By Mara Bovsun - NYDailyNews.com

January 17th 2009

Frau Josephine Molitor was firmly against the marriage, certain that no good could come of a union between her plain 25-year-old daughter Lina, and Karl Hau, a brilliant, flamboyant 19-year-old law student.

Mother knew best. Six years after the wedding, both she and her daughter were dead, and the bridegroom stood accused of the murder of his mother-in-law.

Hau's trial was a sensation, and when the guilty verdict was announced on July 22, 1907, riots erupted in the streets of Karlsruhe, Germany.

One old woman was trampled and scores of people were injured as hundreds of citizens went wild in front of the courthouse. It took two companies of infantry and a squadron of mounted police to bring order.

On the evening of her murder, Nov. 6, 1906, Frau Molitor had received a telephone message at her villa in Baden-Baden, telling her that a parcel was waiting for her at the post office. She and her younger daughter, Olga, set off to retrieve the package. As they turned onto a deserted street, there was a flash, and the old woman fell to the ground, dead, a bullet piercing her heart. Her daughter screamed, bringing police and a flock of the curious.

The postmortem showed that the gunman had been no more than 3 feet away when he fired the fatal shot.

A few people said they saw a man run from the scene. Some said he was short, others said medium height. All agreed that the assailant looked young, and that he appeared to be wearing a phony beard.

Hau on the hot seat

Suspicion fell immediately on the son-in-law, and there were several factors to support his guilt. The housemaid who answered the telephone, for example, thought that the voice announcing the parcel at the post office was Hau.

More significant was the visit that brought Hau, his wife and their young daughter to the Molitor household that summer.

They had traveled a long way, coming from Washington, D.C., where the couple had settled immediately after their wedding. There, Hau continued his studies, and graduated with high honors. Diploma in hand, he established a respectable law practice and secured a prestigious position teaching Roman law at George Washington University.

In the summer of 1906, the Haus headed for Europe, partly on business and partly to pay a visit to Molitor. While his wife and daughter went directly to the Molitor villa, Hau took a side trip to Constantinople to seal a deal over Turkish oil.

The deal fell through, and when Hau joined his wife at his mother-in-law's place in July, he was broke. He begged the wealthy widow Molitor to bail him out. She said no.

They stayed on at the villa for a few more months, with the relations cordial, but cool. In late October, Hau announced that it was time to head back to America. He packed his wife and child on a train to take the trip to London and then a liner back to the states.

But in Frankfort, he abruptly told his wife that he had some business to conduct, and that she should go on ahead and wait for him at the Hotel Cecil in London.

After the murder, police tried to find Hau in Frankfort, but they had missed him by a day. Some guests at the hotel where he stayed recalled that he wore a black beard, while others insisted he was clean-shaven.

In Frankfort, police learned, he had hired a hairdresser to fashion a phony beard for him. They also discovered that he had taken the train to Baden-Baden at 11 in the morning, returning to Frankfort on the 10 p.m. train.

Even more incriminating was a telegram he had sent to his wife that day: "Arrive tomorrow night. Don't betray address."

When he arrived in London on Nov. 9, police were waiting for him.

After his arrest, he behaved like a madman, raving that he was the favorite son of the sultan of Turkey.

By January he had regained his reason, and was on his way to Germany.

In the meantime, his wife had started to delve into certain domestic financial matters - specifically, what had become of her dowry. Her late father had left her $50,000, which she promptly turned over to her husband upon their marriage. Her lawyers couldn't find a cent.

In June, Lina Hau visited her husband in jail. They talked for a long time, and guards noticed that she seemed despondent when she left.

She traveled by train from Karlsruhe to Pfaeffikon, Switzerland, and upon arrival went for a swim in one of the beautiful mountain lakes.

A boater later pulled her lifeless form from the water.

In her suicide note she said she could not bear to be separated from her husband, "notwithstanding his awful deed."

A fake beard

It was with all of this circumstantial evidence that Karl Hau faced a jury on July 17, 1907. The Frankfort barber testified that Hau had hired him to make a false beard, which the defendant picked up on Nov. 6.

The motive, the prosecutors said, was money. Lina's dowry was gone, but she stood to inherit substantial property upon the death of her mother.

His attorneys tried to raise reasonable doubt, casting suspicion on other people, and offering explanations for everything from his false beard to his travels that brought him to Baden on the day of the killing. He had been lured to Baden by love, they said, a clandestine affair with Olga, his wife's sister.

Hau admitted to making the telephone call summoning his mother-in-law to the post office, but he insisted his motive was only to get her out of the house, so he could be alone with his beloved Olga.

Somehow this story touched the hearts of the German people, and that's when crowds started gathering outside the courthouse.

At the end of the five-day trial, there were great masses in the streets, and when the verdict came in, they stormed the entrance. The mob cast the Molitor women as the villains, and threw rocks through the windows at the hotels where the family stayed during the trial.

Despite the public outcry, Hau was sentenced to death in the traditional manner - beheading by ax.

Hau appealed, citing dozens of shortcomings in the prosecution's case.

His conviction was upheld, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. Ten years later, in September 1924, he was set free under one condition: He must not write about the case.

Hau defied the condition of his parole, penning a book. A warrant was issued for his arrest, but he vanished.

No one knew what had become of him, until March 12, 1926, when a man living in Tivoli, Italy, shot himself. He called himself Stau, but authorities confirmed that the fingerprints of the suicide matched those of the fugitive Karl Hau.