The Faces of an Angel

A Crime Story

Prologue

Friedensreich von Sussmann was feeling increasingly cranky.

It was a lousy day in April, 1904 — another lousy year for Frid, as a few of his friends called him — in a lousy backalley in a lousy town that seemed to be composed only of backalleys.

And there was this lousy female body.

He was standing on the bank of the river Ljubljanica in Ljubljana, a small, backwaterish town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, home to about 40.000 souls.

A couple of years ago, back in 1895, a terrible earthquake shook this cozy town. It soon proved to be a sort of a benefit to the people. O Of course, there were some dead people and many were injured; buildings and dreams were crushed; but then the Power of the Empire kicked in for the very first time in the once proud Duchy of Carniola. Something happened that the good people of Krain never thought to be possible: Austro-Hungarian ‘dungeon of nations’ helped their Slavic inhabitants.

Relief efforts were fast and effective — quite unlike the overall performance of the Empire. A vast restructuring project was soon underway. Influx of empire’s money quadrupled. Builders, doctors, planners and all sort of experts flocked in. Even His Imperial Majesty Franz Joseph I. visited the stricken town, among jubilant cheers of “Vivat!”.

Friedensreich von Sussmann was the fourth child of a respectful viennese family. His grandfather Aloysius von Sussmann was credited with profound restructuring of the Vienna police department, slowly but decidedly shifting its main cause from preserving the absolutist monarchy to fighting crime. His other grandfather was a doctor working side by side with the great Semmelweis combating puerperal infections. Friedensreich’s father was a colonel of the Imperial-Royal Landwehr, stationed in the Vienna headquarters. His oldest brother Johann was also a military officer and his sister Helena was an accomplished harpsichordist, married to a prospective doctor. The other brother, Vinzenz, died of smallpox just before Friedensreich was born.

Friedensreich was a bright, precocious child with a voracious intellect that soon impressed his teachers and tutors. His reputation was impeccable, apart from some typical child pranks. He had the world at his hands when he finished lycaeum, but then he surprised everyone by stating he wants to be a policeman. To fight crime, he said, just like his granddad.

And he did. In 1893 he joined the Vienna police squad, crime division (not called that back then). He rose through the ranks — his grandfather influence was definitely helping him — and cracked some toughies, eventually tracked down and singlehandedly arrested a notorious anarchist terrorist leader, hereby earning commendation and a medal. And respect.

Transfer to Ljubljana

Friedensreich again suprised everyone when he requested a transfer — to Ljubljana, a calm, small, slow town that had seen better days, but was now burgeoning in the wake of post-earthquake activities, transforming itself into a charming, modern city. Von Sussmann arrived in Ljubljana on 10th of june, 1901, and took the job of Gendarmerieoberinspektor II. Klasse — senior inspector II. class — of the k. u. k. Gendarmerie the next day. Friedensreich was eager, capable and smart — he carried a crude laboratory for dactiloscopy and trace evidence analysis he himself devised — and ready to take on crime.

And he did. In the first year of his service Friedensreich von Sussmann arrested 177 people, 134 men and 47 women; 56 of those for drunk and disorderly conduct, 51 for theft, 34 for robbery, 23 for agravated assault, 10 for soliciting, 2 for attempted murder and 1 for murder of an infant.

Next two years weren’t much different for him. There were no brilliant crime minds in this town, and no perplexing crimes were commited. Just a never ending litany of poor, drunk, sorry creatures, caught in their debased, zola-ish nature and nurture that paraded on: all guilty, of course. Friedensreich was more bored and crankier every day, and his colleagues described him as an smirk, snobbish recluse. He even contemplated to request another transfer — to anywhere. Ljubljana definitely did not match his expectations.

And now he had this body.

First victim

In the wee hours of 13th of April, 1903, a boatswain saw a body floating in Ljubljanica river, just below the newly built Dragon bridge. He caught it with a long pole, pulled it onto the boat, turned it over — and fainted on the spot.

The body had no face.

The good doctor was pale and his hands were trembling as he relayed his report to inspector Von Sussmann later that day. The body was that of a woman, 18 to 25 years old, dark-haired, grey-eyed, she was 156 cm tall and weighed 45 kg. She was floating in the water for no more than six hours, and probably died the day before. The cause of death was asphyxiation — she did not drown, as she had no water in her lungs. The girl was well-dressed, in a manner typical of a middle-class woman, but had no jewellery on her. She wasn’t married — no marks of a wedding ring on her finger — and she never bore a child.

