In April 1903 a servant named Klotsche, whose circumstances had improved, went to take back her baby son, Wilhelm. She had handed him over months earlier to a woman in St. Pauli, the Hamburg entertainment district, who for a single payment had promised to find him a good home. The boy could not be found. At about the same time a foster mother named Wulfing, who had grown suspicious, went to the police. The inquiries that followed showed that four infants who had passed through the hands of Elisabeth Wiese at Wilhelminenstrasse 23 in 1903 had disappeared without a trace.
She was born Elisabeth Berkefeld in Bilshausen, near Gottingen, on July 1, 1853, by most accounts; one gives 1859. She was a Catholic, trained as a midwife, and had an illegitimate daughter, Paula. In 1888 she married Heinrich Wiese, a boilermaker. In Hanover she was convicted in several abortion and fraud cases and barred from practicing, and in the mid-1890s the couple moved to St. Pauli, where the Hamburg directory first lists them in 1896. The marriage was bitter. He accused her of extravagance and she accused him of drinking, and she tried more than once to poison him for his savings.
Money was short. In the winter of 1901 and 1902 she placed advertisements in the Hamburg papers in which a young lady asked a noble-minded gentleman for a loan of thirty marks against grateful repayment; the men who answered collected the repayment from Paula. Paula eventually refused and in the spring of 1902 fled to London to work as a servant. In July she came back to Hamburg heavily pregnant and gave birth on July 6 in a cellar flat at Thalstrasse 18. By Paula's account at the trial, her mother was waiting beside her with a tub of water, drowned the newborn at once, and tried to burn the body in the kitchen stove.
On January 23, 1903 Wiese noticed the advertisements in which better-off unmarried mothers looked for foster parents and couples offered to take such children for board money. The police had forbidden her to keep foster children, so she took them outright, for a lump sum, giving the mother a receipt for a hundred or a hundred and twenty marks and promising the child would be well looked after, and then placed them with poor servants for sums of between one and three hundred marks. Between January and April 1903 four servant women gave her their babies: Wilhelm Karl Klotsche, born October 19, 1902; Franz Carl Friedrich Sommer, born December 23, 1902; Peter Schultheiss, born December 31, 1902; and Bertha Blanck, born February 26, 1903. To the mothers she said the children had gone to rich people in London, in Vienna, in America, or to a cousin in Gottingen.
When the placements fell through and the children came back to her, the prosecution argued, she poisoned them with morphine and burned the bodies in her stove. The morphine had belonged to a consumptive lodger who had died; the police found it, with other poisons, when they searched the flat. A neighbor who had swapped apartments with her in October 1902 complained that the stove she inherited drew ferociously and ran far too hot, with several firebricks missing. She was arrested in the flat in May 1903, protesting violently. No child's body was ever found.
The trial before the Hamburg jury court opened on October 4, 1904 and lasted five days. Besides the five murders, the charges included the attempt to poison her husband, the prostitution of her daughter and an abortion carried out on her, incitement to perjury and forgery; she had tried to persuade a fellow tenant, and later a woman in the cell beside hers, to lie for her. Paula, twenty-two, came from London for the trial. She would not look at her mother and referred to her only as the Wiese. On October 10, 1904 the court convicted her on all five counts of murder and sentenced her to death five times.
Whether she ever admitted it is disputed. One account says that after weeks of questioning she confessed to the poisonings and the stove, and the same account says she made no confession at the end; another has her denying everything to the last, saying she had killed no children. Her plea for clemency was refused. At about eight o'clock on the morning of February 2, 1905 she was beheaded in the courtyard of the remand prison on the Holstenglacis by the executioner Alwin Engelhardt. The Hamburg papers called her the angel-maker of St. Pauli, and later retellings put her victims as high as sixteen. Five murders were charged and proved to the jury's satisfaction, and much of the original case file was later destroyed by fire.
July 1, 1853: born Elisabeth Berkefeld in Bilshausen, by most accounts (one gives 1859).
1888: marries Heinrich Wiese, a boilermaker.
1896: the Hamburg directory first lists the couple in St. Pauli.
July 6, 1902: her daughter Paula gives birth in a cellar flat; by Paula's account, Wiese drowns the newborn.
January 1903: four servant women begin giving her their babies, between January and April.
April 1903: the servant Klotsche comes to take back her son Wilhelm, who cannot be found.
May 1903: arrested in her flat.
October 4, 1904: her trial opens before the Hamburg jury court.
October 10, 1904: convicted on all five counts of murder and sentenced to death five times.
February 2, 1905: beheaded in the courtyard of the remand prison on the Holstenglacis.