thecrimes Stuart also finds the women as the most frequent murderers and children the most frequent victims, but when children cannot be found the victims are chosen that are ”somehow childlike”.89 Peter Kaatzer had collected a number of cases of what he calls indirect suicide and he noted that the statistics of perpetrators of ordinary suicides showed that a majority of them were between twenty and thirty years old. For indirect suicide, he found that six out of ten women were between twenty and thirty years old while only ten out of thirty men were of that age.90 The idea of the almost self-evident salvation of the little child was thought to offer the murderer protection against bloodguilt. This clearly contrasted with the often-stated belief that murder, and especially the murder of children, generated bloodguilt.91 Killing a child could also be seen as a favour to the child, delivering it from the dangers and temptations of this world.92 Vera Lind identified twenty-three murderers (fourteen men and nine women) in a study of suicide in Schleswig-Holstein in 1600–1820. She found that the women committing ”verdeckt” suicide always murdered a child less than ten years of age and almost always used a knife to cut the throat of the child.93 In a both typical and extreme case from 1808, a woman was executed in Malmö because she had murdered ten of her children. Still she had waited with murdering them until they were baptised.94 In 1698, more than acentury earlier, acase from Stockholm was mentioned at agovern89 ”They sometimes also killed adults, often in institutional settings – houses of correction, hospitals–where they might have been constrained in their choice of victims. But even here they preferred victims whom they perceived as somehow childlike–the deaf, dumb, and simple-minded.” Stuart 2023 p 75 sqq (Quotation p 80). 90 Kaatzer 1872 p 9. 91 See for the latter thought e g Bergman 1996 p 21 sqq, 25 sqq, 30 sqq, 38, 40. See also Schnabel-Schüle 1997 p 260 about Hans Jörg Wagner which in 1778 when he decided to murder his wife did not regard it as problem or a double murder even though she was pregnant, because she was only in the twelfth week and he thought that the child only acquired a soul in the sixteenth week. 92 Chevalier 1837 p 315 sq. 93 ’disguised’ Lind 1999 p 191, 336. 94 Note 24 October 1808 C:1 Malmö slottsförsamlings arkivMSA. 48
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