The terrifying wounds on her face were inflicted by a blunt object, a hammer possibly, no more than an inch across the head. Curiously, all the skin and flesh was removed before the blows were inflicted, all post mortem. There was catastrophic damage to the orbits, nose, cheekbones, lower and upper jaw. The face was smashed in: bone fragments were found lodged deep in the brain, together with some pieces of wood and plaster. Some of the bones had strange cuts that the doctor-cum-pathologist could not explain — perhaps the killer used the other, sharp end of the hammer.

Otherwise, there was nothing unusual, no marks, no trace — except for a small amount of plaster in her nasal cavity and in her mouth. Water washed away everything else that might have helped the investigation.

Friedensreich let loose his brutish gendarmes to canvas the area and to search the banks of the river for anything, while he went back to his office, to check for a missing person report that matched the body, to smoke a pipe, and to think.

He didn’t wait for long. A constable brought a distressed woman into his office, claiming her daughter went missing the day before. She claimed the girl went to the house across the street for some shoes the neighbour — a cobbler — had repaired, but a apparently she never got there, and she never came back. The girl’s name was Maria Kovacs and she worked as a waitress — maître d’, her mother emphasized — in the restaurant and hotel her parents ran on Schellenburg allee. She was nineteen. Height, weight, hair, and eye color matched. However, identification of the body was difficult: the investigators had not retrieved any personal items from the body, and there was no face. Inspector Von Sussmann would never let the lady see the disturbed remains of what might have been her daughter.

Investigation leads to — nothing

Something stuck in Friedensreich’s mind: the woman mentioned a cobbler. Cobblers work with hammers, don’t they, he murmured. Gathering a patrol of gendarmes, he immediately paid this cobbler a visit. As the gendarmes roughed the poor guy, his wife cursing and his children screaming, inspector Von Sussmann inspected the small workshop. He found three hammers, but none seemed to have been used in the brutal murder. They dragged the cobbler to the Kreisamt, where Von Sussmann interrogated the guy. A particularly large gendarme was present, notorious for his brutality, whip in hand — to soften the suspect.

The interrogation yielded nothing. Von Sussmann was soon convinced cobbler was telling the truth: Maria (whom the cobbler knew well) never stepped into his house on that fateful evening. The witnesses — the cobbler’s apprentice, a customer, an older guy who was visiting the workshop for a chat (cobblers knew all the news) — all corroborated the cobbler’s testimony: they had not seen Maria at all.

Von Sussmann decided to keep the cobbler in the county jail for a couple of days and went on to investigate the guests of the hotel and the restaurant Guests were soon cleared, and Friedensreich’s charm helped calm down an angry married colonel who stayed there with another lady. Von Sussmann assured him not a word of this would be kept on file.

The last person who saw Maria was a housemaid who briefly conversed with her at the hotel entrance. She confirmed Maria was on her way to the cobbler’s. She did not see anyone on the street. She heard, however, a streetcar passing not long after Maria left. She was unsure if the carriage stopped or slowed down, but she was sure it was pulled by just one horse.

The gendarmes searching the crime scene came back empty handed. Von Sussmann had nothing. Not only was the trail getting cold: there was no trail to speak of. That made him even more cranky.

A funeral

Three weeks later in Mariafeld, a small village a couple of kilometers down the Ljubljanica river, a young woman’s body was put to her final rest. A fisherman found her in the settlement of Beuz, tangled in the trees just above the dam of the paper mill, drowned, decomposing. Nobody knew who she was, and the villagers suspected she commited suicide by jumping in the fast flowing river some way upstream, maybe even in Ljubljana. A good parish priest felt sorry for the poor girl and dismissed accusations of suicide — she was interred in the holy ground. There was no official investigation. Only the priest and a deacon attended the funeral on a bleak day. The priest mentioned her in his sunday sermon: what the untamed nature can do to a lost soul, crushing the bones, peeling the skin off, destroying the face.

The face. The priest later admitted that this poor girl chased him in his dreams. A girl without a face.

