Numerous witch murders have been mentioned in previous chapters. I have found references to at least twenty-two slayings committed by white Americans, and five by African Americans. The annual reports of the commissioner of Indian Affairs mention seventeen witch killings out of 147 murders.1 Other sources refer to more instances, so we are looking at several dozen executions in Native American communities at least during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. So no culture was immune from the impulse to kill witches. The purpose of this chapter is to explore in detail what led people to commit such a crime, the interplay of personal psychology, community relations, and cultural influences. What was the impact of the killers’ actions on family, friends, and neighbours? How did the authorities react and how did the press go about reporting such an extraordinary crime? Moreover, I explore the aftermath of the trials and prosecutions, the subsequent life stories of those affected. In the process, some pitfalls of historical interpretation and assumption are revealed, illustrating the importance of understanding the consequences of events and not just their origins.
In the Empire state of New York, within no miles of the great city of New York, in the centre of a prosperous farming community, in a county where thousands of dollars are expended annually for the purpose of education and thousands more for the advance of Christianity, there are persons who believe so thoroughly in the ancient bugaboo called witchcraft, that they could have committed murder to rid the community of a peaceful old man who had lived among them for forty years.2
In 1853 the ship Edwiner docked in New York having set sail from the French port of Le Havre. Amongst the many German immigrants on board were a farmer named Pierre Heidt, his wife Maria Catharina, their three sons, Nicholas (aged eighteen), Edward (thirteen), Adam (four), and a daughter Caroline (eleven). They had travelled from Bavaria to start a new life in New York State. They were one of thousands of farming families from south-western Germany that made their way to America via Le Havre during the mid-nineteenth century. Many left due to land pressure, in part because of the tradition of partible inheritance that made the region one of small farms and hampered entrepreneurial opportunity. Repeated crop failures did not help. It was not extreme poverty that motivated many though, but the chance to prosper.3 A French commentator, writing at the time, described the ordeal of these German migrants as they made their way across France:
It is a lamentable sight, when you are travelling in the spring and autumn on the Strasburg road, to see the long files of carts that meet you every mile, carrying the whole property of the poor wretches, who are about to cross the Atlantic on the faith of a lying prospectus. There they go slowly along; their miserable tumbrels — drawn by such starved, drooping beasts, that your only wonder is, how they can possibly hope to reach Havre alive’.4
The Heidts made it alive, and spent their last reserves of money on purchasing land in Sullivan County, New York.
Significant German settlement had begun in the area during the 1840s, and by the time the Heidts arrived there were some 2,600 Germans in the county, mostly living around Callicoon and Cochecton. Many had been drawn there by the German-language prospectus distributed at entry ports by a local surveyor and land agent named Solomon Royce. The first generation had much work to do carving out fields and an agricultural living from the wooded hills. Many endured great hardship. One German settler recalled getting lost in the woods whilst attempting to reach the settlement of Jeffersonville before a road existed from the south. Tired and exhausted, he came upon a settlement of half a dozen German families and begged for food. They were unable to help for they were starving themselves. By the 1870s farming was beginning to pay off though, and the settlers were able to fund the creation of several Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and German Reformed churches.5
After the first couple of decades in their new country, the Heidts perhaps congratulated themselves and thanked God that their great trek had paid off. They built a home in what is now Delaware Township, a rural area of small hamlets in the Catskills. Pierre, who anglicized his name to Phillip Peter, began farmed with the help of his two eldest sons. One of their neighbours was another German immigrant, George Markert, who was originally from Saxony. He and his father worked a small patch of land nearby. The two families got on well. Around i860, the twenty-six-year-old George married Phillip’s daughter Caroline, and a long-standing friendship developed between him and Adam.
In 1869 Adam Heidt married Barbara Ulrich, the American-born daughter of Bavarian immigrants Anton and Ursula Ulrich, who farmed near Bethel, Sullivan County. The young couple moved to Rockland, where Adam worked as a carpenter. Their first son, Joseph, was bom the following year. By 1880 the family had relocated back to Delaware Township, where Adam built up a sizeable farm of 133 acres at a spot called Swiss Hill, just south of Jeffersonville. Joseph attended school in the winter and helped on the farm in the summer, while Barbara looked after three further offspring. Adam became a respected member of the community, acting as an officer of the Callicoon Agricultural Fire Relief Association.6 His uncle, George Market, had by now also bought a small farm for himself and his second wife in Delaware, some 125 yards from the historic Stone Arch Bridge that crosses Callicoon Creek. It was within hollering distance from the Heidts farm. George had saved up money to buy it after having laboured for years at Gideon Wales’ tannery near Kenoza Lake. It was only a fifteen-acre spread and George laboured for neighbouring farmers to make ends meet. In 1888 Adam had to lend $600 dollars to him in a legally binding agreement to help pay off other debts he had accrued.
