Meantime Schönleben had been living quietly at Bayreuth, quite unconscious of the storm gathering round her. Her finished hypocrisy even led her, while on the way there, to write a letter to her late master reproaching him with his ingratitude at dismissing one who had been a protecting angel to his child; and in passing through Nürnberg, she dared to take up her residence with the mother of her victim, Gebhard’s wife. On reaching Bayreuth, she again wrote to Gebhard vainly hoping he would take her back into his service, and she made a similar unsuccessful attempt on her former master Glaser. While thus engaged, the warrant for her arrest arrived and she was taken into custody on October 19th. When searched, three packets were found in her pocket, two of them containing fly powder and the third arsenic.
For a long time she would confess nothing; it was not till April 16, 1810, that her courage gave way, when she learned the result of the examination of the body of Frau Glaser. Then, weeping and wringing her hands, she confessed she had on two occasions administered poison to her. No sooner had she admitted this than she fell to the ground in convulsions “as if struck by lightning,” and was removed from the court. Strange to say, although she knew that by her confession she had more than justified her condemnation to death, she laboured to the very last to gloss over and explain the worst features of her chief crimes, and in spite of ample evidence, denied all her lesser offences. It was impossible for her false and distorted nature to be quite sincere, and when she told a truth she at once associated with it a lie.
When Anna Schönleben fell into the hands of justice, she had already reached her fiftieth year; she was of small stature, thin and deformed; her sallow and meagre face was deeply furrowed by passion as well as by age, and bore no trace of former beauty. Her eyes were expressive of envy and malice and her brow was perpetually clouded, even when her lips moved to smile. Her manner, however, was cringing, servile and affected, and age and ugliness had not diminished her craving for admiration. Even in prison and under sentence of death, her imagination was still occupied with the pleasing recollections of her youth. One day when her judge visited her in prison, she begged him not to infer what she had been from what she was; that she was “once beautiful, exceedingly beautiful.”
Her life history antecedent to the events just recorded has been constructed from trustworthy sources and her own autobiography which fills eighteen closely written folio sheets. Born in Nürnberg in 1760, she had lost her parents before she reached her fifth year. Her father had possessed some property and until her nineteenth year she remained under the charge of her guardian, who was warmly attached to her and bestowed much care upon her education. At the age of nineteen she married, rather against her inclination, the notary Zwanziger, for that was her real name. The loneliness and dulness of her matrimonial life contrasted very disagreeably with the gaieties of her guardian’s house, and in the many absences of her husband, who divided his time between business and the bottle, she passed her time in reading sentimental novels such as the “Sorrows of Werther,” “Pamela” and “Emilia Galeotti.” Her husband, with her help, soon ran through her small fortune, which was wasted in extravagant entertaining and in keeping up an establishment beyond their means. They sank into wretched impecuniosity, with a family to support and without even the consolation of common esteem. She took to vicious methods and presently her husband died, leaving his widow to follow the career of an adventuress.
During the years that intervened between the death of her husband and the date on which she first entered Glaser’s service, her life had been one long course of unbridled misconduct. Absolutely devoid of principle, she associated with others as vicious as herself; she became a wanderer on the face of the earth and for twenty years never found a permanent resting place or a sincere friend. Fiercely resenting the evil fortune that had constantly befallen her, she chafed with bitter hatred against all mankind; her heart hardened; all that was good in her nature died out and she became a prey to the worst passions, consumed always with uncontrollable yearning to better her condition by defying all divine and human laws. When and how the idea of poison first dawned on her, her confessions did not explain, but there is every reason to believe that it was before she entered Glaser’s service. Determined as she was to advance her own interests, poison seemed to furnish her at once with the talisman she was in search of; it would punish her enemies and remove those who stood in her way. From the moment she met Glaser, she resolved to secure him as her husband. That he was already married was immaterial, for poison would be a speedy form of divorce. To bring her victim within range of her power, she schemed to effect the reconciliation so successfully accomplished, and directly after Frau Glaser returned home, Zwanziger began her operations. Two successful doses were administered, of which the last was effectual. While she was mixing it, she confessed, she encouraged herself with the notion that she was preparing for herself a comfortable establishment in her old age. This prospect having been defeated by her dismissal from Glaser’s service, she entered that of Grohmann. Here she sought to revenge herself upon such of her fellow servants as she happened to dislike by mixing fly powder with the beer,—enough to cause illness but not death. While at Grohmann’s home she had also indulged in matrimonial hopes; but all at once these were defeated by his intended marriage with another. She tried to break this engagement off, but ineffectually, and Grohmann, provoked by her pertinacity, decided to send her away. The wedding day was fixed; nothing now remained for Zwanziger but revenge, and Grohmann fell a victim to poison.
From his service Zwanziger passed into that of Gebhard, whose wife shared the fate of Grohmann, for no other reason, according to her own account, than because that lady had treated her harshly. Even this wretched apology was proved false by the testimony of the other inmates of the house. The true motive, as in the preceding cases, was that she had formed designs upon Gebhard similar to those which had failed in the case of Glaser, and that the unfortunate lady stood in the way. Her death was accomplished by poisoning two jugs of beer from which Zwanziger from time to time supplied her with drink. Even while confessing that she had poisoned the beer, she persisted in maintaining that she had no intention of destroying her mistress; if she could have foreseen that such a consequence would follow, she would rather have died herself.
During the remaining period from the death of Gebhard’s wife to that of her quitting his service, she admitted having frequently administered poisoned wine, beer, coffee and other liquors to such guests as she disliked or to her fellow servants when any of them had the bad luck to fall under her displeasure. The poisoning of the salt box she also admitted; but with the strange and inveterate hypocrisy which ran through all her confessions, she maintained that the arsenic in the salt barrel must have been put in by some other person.
The fate of such a wretch could not, of course, be doubtful. She was condemned to be beheaded, and listened to the sentence apparently without emotion. She told the judge that her death was a fortunate thing for others, for she felt that she could not have discontinued poisoning had she lived. On the scaffold, she bowed courteously to the judge and assistants, walked calmly up to the block and received the blow without shrinking.