Another victim

On Thursday, May 1st, a passer by noticed a large bundle rolled down on the bank of Ljubljanica in Trnovo. He presumed that it had fallen while being loaded on a boat at the nearby pier, so he alerted the longshoremen. They picked the bundle up, when one of them noticed a large blood stain. They called a nearby gendarme, who notified the police headquarters.

Friedenreich Von Sussmann was visiting some friends of the family in Graz at the time, so another inspector, herr Grosz, led the investigation.

Unfortunately, inspector Grosz, and old, tired man, did not posess Von Sussmann’s qualities as an investigator. The crime scene was not secured. Witnesess were interviewed lightly, and many reports went unchecked. Even the cloth the body was wrapped in was lost — and so was all the evidence that might have been found on it.

The Trnovo victim was a woman in her mid-teens, 160 cm, 48 kg. She had a light complexion, brown hair, while the colour of her eyes could not be determined.

The eyes weren’t there.

Again, the killer removed almost all the skin on the face and used a hammer to break the face off. He hit her more than 40 times, the doctor said, and all the blows were dealt post-mortem. She died of asphyxiation. Traces of plaster were found in her lungs, her nasal cavity, in her mouth and on her face — on what had remained of it.

Inspector Grosz was nonplussed by all this and he rudely brushed aside the doctor’s persistent remarks of an earlier, similar victim. He knew what was going on — an angry and probably drunk husband suffocated his cheating wife, destroyed her face as to hide her identity, and threw the body into the river. Now they just have to go through Trnovo, find a husband whose wife disappeared, and arrest him. Case solved.

The confession

And they did solve it. On the day Friedensreich von Sussmann returned to Ljubljana, Grosz himself arrested one Johann Pachnigg, 45, resident of Trnovo, whose wife Anna went missing four days before. Neighbours were gleefully telling the police about the quarrels the couple had all the time, how Johann used to beat the hell out of his wife, how she was a known cheater and almost a prostitute, and how he was “crazy with rage” every time he drank himself to stupor. Which was pretty much every other evening.

It took inspector Grosz and two of his gendarmes only three hours to beat the confession out of Johann Pachnigg. Yes, she cheated on me. Yes, sir, I was drunk and angry. Yes, I suffocated her, with a pillow. Yes, I took a hammer and smashed her face. I hated her so much. Then I wrapped her body in cloth, took her to the riverbank and rolled her down. Hammer? I don’t remember. I must have thrown it into the river. I am sorry, sir.

Bloody, beaten and in tears Johann was thrown into the jail, and Grosz took his team for a drink to celebrate.

The next day three things happened.

In the early morning hours Anna Pachnigg returned to her house and found a policeman guarding the entrance. When she inquired, the policeman told her the man living there killed his wife, was arrested, and is now in jail. She screamed and fainted.

Friedensreich von Sussmann visited the morgue and found about Grosz’s victim that had no face, just like Maria Kovacs a couple of weeks before. He and the doctor were startled by the many similarities of both victims, and and he rushed back to the office to get the file on victim “Ana Pachnigg”.

Just as he was about to finish reading Grosz’s report, getting angrier by the page, a distressed man ran into the police headquarters and told the officer on duty a body has been found. It was 11 pm.

Third victim

A man named Michael told the police how he stepped into a small alley leading from St.Peter street to the banks of the river to relieve himself. Just as he turned around the corner, a strange-mannered man bumped into him, mumbling, and went away as nothing happened. Michael turned to confront the man, but the man climbed on a carriage and drove off. Michael went back to his business when he noticed a woman slumped on the pavement. He assumed she was drunk, so he kicked her and yelled to her to get lost. But she just rolled over and the man came face to face with terror. His screams pierced the calm town.

This time Friedensreich von Sussmann personally examined the crime scene. He was going from one end of the alley to the other, painstakingly collecting everything of possible value, measuring, searching for footprints, fingerprints, drag marks, anything that might point to the perpetrator of this crime. This one — and possibly two more.

Von Sussmann had a large area of St. Peter’s street and adjacent alleys cordoned off. His gendarmes woke up everyone living there, asking questions over and over again: have you seen the carriage? What did the carriage look like? What did the driver look like? Where did he go?

