In the year of the Lord 1786, the Austrian surgeon Franz Xaver Wegartshofner put an end to a most bizarre killing spree. For a long time, there had been rumours concerning the wealthy farmer Bartholomäus Rainer of Großlobming (Styria). He was now sixty-eight years of age, seemingly a rather odd man who never cut his fingernails, and people whispered he was a sorcerer dealing with occult powers. Yet he was never in want of a wife, which is to say that whenever a wife of his went to the churchyard for good, he had no problems in finding one to replace her.
However, when his sixth wife died on July 4th of that year, rumours got so intense and minds so upset that the authorities could no longer ignore it. Wegartshofner was required to investigate. After learning from the deceased Mrs Rainer’s doctor that she had suffered from a somewhat mysterious sort of diarrhoea, he performed an autopsy on the corpse that lead to what he deemed to be the strangest discovery he had made in his whole career: in the severely sore uterus of the dead woman, he found a piece of printed paper, containing a gray substance, which, according to a chemical analysis, proved to be a deadly amount of arsenic (11 grains).
Following his arrest, the widower confessed to murdering five out of his six wives by administering arsenic to them. His first wife had passed away after eating an arsenic-seasoned soup he kindly served her when she was just recovering from the birth of her eleventh child: no one would wonder at childbed deaths in those times, and he hadn’t been as clumsy as to call a doctor when she got her colic. Marrying again, within a year from this death, he murdered the second wife in a similar way, after she had given birth to a child. The third wife, he claimed, and insisted, had died of natural causes. The fourth wife met her fate after falling ill some day. This time, Rainer called a doctor, and blended the prescribed medicine with arsenic: she died two days after taking it.
He seemed to be in a hurry now. Taking a fifth wife, few months after he had buried the fourth, he waited just one year before murdering her, too. Aware that people were talking, and worrying at the prospect of possible investigations and autopsies (for he was determined to murder on, and to murder on by using arsenic), he came up with an – at least he thought it to be so – ingenious device. Autopsies, he concluded, would look for poison in the victim’s stomach. There could be no danger of detection as long as he was able to make the poison operate from another part of the organism. And he was.
Having made a tiny parcel of his deadly gift by enveloping it with paper and securing it with a thread, he inserted it deep into his wife’s vagina by means of marital intercourse one night, just before she went away on a (planned) visit to her family. She died two days later from violent “cramps” in the house of her parents. Even the local corpse-washer seems to have had her suspicions; she called the local barber, indicating to him black spots on the belly and the back of the dead woman. But the barber made no other use of his last word than to calm down her apprehensions. These were symptoms of a gangrene, he explained.
Now, as his device had worked out so brilliantly, Mr. Rainer married for the sixth time, only a few weeks afterwards, and undid his newest wife in the same way, as speedily as he could: which led to his own undoing. Strange as the story of this man may seem, the motive to which he confessed is still the strangest part of it. Being indeed occupied with occult sciences, he had read in a book on the subject that “he who hath outlived nine wives will turn into a bird”; and it seems Mr Rainer had no greater desire than to become a bird. He had even prepared for the event not only by murdering his wives, but also by not cutting his fingernails -- trying to transform them into eagle claws.
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There's not much room for conjecture in what I know about this case, apart from the question what became of this man; did he or could he plead insanity? Did he go to prison for the rest of his nowaytobecomeabird-life, or did he perish in one of the gulags the emperor had created in the Hungarian moors? Was he one of the last to be executed, before Joseph II -- for a short interval -- abolished the death penalty, in 1787?
What's left to everyone's guessing is how this case got preserved for posterity. I found it in a German paperback dealing with the history of forensic medicine (Hans Pfeiffer, Die Sprache der Toten, Munich 1997), but without any indication of the source; and the author of that book, it seems, has died some years ago. The community of Großlobming is no stranger on the web, but to date I've found no website that makes mention of this case (of course they may see it as one of those skeletons rattling in the cupboard which are best forgotten).
What I'd like to know about, too, would be what became of those gulags of Joseph II, when his nephew (Francis II) abolished his reforms. Somehow I seem to be the only person to take an interest in that question.