Yes, the Heidts prospered, but they also went through some dark times. In 1874 Adam’s brother Nicholas, who farmed nearby, was hit by a train and died later after sustaining serious injuries. In 1882 Anton Ulrich fell from a load of hay and broke his neck. Around 1884 Adam’s sister Caroline, George Market’s wife, died in her early forties. Markert soon married again. In 1888 Adam’s mother Maria died at the age of seventy-five. Adam administered her will, which stated that her property should be divided up between her children and grandchildren.7 Her death was hardly a great shock, but it happened not long after his mother-in-law Ursula was murdered at her home in Bethel, a mile or so from Jeffersonville. In October 1887 a drunken ex-sailor named Jack Allen entered her home, where she lived alone, and shot her dead. The motive was robbery. A neighbour, Theodore Kanig, who came calling for a jug of cider, found her lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. Adam and Barbara gave testimony at her trial.8 Allen was hanged at Monticello jail in July 1888, after adjusting the rope around his neck and telling the hangman, ‘Let ‘er go’.9 It was the last hanging in Sullivan County.
As well as these personal misfortunes, there were also problems on the farm. Two fine horses died inexplicably, and some of Adam’s cows dried up. Yet his neighbours’ cows seemed to produce richer milk. On top of all this, Adam had been suffering for years from an ailment that no doctors could diagnose or cure. The medicines they gave him only made him worse. He had pains in the teeth and limbs, and his ‘stomach beat like his heart’. Then all at once he began to improve—until, that is, Markert came to visit after having spent some time away in Rockville, Connecticut. This was in 1890. After shaking hands with him Adam began to feel pains all over his body. He tried some patent medicine, the first bottle of which seemed to help but the second made him worse. Some pills made no difference.
One day in the spring, Markert visited the Heidt farm and Adam took him down to the cellar for a glass of cider. He began to have strange sensations in his eyes. The two men went back upstairs and sat down, and Adam observed Markert stroking his beard in a strange manner:
He stroked his whiskers and twisted his hand at the end of each stroke as if he was throwing something from them at me. He saw that I noticed it and he stopped. When I turned my head he did the same thing again. I went and looked in the glass. My face was yellow, with a blue rim around my eyes. He then went home. I told my wife to look at my face, and that Markert was a witch and had cast a spell upon me. She told me she couldn’t believe that he would do such a thing because he talked so much religion. I told her I thought he had done it.
Markert repeated the same beard-stroking action the following Sunday.
Now that he had fixed upon the idea that Markert’s witchery lay behind all his problems, he wracked his memory for other suspicious words or actions that seemed innocuous at the time but which he now reinterpreted as sinister. He remembered an episode twenty-two years before when Markert had patted him three times on the shoulder and said ‘You’re good—a right good brother-in-law’. Why the repetition? And three times at that? Clearly a spell was worked that moment. Then there was the encounter a couple of years back when Markert had been unusually solicitous regarding Adam’s health. ‘He said he had met the doctor and had asked him if I was dangerously sick, and the doctor said I was’, Heidt recalled. Was he concerned about the progress of his witchery?
The last time that Markert came to Heidt’s house was in December 1890. He wanted Adam to file a saw for him. Adam refused. The mere sight of it gave him pains. He went to a local doctor who prescribed vapour baths and a course of medicine. They made him feel even worse. He could not eat or sleep. He was taken to hospital and spent two weeks there. The doctors could not find anything wrong with him. Released from hospital and disillusioned with the medical profession, he took a trip to New York to consult a popular fortune-teller named Mrs Stein who lived on Eighty-fifth Street. She confirmed that he had been bewitched and that from then on he should not shake hands with any man. She wrote down a charm on a piece of paper, instructing him not to look at it, and to carry it at all times. He visited her again in March 1891.