Next morning Von Sussmann attended the autopsy. The woman’s body was sloppily wrapped in a long and narrow linen cloth, much like an egyptian mummy — just as the Trnovo victim was. Was this a clue, Friedesreich thought. Was the killer trying to embalm the body?

The face was smashed in, but not quite the same as with the other victims. There were less blunt hammer strikes, and more peculiar cuts on the bone, made with a sharp, narrow object, possibly a chisel. Again, the perpetrator removed most of the skin and flesh, and there was substantial damage to the orbits, nose, cheekbones, lower and upper jaw. Doctor’s voice became dark, as he explained to Sussman that it looked as someone were trying to reconfigure the poor girl’s face after she died: the strokes of the chisel seemed meticulous and precise.

Another similarity made inspector Von Sussman’s warning lights go off: she had traces of plaster in her lungs, in her mouth, her nasal cavity and even on the crushed bones of her face.

Doctor did not like to speculate, but yes, he answered the inspector’s question, it was conceivable she suffocated because the killer put plaster over her face, covering both her nose and mouth.

Now Von Sussmann was sure that one person is responsible for the deaths of three girls — and was afraid there will be more.

Friedensreich von Sussmann went to his office, locked the door and stuffed his pipe. While they waited for someone to identify the body, he needed a good thinking over.

A profile

Three young women were asphyxiated. All had traces of plaster in their upper respiratory pathways and on their destroyed faces — it was possible the killer covered their faces with plaster to suffocate them. Their faces were destroyed: first the killer removed the skin and most of the flesh, then he crushed the bones with a hammer and (possibly) a chisel. It may be that the killer wanted to reconfigure their faces.

All of the victims were found in or near the river, one under Dragon bridge, one in an alley leading to the river les than 500 meters upstream, and one in Trnovo, just over a kilometre upstream.

All of their belongings, clothes and jewellery were then removed and the bodies were disposed of in or near the river. Two of the bodies were wrapped in a large strip of linen cloth before they were dragged to the river — and Von Sussmann speculated that the first one was wrapped too.

The first victim — Maria Kovacs — disappeared from the street, and a witness testified she heard a carriage passing by at the time Maria went missing. The third victim was almost surely transported there in a carriage.

Inspector Von Sussmann made a mental sketch of the killer: he had a carriage, was physically strong and worked with hammers, chisels and plaster. Was there a crazy killer builder on the loose?

Mariafeld victim connected

Latter that day someone mentioned to the local policeman they should look for a possible fourth faceless victim. He was from Mariafeld and he heard rumours of a girl without a face found in Ljubljanica near Beutz and silently interred in an unmarket grave at the Mariafeld cemetery. The policeman notified inspector Von Sussmann who promptly ordered an exhumation — over stern objections of both civil administration and his police superiors, who didn’t want to “frighten the people” with stories of some deranged killer roaming the streets of this peaceful Austro-Hungarian town. They were suspicious of Von Sussmann’s “theories” and they personally advised him — in a friendly manner — not to “create disturbances”. But he would not budge.

The exhumed corpse bore unmistakeable marks of hammer and chisel strokes. The poor girl didn’t kill herself: she was the victim number two of a man who killed at least — at least!, murmured Friedensreich to himself — four women.

Face off

The investigation stalled again. The search for a carriage was going nowhere: there were over a thousand carriages in town, and they checked less than a hundred in one week. Evidence collected yielded nothing. Three of the victims were still unidentified.

It was now late May in Ljubljana, and spring rains came. It was raining for a whole week now, and the town was soaked wet. Incessant sound of raindrops, rising Ljubljanica threatening to spill over, mud and deep puddles on the street —combine that with the totally unproductive search for the killer, and one can see how the crankines of Friedensreich von Sussmann reached unprecedented levels. Little did he know those showers of May would bring not only flowers of June — but also the much needed break in the investigation.

The new, glamorous empire building on Dalmatin street was hastily finished: glazed plates that were simply glued to the wall started to peel off, statues were just put on their pedestals and not fixed, the railings were wobbly and the roof was leaking. Against the builders advice the owner insisted on grand opening on May 1st, and he had it. Now he was furious.

An angelic woman’s face adorning the entrance fell off on the street narrowly missing a passer-by, as the rain seeped behind it and loosened the cement. He dispatched a servant to the contractor’s office and demanded the damage fixed immediately.

