On December 2, 1920, homicide investigators in Spandau, on the western edge of Berlin, announced the arrest of a fifty-year-old cabman named Schultz on eleven counts of murder. The victims were said to include men, women and children, among them an eight-year-old killed in 1894 and, some years before that, his wife's two brothers. His wife was said to have kept silent for decades under threats to her own life and finally to have gone to the police, and the eleven counts rest on her account.
That announcement is the whole of the record. It survives in a single English-language encyclopedia entry, and every later account repeats it. No first name for Schultz is recorded, and the names of the eleven dead were never published. Later retellings add that he was convicted and executed, some of them by guillotine in 1921, but none cites a trial report, a sentence or a place of execution.
The registers of executions in the German Reich compiled from court and prison records list no cabman named Schultz. For the whole period from August 1920 to April 1922 they record a single execution in the Berlin area: that of Friedrich Schumann, born in Spandau, the Falkenhagen Lake killer, sentenced by the Berlin III assize court on July 13, 1920 for at least six murders and eleven attempted murders, and beheaded at Plötzensee prison at six in the morning on August 27, 1921. The two cases share a district and a year and nothing else.
Whether Schultz was ever tried, whether the charges were proved, and what became of him are not known. Until a contemporary German court or newspaper report is found, the case stands as a police announcement of an arrest.