After this last visit Adam confronted Markert, saying he was a witch and demanding that he take back the words ‘y°u are a good, a right good brother- in-law’. Markert only laughed at him. The pains got worse. In November, Adam went to stay with his brother in Bradford, Pennsylvania, for five weeks. During this time he consulted a travelling quack doctor named Clark. Adam did not tell him he was bewitched. The good doctor gave him two glass bulbs connected by a glass tube containing a liquid. He held the two bulbs in his hands and the liquid transferred from one bulb to the other. From this the doctor diagnosed that he had heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and a host of other diseases. Fortunately, the quack’s medicine could cure them all! Adam declined, for he knew now that his problem was beyond natural help. What he needed was spiritual aid. So he went to Pittsburgh to see the celebrated Father Mollinger. Mollinger gave Adam a blessing and said that there was no need for him now to take any medicine. Adam did not tell Mollinger he was bewitched, but desperately hoped that his blessing would counter Markert’s spell. It did not.
Adam talked frequently of Markert’s witchery with his son Joseph and recounted other cases of witchcraft to support his conviction. Unlike his mother, Joseph became persuaded that his father was, indeed, under Markert’s spell. Adam also expressed his views freely with acquaintances and neighbours. When, in October 1891, he called at the home of Adam Barnhart, a farmer of Kenoza Lake, and a fellow Bavarian, he refused to shake hands, saying that he was under a spell laid upon him by Markert. Another neighbour Conrad Metzger tried to convince him that he was not bewitched when Adam asked to borrow $10 from him to see Mrs Stein in New York. As we see over and over again in witchcraft cases in this and early periods, Adam was cautiously seeking support from the local community in the event that action needed to be taken against Markert.
On the evening of Tuesday 19 January 1892, George Markert left his house and trudged through the falling snow to the Half-way House, a respectable inn run by Philip Hembdt on the road from Jeffersonville to Callicoon depot. Markert often spent the evening there with friends. Around 10 o’clock he left for home, but his wife Catharine and stepson John never saw him alive again. At first they were not concerned, as he often stayed out late, but in the morning Catharine sent John out to ask neighbours if they had seen George. As John got to the farm gate that opened onto the main road he saw blood in the snow.
Two men had also seen the blood that morning. One was a neighbouring farmer and local mailman John Koehler, and the other Casper van Bergen. They found Markert’s cap, jack-knife, and hickory stick nearby, and followed a trail of blood and footprints in the snow that led to the Stone Arch Bridge over Callicoon creek. There had clearly been a violent struggle between two or three men, and the marks in the snow suggested that a body had been thrown over the bridge. The two men went to notify Philip Hembdt and others, including the local constable Charles Heidt—a nephew of Markert’s and the cousin of Joseph Heidt. Several boats were launched into the creek and the water dredged with hooks. Markert’s body was found, dragged on to land, placed a sledge, and taken to Hembdt’s hotel. The men present had all heard of Adam Heidt’s accusations, and now reached the conclusion that he must be responsible for Markert’s death.
At the Half-way House an examination of Markert’s body showed that he had been shot in the head several times. Two letters were found on him, one in English and the other in German. The latter read as follows:
Kenoza Lake March 19, 1891 George Markert —
You seeming friend and sly enemy. Nothing done so fine but what it will appear in the daytime. God has opened my eyes. You should take your witchcraft back. You know I have a judgement against you. You came to me on a Sunday and got receipt. If you do not take the torture back I will sell the judgement and pay the doctor bill which you have caused. You came to my house and stroked your beard. I was sick all the time. I forbid you my house and my barn, my flesh and blood. In the name of God.
A. Heidt.
The letter in English was roughly the same. Adam clearly suspected that Markert aimed to bewitch him to death to avoid honouring his debt.
On the Friday a party of local men went to arrest Adam and his son Joseph. Armed with a search warrant they found a revolver hidden in a pile of hay and a bloody handkerchief. The two Heidt men were taken to Sullivan County Jail, while the coroner John Dycker launched an investigation. At the inquest, both Adam and Joseph denied any knowledge of the murder, but the jury decided there was sufficient evidence for the Heidts to be indicted for murder. Their case was to be considered by the county grand jury in the spring, but both the prosecution and defence requested more time to gather evidence. Meanwhile, in the spirit of impartiality, the press reported the widely held view that they were guilty.10
The trials of Joseph and Adam began on the 17 August 1892 at the Courthouse in Monticello. Joseph’s trial came first, and was relatively straightforward as he had already confessed to the crime while in jail. He told his version of events on the night of the 19 January to the court:
I made up my mind to ask my uncle to remove this spell from him [Adam]; remember the fatal evening; was at Kenoza Lake to see the blacksmith concerning the shoeing of our horses the next day; saw him at Curtis Alley’s hotel; after leaving there I went to Markert’s; had a pistol in my possession at the time, which I found in the bam; did not see uncle when I went down to his home that night; then went over to the bridge and waited awhile and I met him at the bridge and he replied, good evening, and asked what I wanted. I asked him to if he would be so kind as to take the torture back from my father; his reply was that he would take nothing back; again repeated the request, to which he again refused; told him that I would have him arrested in the morning if he did not; he said that if I said another word he would knock the life out of me, calling me a damned lummix; he then attempted to strike me; he was angry and did strike me; I grabbed the club and wrestled it away from him; we had by this time crossed the bridge to the scene of the affray; he clinched me, took out his knife and told me that I would have to die on the spot. In trying to escape I slipped and fell; grabbed hold of him and pulled him down; drew the revolver and fired for his head; cannot say how many times; when I regained my footing I again grabbed him and threw him over the bridge; then went home; did not know what I was doing at the time, have had a headache since then; was afraid to tell of the deed for fear of being lynched.
