Arsenic and silk ribbons: Frankfurt poisoners with double life

A red silk ribbon and a rod under the chaise longue.

Back then, in July 1912, Wally Hopf was irritated by this find in her married apartment on Bülowstrasse, now Heidelberger Strasse.

What had her husband Karl Hopf been up to while she was visiting her sister in Glashütten im Taunus for a few days?

Suspiciously, she opened her husband's secretary.

What she discovered unsettled Wally even more: intimate letters to strange women, some of them written during the time of their engagement.

To her surprise, she also found documents stating that her husband had been married twice before. Wally only knew of one marriage; the woman, Hopf had told her, had died. The unsuspecting wife was completely shocked when she found pornographic pictures in a small box that showed Karl Hopf during sadomasochistic practices with a naked girl. When Wally confronted him when he returned to their apartment, the husband refused to make a statement. But when she had her tea at breakfast the next morning, she immediately went black and felt miserable. She suspected that her husband had tried to poison her. Having regained her strength, she took the rest of the tea to a chemist's laboratory on Lange Strasse,where, however, no toxin could be found in the drink. The day later, Wally had headache, diarrhea, and vomiting again. Because the symptoms persisted, she was cared for at home by a nurse and her husband for weeks. Finally, her family doctor managed to have her taken to the deaconess hospital on Eschersheimer Landstrasse, where she fought for her life for seven days.where she fought for her life for seven days.where she fought for her life for seven days.

Spectacular process in the German Empire

After the doctors there had analyzed all the temperature curves and pulse diagrams and studied the disease in detail, their findings were clear: Wally Hopf, née Siewic, had undoubtedly been poisoned. This sealed the fate of the poisoner Karl Hopf. His wife filed a complaint, and Hopf was arrested on April 14, 1913 in front of the deaconess hospital. During the interrogation, Detective Inspector von Salomon suggested that Hopf had secretly administered poison to his wife in order to get a life insurance of 80,000 Reichsmarks after her death. And not only that. He had already killed his first wife with poison and then cashed in her life insurance. The surprised Hopf admitted: “Yes, it's true, I gave my wife poison, digitalis at that. But it happened by mistakeI never wanted to poison her. "

The attempted poisoning of his third wife was not the only outrage that Hopf was accused of in one of the most spectacular trials in the German Empire. The public prosecutor accused the accused of sevenfold murder and attempted murder with arsenic or thimble poison and - unique at the time - with typhoid, cholera and other deadly bacteria. The former Baden judge Thomas Schnepf has now written down the sensational criminal case on the basis of the court files and the press reports at the time and titled “Frankfurt poison murders. Der Fall Karl Hopf ”published as a book.