Rosalie Kleinrath folded her good shawl into the wooden chest that morning, placing it beside a comb, a few coins, and a letter from home. She had heard there was good work available, a position with a baroness, steady wages, and a roof that did not leak. She closed the lid gently, as though the box itself were something precious. By evening, she would have followed a stranger into the woods near Sankt Christophen.
She would not come back, and she would not be the first woman on whom Franz Schneider had set his sights. This is the story of a husband and wife who turned the simplest hope of a poor woman, a steady job and a decent home, into a hunting ground. In the summer of 1891, in the quiet countryside of Lower Austria, young women came by the dozens to the employment offices in towns like Nöllingbach, carrying their luggage boxes and applying for positions as servants. For most of them, it was the only real way out of poverty.
Wages, a roof, and a kitchen they could finally manage. That, all in all, was the simplest kind of hope a person could carry, and that was exactly why Franz and Rosalie Schneider chose it as their hunting ground. Franz Schneider was in his mid-thirties that summer. A man who had never learned to write his own name and who had spent half his life moving between prison cells and petty schemes.
What he lacked in education, he made up for in manner. People who met him described his calm, unhurried voice and his way of offering easy compliments. That kind of charm that makes strangers feel comfortable faster than they should. He had a habit, as many witnesses later recalled, of noticing something small and specific about a woman first.
A necklace, or a cross at her throat, or the careful way she carried her luggage, and praising it before mentioning, as if it were merely an incidental thought, that he knew of a vacant position nearby. It rarely seemed like an attempt at seduction. It seemed like a moment of attention and appreciation. That, more than any invented baroness or forged reference, was the real weapon Franz Schneider carried into every encounter.
Beside him was his wife Rosalie, a divorced cook several years his senior, with a sharp gaze and a talent for seeming exactly as respectable as the lie required. They had married that same year thanks to a foreign dowry of 700, which evaporated within months, leaving them by summer as poor as they had been before the wedding, bound together only by need. What Rosalie brought to the marriage was specialized knowledge. She had spent years working in other people’s kitchens, and she understood, better than almost anyone, what a young servant entering a registry office hoped for, what she wanted to hear, and how easily that hope could be steered in the wrong direction.
Where Franz relied on charm, Rosalie relied on credibility. She dressed simply and neatly, spoke in the practical, measured tone of a woman who had managed other people’s households for years, and never overplayed anything. She did not need to make fantastic promises. A steady wage and a respectable lady were more than most of these women had been offered in months.
That restraint, more than any lie, was what made her so convincing. By early summer, the two had settled on a particular method. They would pose as employers, or as people who knew employers, offering positions respectable enough to be believed. The goal, as the records later proved beyond doubt, was not mere robbery.
Nearly a year before the murders began, on the eleventh of September 1890, Franz approached a servant named Johanna Donnsberger at an inn in Sankt Pölten. He admired the little cross around her neck and mentioned a position at another nearby inn, with good pay and light work. It was the same easy promise he had used over and over. She believed him and followed him into open fields outside the town, where she was assaulted and robbed.
She survived the attack and reported it. The authorities dismissed her account, citing what the records called her “bad reputation,” a phrase that caused quietly lasting damage after that night, because it taught Franz Schneider more clearly than anything else that he would not be believed. In late May 1891, he lured a woman named Johanna Strasser to a deserted church near Nöllingbach and demanded her valuables. When she told him she had nothing, he strangled her and assaulted her, leaving her unconscious among the trees.
She survived. On the first of June, he approached a woman named Anna Gouricks and asked her to walk with him into the forest. She refused. He offered instead to accompany her to a nearby inn, and there he assaulted and robbed her before disappearing into the evening crowds.
Like Donnsberger before her, Gouricks said nothing to the police. Not yet. Three women, three assaults, three silences. Each one gave Franz Schneider another month of freedom, another month to refine his method, and another month to learn exactly how far he could go without consequences.
By June, Rosalie had stopped staying at home. The two now worked together, a respectable couple offering employment opportunities that carried a kind of credibility Franz could never have achieved alone. Rosalie spoke of a baroness looking for a servant. She spoke of wages, lodging, and decent work.
For any ambitious young woman standing in a registry office that summer, it sounded exactly like an answer to her prayers. On the eighteenth of June, they found her. Rosalie Kleinrath, the young woman with whom our story began, entirely confident that her box of belongings would follow her to a better life. They told her about a position with Baroness Fuca, in a household Frau Schneider claimed she herself worked in, with good pay and a kind lady, exactly the details she had been hoping to hear for weeks.
Kleinrath believed them, went with the couple to their residence, and later that day walked with Franz into the forest near the village of Sankt Christophen, the same forest where our story opened. He strangled her there, stole all the valuables she carried, and left her among the trees. Afterward, he and Rosalie returned to her empty apartment and sold everything she had left behind, even the comb and the letter from home that she had carefully packed that morning. Two weeks later, on the third of July, Rosalie approached a woman named Marie Höttwagner at the employment registry in Nöllendorf and offered her the same kind of position.
Höttwagner had a sweetheart who accompanied her to the office that day and waited for her at a nearby tavern, expecting her return within the hour. He watched her leave with the Schneiders and suspected nothing. There was nothing in their manner to arouse suspicion. He waited for her that evening.
He waited the next day and the day after, convincing himself there was an ordinary explanation, a delayed train or a misunderstanding about the address. About twenty days later, on the twenty-third of July, her body was found in the dense forest outside Nöllendorf, known locally as the Dürr Woods, strangled and stripped of everything she owned. It was that same young man, who had kept hoping until that moment that he was wrong, who was asked to look at a straw hat found beside her to confirm whether it belonged to her. Five days later, the Schneiders contacted a woman referred to in various sources as Friederike or Vinzenzia Zewal.
