**The authorities in Lucerne were convinced they had caught an entire "counter-society of crooks". Illustration by Marco Heer.**

The Keller Affair: conspiracy, coercion and the criminal underworld

With the help of a homeless woman named Klara Wendel, in 1825 the authorities in Lucerne hoped to uncover a conspiracy behind the death of the city mayor, Franz Xaver Keller, nine years earlier.

Patrik Süess

Patrik Süess is a freelance historian.

The mayor of Lucerne, Joseph Karl Amrhyn, was positively buzzing. The truth was finally out: contrary to the forensic report, his predecessor, mayor Franz Xaver Keller, had not in fact “lost his footing”, slipped into the Reuss and drowned as he ventured along the dangerous stretch of road known as ‘der böse Weg’ (‘the perilous path’) one stormy night in September 1816. On the contrary, the incident had been nothing short of an assassination. In the politically charged years of the Restoration, it had long been rumoured that Keller’s death was the result of an attack orchestrated by ultramontane circles. In the early 1820s, as a feud raged in Lucerne between the aristocratic-conservative, pro-Church party and the early liberal-State church party, liberals like Amrhyn lived in constant fear of a ‘counterrevolution’ and political attacks. And now, finally, in September 1825, he held the key to unlocking a huge plot.

**Was the former Lucerne mayor Franz Xaver Keller murdered? It seemed so!** Wikimedia

Apparently, it had been a conservative councillor named Leodegar Corragioni, who nine years previously had led a band of robbers, headed by two homeless men named Josef Twerenbold and Hans Wendel (known as ‘Krusihans’) from their secluded camp to the country house of Joseph Pfyffer von Heidegg, another conservative member of the Cantonal Council. After being wined and dined and treated like royalty, the robbers allegedly received the order to kill Franz Xaver Keller. With their faces blackened, the pair were said to have laid in wait for Keller and thrown him into the Reuss. After the deed was done, the shady characters were rewarded with two guilder and four Kronenthaler and were said to have celebrated late into the night in the company of Corragioni and Pfyffer.

At least this is the account given by Klara Wendel, the sister of ‘Krusihans’. And that was far from all she had to say! According to Klara, there was an extensive ultramontane plot running through the heart of Lucerne’s patrician class: besides Pfyffer and Corragioni, she claimed the communal councillors Fleckenstein and Segesser were also involved, as well as the apostolic nunciature, protestant judge Blumer, and two mysterious Italian-speaking clerics, who supposedly knew how to kill people through prayer and whom Klara Wendel referred to as the Polentenfresser (‘the polenta muncher’) and Meitschifuxer (‘the skirt chaser’). This conspiratorial clique in which many more councillors and priests were involved (“If I walked along the street, I’d recognise a few faces!”, said Klara), was said to have poisoned a number of political adversaries, and allegedly kept a hit list of people it wanted to kill. The fact that communal councillor Segesser was said to be one of the plotters must have particularly troubled Amrhyn as Segesser was his father-in-law. The Lucerne government immediately put in place maximum security measures: the armoury was manned by trusted officials and a garrison was ordered in the barracks. Councillors Pfyffer and Corragioni were arrested and charged with Keller’s murder.

**Portrait of Klara Wendel, 19th century** Burgerbibliothek of Berne

Portrait of Johann Wendel, also known as ‘Krusihans’. Lithograph, 1826. — **Portrait of Johann Wendel, also known as *‘Krusihans’*. Lithograph, 1826.** Wikimedia

Nobody could have guessed this would happen when a year earlier, in the summer of 1824, 20-year-old Klara Wendel had been arrested in Einsiedeln (SZ) for selling laces and ribbons that had come from a burglary in Näfels (GL). Klara and her family belonged to a group of travelling vagrants, who were estimated to number several thousand in Switzerland in the first half of the 19th century.