A builder and his apprentice came to the house and picked up the sculptured face. As the apprentice went up the ladder to fix the face back on its place, he gasped and almost fell down.

Eyes of the skull were staring right at him.

The break

Von Sussmann arrived promptly and had the doctor examine the skull in situ. Doctor climbed up the ladder and confirmed: the skull had signature marks of a hammer and a chisel. It was the victim number five.

By now a large crowd had gathered and rumours of a deranged killers eating their victims before immuring them spread faster than the plague. The crowd was hostile and some horse turd hit the police. When stones started to fly, the police hit back with batons. The situation was electrified and threatening with escalation.

Friedensreich returned to the headquarters, and he was promptly summoned before the chief of police. The chief was furious. Von Sussmann’s preposterous theories are theratening peace and order in Ljubljana. People are terrified, scared, going crazy! This nonsense of a roaming deranged killer must stop immediately. Von Sussmann should look up to inspector Grosz, who apprehended the murderer in two days! Yes, the man was innocent, but that is beyond the matter!

Von Sussmann protested in vain, but then gave a simple and surprising pledge: he will arest the killer in 24 hours. The chief accepted that, yet if Von Sussmann failed to do it, he will be promptly dispatched to the darkest cul-de-sac of the empire, where he will be catching goat molesters for the next hundred years.

The hunt

Von Sussmann looked at the builder and his apprentice who had found the skull beneath the angelic face. They were shocked. And profoundly afraid — there was a turning point in their lives, a pivot: they were face to face with evil. “Tell me,” he said, who put that sculpture above the entrance?”

“I did,” said the older man. “But I … I never knew, I could not …”

Von Sussmann believed him, surely. He was after the man who made the face with the skull inside. He was after The Crazy Sculptor of Ljubljana, the town’s first known serial killer.

“I know that. Who did you get the sculpture from?”

It turned out the builder’s apprentice knew this man. The young man was deeply disturbed: the man seemed completely normal — for an artist. The sculptor’s studio was in the part of Ljubljana called Friskovec. Suitingly, it was almost exactly where the town’s gallows used to be. A haunting place.

The apprentice provided another grisly detail. He remembered a year ago he went to the studio to pick up a similar angelic face that was to decorate a façade of another townhouse. He noticed hair and stains on the inside of the hollow plaster face, but the sculptor smiled and said it is his “secret recipe” that made the plaster more durable. The apprentice thought it was horse hair. Now —

Inspector had enough. It was time to put an end to this horrible affair.

A strong police detachment was ready at the Church of the Immaculate Heart, some hundred meters from the sculptor’s studio. Inspector Friedensreich von Sussmann gave his final instructions. The man they were about to arrest is crazy and dangerous. They must be prepared for anything. And, inspector said to them, they must get the man, one way or another.

“Yes. Shoot if you have to. I will not have a wounded or killed policeman on my watch. Whoever gets hurt shall be severely reprimanded.”

The policemen laughed, nervously. The tension was high and even the notoriously cranky inspector making jokes could not defuse it.

“Let’s roll.”

The Sculptor

Silently the police surrounded the sculptor’s studio on Friskovec. When inspector Von Sussmann got the signal that the encirclement is complete, he approached the house. A policeman pointed to a carriage, parked in the yard. Inspector nodded.

A man in his late thirties opened the door. He was of average height, average build, with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. Inspector was surprised how average the man — the evil — looked. Everything on him and about him was not really worth mentioning. Except the eyes: they were sad, and empty.

Inspector cleared his throat and demanded: “Are you Simon Matschek, a sculptor?”

The man, wearing stained, dusty overalls, simply said: “Yes.”

“You must come with us.” Simon the sculptor nodded again. Inspector spoke softly: “It is over, Simon.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

Von Sussmann noticed the man was actually relieved. “Get dressed, and let’s go.”

The man went into his studio, inspector and three policemen following him closely, guns drawn. The studio was spacious, yet dark. There were pieces of stone, half made stucco decorations, unfinished sculptures, a large modelling wheel, and copious amounts of clay and plaster. A large, beautiful female sculpture was in the corner. In a cabinet they found long and narrow pieces of linen cloth, just like those the bodies were wrapped in. A hammer and a chisel lay on the table — Von Sussmann saw ominous stains on both of them. He was relieved: they had him. There shall be no more murders.

