Death Of An Assassin: The True Story Of The German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee (true Crime History) [Hardcover]

From the depths of German and American archives comes a story one soldier never wanted told. The first volunteer killed defending Robert E. Lees position in battle was really a German assassin. After fleeing to the United States to escape prosecution for murder, the assassin enlisted in a German company of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Mexican-American War and died defending Lees battery at the Siege of Veracruz in 1847. Lee wrote a letter home, praising this unnamed fallen volunteer defender. Military records identify him, but none of the Americans knew about his past life of crime.

Before fighting with the Americans, Lees defender had assassinated Johann Heinrich Rieber, mayor of B?nnigheim, Germany, in 1835. Riebers assassination became 19th-century Germanys coldest case ever solved by a nonlaw enforcement professional and the only 19th-century German murder ever solved in the United States. Thirty-seven years later, another suspect in the assassination who had also fled to America found evidence in Washington, D.C., that would clear his own name, and he forwarded it to Germany. The German prosecutor Ernst von Hochstetter corroborated the story and closed the case file in 1872, naming Lees defender as Riebers murderer.

Relying primarily on German sources, Death of an Assassin tracks the never-before-told story of this German company of Pennsylvania volunteers. It follows both Lees and the assassins lives until their dramatic encounter in Veracruz and picks up again with the surprising case resolution decades later.

This case also reveals that forensic ballisticsfirearm identification through comparison of the striations on a projectile with the rifling in the barrelis much older than previously thought. History credits Alexandre Laccasagne for inventing forensic ballistics in 1888. But more than 50 years earlier, Eduard Hammer, the magistrate who investigated the Rieber assassination in 1835, used the same technique to eliminlz