These itinerant peoples were mostly descendants of those who had lost their citizenship or right of domicile in a Swiss municipality over the previous centuries. Anyone who was not a citizen of a commune was homeless and lived on the margins of the community or was left to wander the country as a vagrant. Since the communes had been made solely responsible for supporting their poor in the 16th century, impoverished citizens were increasingly stripped of their citizenship. Reasons for loss of citizenship included criminality, but also an overly long period of absence from the home town, circumventing marriage bans, or illegal changes of denomination. Losing the right of domicile like this usually led to expulsion from the commune of origin and forced those affected into an itinerant lifestyle. Life on the open road was “a constant struggle for survival and played out in a social milieu that was characterised by permanent repression and social stigmatisation.” People lived hand to mouth – if they were lucky, they could get work as casual labourers, but sometimes petty crime was the only way to survive. Klara Wendel’s father Niklaus, for example, worked as a travelling sieve maker, while her mother Katharina scraped a living for the family (Klara and her four siblings) through begging and petty theft.

**Klara Wendel was arrested in Einsiedeln in 1824.** Swiss National Museum

When Klara Wendel was arrested, people initially thought it was a typical case of vagrant petty crime. But the longer the hearing lasted, the more extensive Klara’s confessions became. After six months of imprisonment, she had already owned up to 400 thefts and burglaries that she claimed to have committed with a professional band of crooks, as well as cases of arson and murder. She also said that she and her gang had planned to blow up dozens of other houses and churches, and ultimately to burn half of Glarnerland to the ground. She even claimed responsibility for the great fire of Fläsch of 1822. The only reason she had not been exposed, she said, was because she was being protected by ‘people in high places’, such as councillors Gallati and Landolt, who often visited the travellers’ camp, dressed up as robbers, and then took part in the gang’s robberies. The authorities were deeply alarmed: besides the crime itself, this affair blurred the lines between all parts of society and social classes in the most dangerous way possible. When Klara finally claimed that her brother and his side kick had murdered mayor Keller, she was transferred from Glarus to Lucerne for the trial.

The newspaper Der Schweizerfreund reported on the major fire in the village of Fläsch in March 1822. e-newspaperarchives

Klara Wendel’s testimony led to a veritable witch hunt against homeless vagrant people. So-called ‘beggar hunts’ had already existed in previous centuries; the homeless people picked up were usually beaten, branded or had their ears cut and were then simply kicked out of the canton. This time, however, the authorities were convinced they had convicted a ‘highly dangerous band of robbers’. They worked themselves into a panic about a whole ‘counter society of criminals’. In the end, 17 men, 22 women and 27 children were arrested. After months of imprisonment in Lucerne, with systematic mistreatment and appalling sanitary conditions, confessions then followed that tallied with Klara’s version of events and what the authorities wanted to hear. Klara’s brother Hans Wendel was prepared to confess to anything the judge wanted to hear because “his life was ruined”. Josef Twerenbold, who had also been seriously incriminated in the Keller ‘murder’ by Klara died as a result of detention conditions. However, the Lucerne authorities were proud of their success and convened a conference to inform the other cantons about the events in Lucerne. The sensational coup in which the Lucerne government had won the battle against organised crime and its political accomplices, was even reported abroad, while the play ‘Clara Wendel ou La Demoiselle Brigand’ premiered in Paris.

The play ‘Clara Wendel ou La Demoiselle Brigand’ premiered in Paris in January 1827. — **The play *‘Clara Wendel ou La Demoiselle Brigand’* premiered in Paris in January 1827.** Google Books

But criticism was soon levelled at the way in which the hearings were conducted and the confessions obtained. And when the proceedings were moved from Lucerne to Zurich in December 1825 and new judges were deployed, the whole prosecution collapsed. The hearing judge in Zurich, Heinrich Escher, concluded that the previous hearings with their countless leading questions and constant threats of severe punishment if the crimes were denied, amounted to a ‘bad comedy’. He bemoaned the fact that there was no proof and only presumptive evidence of all the alleged crimes. On the contrary, he said, the hearings had not attempted to investigate the crimes, merely to engineer them, as the authorities were hell-bent on arresting a dangerous gang of robbers and uncovering a political conspiracy. He said that Klara Wendel “who looked like a typical moll” had been systematically set up as the accomplice witness by being granted preferential treatment and rewarded for every additional ‘confession’. Escher closed with the words: “Truly, if these proceedings were not so very serious in their causes and consequences, they would be amusing.”

