds a fictionalization of the confession, not to deceive, but to “craft their ‘narrative’ so as to give moral meaning” to the act.
Often there are no other witnesses. Accordingly, the murderers themselves “testified to their victims’ demeanor at the moment of death, structuring their narrative to emphasize their victims.’” The confessing spoke of children who knelt and prayed and asked to die, or who called out to Jesus in thanks. The confessions tell of willing death, an angelic death, a good death.
Moreover, the child’s death prefigures the execution of the murderer. One murderer cries out four times, in the moments before beheading: “Now Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
The parallel in the narrative points to another parallel and problem. Execution in Christendom was itself a ritual, precisely the kind of death one would hope to experience, paying blood for blood, knowing that Christ had already done the very same for her. Execution was choreography, solemn in design, at least in the beginning: the march to the scaffold or the block, the pronouncements and proclamations, the public viewing, the attention, the high drama.
Stuart notes that pamphleteers, engravers, and balladeers did not help. They simply made the murders and executions more alluring to future murderers. Through artful reporting and powerful images the children were often portrayed as martyrs and “innocent lambs,” and the execution as a grand stage, which for some only reinforced the sacredness of the unfolding action.
The legal system was confounded and turned to a get-tough policy of deterrence. It de-ritualized executions and made them unattractive, so to speak. “In Augsburg the condemned was ‘nailed into a barrel and cast in the river,’” writes Stuart A hand was chopped off first and only then the head. Bodies were cast into wastelands, added with animal carrion, or buried beneath the gallows. But the definition of a “good death” is subjective. Agnes Catherina “expressed the desire to be boiled in oil or ripped apart by claws.”
The courts devised a new plan: life in prison, depriving the murder of what she most desires. Stuart reports that the effect seems negligible, for reasons unknown.[23] The Lutheran clergy devised a new dissuasive theology: that the murderer is in fact guilty of suicide. This reasoning broke ground on the true meaning of life and death, but it suffered all the same in that the suicides were then still alive to repent and receive forgiveness.[24]
In conclusion, Stuart presents suicide by proxy as “justice fantasy”: the intersection of one’s imagination with the utilization of the theological-criminal justice system; a combination of anarchy and bold orchestration by those who are beyond worldly justice and who use the very same to help them achieve their aims.
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Kathy Stuart, “Suicide by Proxy: The Unintended Consequences of Public Executions in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 41, no. 3 (2008).