Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus

Portrait of Charlotte Ursinus

Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus (* May 5, 1760 as Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth von Weingarten , † April 4, 1836 in Glatz ) allegedly murdered her husband, her aunt and her lover with arsenic and carried out a poison attack on her servant . Her high-profile case led to the development of a court- proof detection method for arsenic poisoning .

Life and deeds

The daughter of the Austrian Legation Councilor Maximilian von Weingarten (1721–1781, later called von Weiß ), who had betrayed himself for home, position and assets, and the Charlottenburg mayor's daughter Ernestine Henriette Witte married at the age of 19 Theodor Ursinus, the much older Privy Councilor of Justice and government director , with whom she lived in Stendal until 1792 and then in Berlin . Due to the age difference and the withdrawal of Theodor from "marital duties", she probably took a lover, a Dutch captain named Ragay, with the consent of her husband , who separated from her in 1796. Ursinus then tried in vain to win him back. After several months of illness, Ragay officially died in July 1797 of " pulmonary consumption " without any signs of poisoning.

Theodor Ursinus, who had happily celebrated his birthday the day before, died surprisingly on September 11, 1800. According to the widow, he had complained of malaise on the evening of the celebration and had been given a strengthening elixir and then emetic from her . The following morning his condition deteriorated rapidly and he died that afternoon in the presence of several well-known doctors , including the royal personal physician Johann Ludwig Formey and Johannes Nepomuk Bremer . Already at this point there was suspicion against the widow, because she had failed to call a doctor during the night and had bought arsenic from a pharmacist two weeks earlier , supposedly to fight rats .

Christiane Sophie Regine Witte, an aunt of Ursinus, died on January 24, 1801. She left her a great fortune. Here too, Privy Councilor Ursinus had previously acquired a large amount of arsenic.

At the end of February 1803 the servant Benjamin Klein fell ill. The general surgeon Laube, who was summoned, examined him and prescribed a laxative , which did not bring any relief. Ursinus gave him broth and emetics, and his condition continued to deteriorate. On February 28th, she gave him raisins , which he vomited again. He did not touch a rice pudding the next day, but watched Ursinus toss it away, even though it was untouched. Having grown suspicious, he searched the apartment and discovered arsenic powder. On March 3rd, the privy councilor brought him baked plums, which he had the maid bring to a pharmacy for analysis. There the poison was found and a complaint was filed. On the evening of March 5th, Sophie Ursinus was finally arrested. She confessed to the attempted murder of her servant without revealing a motive, and contradicted the suspicion of poisoning her husband and her aunt. Presumably Klein was supposed to die because he knew about Ursinus' marriage plans, which she did not want to reveal.

The examining magistrate ordered an exhumation of the corpses of her aunt and her husband and commissioned the famous chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth and his assistant, the pharmacist Valentin Rose , with an analysis of toxins. The investigation by the two experts could not provide evidence of poisoning in Theodor Ursinus, but it could not rule it out either. In any case, your report was in clear contradiction to the diagnosis made by the doctors treating the deceased, who had assumed a “ nervous attack ”.

The death of Christiane Witte was also investigated after Klaproth and Rose were exhumed. Once again, they found no chemical evidence of arsenic in the organs , but, as with Theodor Ursinus, concluded that the deceased had been poisoned due to pathological changes in the stomach and intestines . Here, too, the treating physicians disagreed and referred to their diagnosis.

The sensational trial of Sophie Ursinus before the Berlin Supreme Court ended on September 12, 1803. She was acquitted of the poisoning charge of Captain Ragay and her husband Theodor Ursinus. The killing of her aunt Christiane Witte could not be fully proven and led to a so-called suspected sentence , while the ordinary sentence was imposed for the attempted murder of her servant Benjamin Klein, so that she was sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress Glatz .

In 1833 she was pardoned after thirty years in prison, but was not allowed to leave the city and died on April 4, 1836 as a member of the better society in Glatz.

consequences

The verdict showed the misery that revealed itself in the evidence of poison attacks in court proceedings: It was not the objective scientific evidence, but the authority of the reviewers that decided the outcome. While the chemical analysis by Klaproth and Rose in the case of the husband could not prevail against the statements of the famous doctors, they succeeded in the case of the aunt, who had been treated by doctors with less reputation .

This dilemma did not let Rose rest, so that by 1806 he developed a well-functioning detection method for arsenic poisoning. But it was only with the development of Marsh's sample of 1832 that it was possible to reliably detect arsenic.

literature

• Willibald Alexis : The Privy Councilor Ursinus . In: The new Pitaval .
• Ingeborg Weiler: knowledge of poisoning and poisoners. A study of the history of discourse. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998.
• Ingo Wirth: Dead put on record - famous forensic medicine cases. Berlin: The New Berlin, 2005.
• Susanne Kord: Murderesses in German writing, 1720-1860: Heroines of Horror. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009.
• Confessions of a poisoner, written by herself. Edited by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene. MLA Publication, 2009.

Web links

• Ursinus . In: Heinrich August Pierer , Julius Löbe (Hrsg.): Universal Lexicon of the Present and the Past . 4th edition. tape 18 . Altenburg 1864, p. 295-296 ( zeno.org ).
• "A Revenante from Criminal Law" (NuT)