Suddenly Simon grabbed a hammer, turned aroud — unnaturally fast, Friedensreich thought — and hit one of the policemen on the head. The policeman collapsed, and the killer turned to inspector Von Sussmann, bloody hammer in hand. For a moment, everything froze.

Friedensreich gathered all the energy and focused it to his finger on the trigger. As if it took an eternity to move it, while the killer was closing in and the shiny head of the hammer was higher and higher in the air, about to come down on the paralyzed inspector.

The time jerkingly flowed forward again. The hammer dropped, the gun discharged. Two, three shots — the other policeman fired too. Friedensreich felt his right arm went numb: the hammer hit right shoulder.

The crazy sculptor was dead. One bullet was in his heart, the other penetrated his forehead. The killer was gone forever. To hell, Friedensreich thought, still dazed from the pain and the shooting.

Later the police discovered that one of the bullets punctured a hole in the sculpture of a female standing in the corner of the studio. Friedensreich thought her face looked eerily familiar. It was —it was exactly the same as the face that covered the skull of the fifth victim. The sculpture was hollow.

Friedesreich took the hammer, disregarding evidence, and smashed the figure. A sigh of horror filled the air: there was a skeleton inside.

Simon and Mary

In summer of 1894 Simon Matchek met Mary Kovachich. He was a promising sculptor, even studied in Vienna for a year, but could not afford the academy. He lived in Ljubljana and made a living doing stucco work, some decorative sculpturing, and modelling busts of wealthier townsmen and their wives.

Mary worked as a maid and a nurse in a nearby house. She was tall and beautiful — after Simon had met her for the first time, he realized every face he modeled looked like Mary. It was love at a first sight — and it was mutual.

Simon and Mary got married in St. Nicholas church on January 10th, 1895. A month later, she was pregnant.

On April 10th disaster struck: a terrible earthquake devastated Ljubljana just after 10 pm. About ten percent of buildings were damaged or destroyed, although few people died in the destruction. Official death toll in Ljubljana was just seven.

The eighth victim, lying in bed beside Simon, her body crushed under a large piece of the ceiling that had fallen on her, was never counted.

Simon went crazy. The pain and loss was just too much for him to bear. Amidst the panic and confusion in the aftermath on the earthquake, he began loudly thanking God his wife left Ljubljana just the day before the disaster. Everyone assumed Mary was out of town, that she was safe. Nobody had any reason to check Simon’s story.

When she didn’t return, Simon told everyone that Mary had decided to leave him and resettled in Trieste, and that she was planning to emigrate to America. People were sorry for Simon. They thought they were a really nice couple. It was sad to see their marriage break apart.

Then people visiting his studio noticed a beautiful sculpture he was working on. A striking female figure, surrounded by dolphins and swans. Many people wanted to buy the sculpture — but Simon steadfastly refused. Even a large sum the manager of a local bank offered was respectfully, but firmly turned down. The work was not for sale.

Friedensreich von Sussmann stopped writing his final report on the case. The killer was dead, his life and his evil deeds examined and explained. But the motive seemed elusive, speculative at best. Friedensreich knew what happened next, how the darkness inside Simon grew until it consumed him and made him crazy: crazy to the point he started to kidnap women and desperately tried over and over again to sculpt them into Mary — to recreate Mary’s beautiful face with blows of hammer and strokes of chisel on their faces. But he had no proof, no testimony.

Friedensreich decided to leave this out. His report concluded with dry “Motive: insanity.”

Case closed.

A week later Friedensreich von Sussmann was on sick leave his superiors willingly granted for his injuries sustained in the fight with the Crazy Sculptor of Ljubljana. The next day he was to leave to Rijeka and on to Losinj, a beautiful island in the Adriatic —he was looking forward to four weeks of rehabilitation.

As he was strolling on the streets of Ljubljana, something caught his eye. A woman’s face on the wall of a house. A beautiful, angelic face.

A face Friedensreich knew all too well.

His heart skipped a beat. Is another victim behind this face? Is the scupture hiding a skull? Friedensreich ran across the street and was just about to ring the doorbell, when he stopped. No. Let it be, Fried. It is over.

As he walked back to his flat he saw another face of an angel.

Before he got home, he counted 17 of them.