Nothing of her personal life remains in the records except her name, and the fact that she too was looking for steady work and believed the couple when they described a position waiting for her. She was killed that same day, stripped of her clothing, and her body hidden under tree branches in a forest near Nöllingbach. Some contemporary reports claimed that Rosalie used a chemical to sedate her before the killing. Historians remain divided over how accurate this detail is.
It was Anna Gouricks who finally broke the silence. Around the twenty-fourth of July, she read newspaper reports about one of the murders, recognized the description of the man involved, and came forward to the police with his name, a rough description of his build and manner, and an account of an assault she had been too afraid or too ashamed to report a month earlier. The investigators already had a second thread to pull. Earlier that month, a furniture dealer in Vienna had felt suspicious about a used travel bag purchased from an elderly man and woman.
Its lock was broken and its contents emptied, so he reported the sale to the police on instinct alone, without knowing at the time that it had any significance. Gouricks’s testimony gave that vague report a name to attach, and a name to search for in guesthouses and labor markets where Franz Schneider was known. Gendarmes and forest guards began combing the countryside around Nöllingbach in growing numbers, searching ground that had quietly, over one terrible summer, become a resting place for the dead. On the fifth of August 1891, Franz and Rosalie Schneider were arrested at their home in Rudolfsheim, where they had been living under the aliases Ferdinand and Rosalie Riedler.
Inside, the police found clothing belonging not only to the three women linked to the case, but according to some accounts, to three others whose disappearances were never explained. Women whose names never reached the surviving records at all. They also found prayer books and religious cards bearing the names of women no longer alive to claim them. The couple had kept them among their personal possessions, as though the dead had simply become part of the household furniture.
This discovery, more than the arrest itself, was what transformed the case from a local tragedy into something far larger in the public imagination. If three deaths could be proven, and the apartment contained evidence pointing to six, then Lower Austria had not seen one terrible summer. It may have seen a far worse one, with most of its victims remaining undiscovered. News of the arrest spread through Vienna almost immediately.
The newspapers gave the couple harsh nicknames of their own invention within days. For the rest of that year, hardly a week passed without new details of the case filling the front pages. Search teams continued to comb the forests around Nöllingbach long after the initial arrests, looking for any trace of the women whose clothing was found in that apartment, while their bodies were never recovered. The bodies of Zewal and Kleinrath were not recovered until months later, found in mid and late November respectively, badly decomposed after spending an entire season in the forest.
What the investigators could confirm with confidence in each murder was the method: strangulation by Franz’s own hands, with Rosalie on at least one occasion holding the victim’s wrists above her head so her husband would not be scratched during the struggle, as had happened to him once before. The clothing found in their apartment was matched piece by piece against the missing women, and became the clearest evidence the prosecution presented to the court. It was not a confession, but an inventory of what they left behind. On the fifteenth of September, while awaiting trial, Rosalie threw herself from a third-floor window.
She survived the fall with serious injuries and was nursed back to health to face trial eventually. The trial opened in Vienna on the twenty-sixth of January 1892, and immediately became the talk of the hour. People lined up for hours to get a seat in the courtroom and refused to give it up even during recess, passing food hidden under their coats so they would not lose their places. Franz confessed openly, and did so, according to witnesses, with disturbing calm, at times even appearing cheerful, as though the weight of what he had done had not fully registered.
The same easy manner that had once drawn women into the forests was now useless before a judge who believed none of it. Rosalie’s role was presented in detail. The holding of wrists, the false promises, the years of insider knowledge she brought to the scheme. Anna Gouricks and Johanna Strasser both stood on the witness stand, finally giving voice to assaults that had gone largely disbelieved for most of the year.
Neighbors and acquaintances described small, unsettling things they had noticed about the couple in the weeks before the arrest, things that had not seemed worth mentioning at the time. As the trial continued, the husband and wife turned on each other completely. Franz blamed Rosalie. Rosalie blamed Franz.
Witnesses described their arguments as fierce, almost animalistic. By the final days of the trial, the two had stopped speaking to each other entirely, separated by accusations as much as by the defendant’s dock itself. The newspapers, in an obvious comparison, called them Vienna’s answer to Hugo Schenk, the servant girl killer who had terrorized the same city less than a decade earlier. On the twenty-ninth of January, the jury returned.
Franz was convicted on all counts. Rosalie was convicted only of Zewal’s murder. Both were sentenced to death. Days before her execution, Rosalie’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with an additional week in solitary confinement as punishment.
For Franz, there was no pardon. He spent his final weeks writing farewell letters and attempting, without success, to reconcile with the wife who would now outlive him. For his last meal, he ordered roast pork, red wine, a cigar, and coffee with milk. Small, ordinary comforts he had chosen carefully, comforts he had never shown the women he killed.
He was executed in Vienna in mid-March 1892 before a crowd of officials, journalists, and members of the public who had followed the case for over a year. When word reached Rosalie that her husband had wished her well in his final hours, she answered only with blame. Rosalie spent her remaining years in a women’s penal institution outside Vienna, remembered in some accounts as an exceptionally well-behaved prisoner. The records do not allow this report to state with confidence when or how she eventually died.
Rosalie Kleinrath, Marie Höttwagner, and a woman remembered by some as Friederike or Vinzenzia Zewal came to the registry offices of Lower Austria that summer, looking for honest work, fair wages, and a home that might value their presence. Instead, what they found was a husband and wife who had learned to read that hope better than anyone who was supposed to protect them. There is no memorial in the forests around Nöllingbach for what happened there.
Only the records remain, preserved now in court archives and yellowed newspaper clippings, keeping, however incompletely, the names of women who wanted only a place to belong.