**The notorious Klara Wendel on a print from the 19th century.** Burgerbibliothek of Berne

As soon as Escher took over the hearings, the defendants all withdrew their forced confessions. In the end, Klara also admitted that she had never taken part in a murder, manslaughter or arson, and had “never seen such things”. When asked why she had made all these false claims, she answered that the judge “often asked me about things of which I knew nothing and would not leave me alone until I gave information. (…) People always thought I knew so much; it’s true, I did know a lot, but nowhere near as much as people gave me credit for”. Many times she claimed to have said “no one will believe all this, to which they answered, if no one will believe you, we’ll believe you. (…) I would rather have broken my neck and all my limbs than get involved in this poisonous story.” Corragioni and Pfyffer were acquitted and released from prison. However, three of the imprisoned vagrants were executed as ‘incorrigible thieves’. And Klara Wendel was sentenced to twelve years of penal servitude for multiple counts of theft.

Right of domicile and municipal citizenship for all

The case finally pushed the issue of homelessness and citizenship to the top of the federal political agenda. Measures were sought “to eradicate with due force this subversive element that is a danger to public safety”. The solution to the ‘homelessness issue’ and the fight against ‘the scourge of criminality’ became one and the same. The Federal Act of 1850 mandated the federal government to grant all Swiss homeless people municipal citizenship. The place of naturalisation was decided on the basis of any temporary suspension of deportation permits, the place where the parents married, or the person’s longest de facto place of residence since 1803. The communes were prevented from stripping people of their citizenship due to criminality or absence. As part of a nationwide manhunt in 1852, the cantonal police forces rounded up hundreds of itinerants and transported them to Bern where they were assigned a new commune of origin. While the federal act gave homeless people citizenship in a commune, it also required them to settle. In some cases, this led to the new citizens being forcibly confined to their new communes of origin for years or decades, and being subjected to ‘paternal police supervision’ “to gradually suppress their overwhelming inclination to roam around and their aversion to permanent work.” In addition, ‘unemployed, wandering vagrants and beggars’ were sentenced to imprisonment and forced labour.

**Police photo of Klara Wendel, 1852/53.** Wikimedia / Swiss Federal Archives

A particularly dark chapter in this process of forced assimilation was the removal of children. Families of ‘vagrants’ were deliberately broken up in order to remove children from the “corruptive influences” of their parents, or as emphasised by the Lucerne Society for the Common Good in 1826: the fact that “babes in arms imbibe malice from their reprobate parents from infancy (...) has led us to make the philanthropic decision to take these children away from inevitable corruption” and to place them “with families of recognised moral standing, (...) to bestow on them the benefit of a Christian upbringing and civic care” and to turn them “from enemies of human society into useful members thereof”. What was done in the 20th century on a large scale by the ‘Kinder der Landstrasse’ (‘Children of the Open Road’) aid organisation founded in 1926, already started 100 years earlier with the first removals of children following the Keller Affair in Lucerne.

While Klara’s brother Hans died in the workhouse in 1831, Klara Wendel remained in prison until 1837. She was then assigned temporarily to the commune of Lucerne, where she relied on state welfare and lived for many years as a forced inmate in a ‘correctional institution’ until she was finally granted citizenship. She spent the last years of her life in Malters and St. Urban, where she died in 1884 at the age of 80.

More of: Modern Age Crime Women in history

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