Joseph’s defence attorney pleaded that he was a simple, misled boy with a formerly irreproachable reputation. At 7.50 p.m., the jury processed back into the court room. The acting County Clerk then addressed them: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, look upon the prisoner; prisoner, look upon the jury. How find you this man, guilty or not guilty?’ Jury foreman Maverick Ingraham arose and pronounced that they had agreed on a verdict of murder in the second degree. Joseph’s life had been saved. He was sentenced to thirty-years’ imprisonment in Dannemora state prison, which is known today as Clinton Correctional Facility.
The next day, a Thursday, it was Adam’s turn in the dock. The presiding judge was Edgar L. Fursman. The first business of the court was to convene a panel of sixty jurors who were then questioned as to their suitability. Then as now, it was not a responsibility that many citizens enjoyed. Isaac Quinlan said his bones ached, but the judge refused to dismiss him. M.D. Pierce said he had diarrhoea, but the judge told him to get a prescription and return to the courthouse. Several hours later the jury panel had been whittled down to the required twelve men. Their task was to decide if Adam had aided and abetted Joseph that tragic night. Had Joseph been economical with the truth? The Judge addressed them: ‘This man is on trial for his life. He is either guilty of murder in the first degree or nothing. It won’t do to convict a man on suspicion. Human justice rests on a foundation of law’.
Friends and neighbours, such as Philip Hembdt, Adam Bemhart, and Conrad Metzger, testified regarding their conversations with Adam on the subject of his bewitchment. Oliver Hofer, Callicoon Justice of the Peace, reported on the letters found on Markert’s corpse. Joseph Heidt was also called back to give evidence. The trial concluded the next morning. By 9 a.m. the jury was seated, ready to hear the address of Judge Fursman. He advised them to give a verdict of not guilty as there was insufficient evidence to convict, not least of which was the fact that the tracks of only two people were evident on the bridge that snowy night. Without leaving their seats the jury expressed agreement. Fursman turned to Adam and said, ‘Heidt you are discharged’. Adam’s eyes filled with tears and he nodded an expression of thanks before being led away.11
Despite Markert’s death, Adam’s health did not recover. His mind deteriorated. In September 1892 a local newspaper editorial stated that Adam Heidt was ‘not a safe man to be at large’. No sane man, it stated, could believe George Markert possessed the power of witchcraft. It recommended that he be taken to the asylum. This is exactly what happened the following June. Adam’s wife Barbara requested the Overseer of the Poor to institute proceedings to have him declared insane and that he was not fit to be at large. Due process was duly gone through with two doctors certifying his insanity, and Adam was taken to the State Lunatic Asylum at Middletown. It was thought he would resist, but the officers told him he would be cured if he consented to go. ‘Neighbours feel easier now that he is under duress’, reported one paper.12 There he stayed until his death in July 1897. The cause was melancholia and inflammation of the spinal marrow or chronic myelitis, which would explain the nervous symptoms and fatigue of which he complained.13
Barbara died in September 1901 after becoming bedridden with stomach cancer. She was buried in St George’s Catholic cemetery, Jeffersonville. As a reporter noted, ‘she was a mild-mannered woman, respected, and seemingly undeserving of so troublous a life as was hers’.14 The same year a local sheriff, while taking a prisoner to Dannemora, had a chat with Joseph Heidt. He was described as a model inmate by the prison authorities. In 1913 he was paroled, having served twenty-one years of his thirty-year sentence. The following year he was pardoned. He settled in Malone, Franklin County, and was described in 1914 as an ‘honest, hard-working man, much respected by the people who know him’.15 He worked in a broom factory for a bit, and in 1930 we find him, at the age of sixty, employed as a labourer, married with a young daughter and stepdaughter. And there we shall leave this tragic family story.