When the appraisers from the Erfurt antique firm entered the workshop and walked around the tall metal bookcase against the far wall, for the first few seconds they didn’t realize what they were looking at.
A woman was sitting in an armchair in a completely natural pose, a book open on her lap, a finger tucked between the pages, her head tilted slightly as if she had just looked up from reading and was lost in her own thoughts.
She was wearing a light-colored dress and her hair was pulled back.
Appraiser Brigitta Kraus later told investigators that her first thought was to apologize for intruding.
She almost said it out loud.
“I’m sorry.
We didn’t know anyone was here.
” It took a few seconds before she realized what had happened.
She left the studio, went down to the street, and sat on the steps of the building’s entrance.
Her colleague, Thomas Fischer, called the police.
The woman in the chair had been sitting there for six years.
Her husband had spent the most time working on her face.
He wanted her to look just as she did in the wedding photo, which had been hanging in the hallway all this time, right above the staircase leading down to the workshop.
Herman Schultz restored dolls, not children’s toys, museum exhibits, wax figures, 19th century porcelain mannequins, and paper-mâché anatomical models for old medical schools.
His workshop was located on the second floor of an old apartment building in Eisenach, Thuringia, the city of Bach and Luther, a city where tourists take pictures of Wartburg Castle and buy postcards featuring views of tiled roofs.
The street where Herman lived was not on any tourist itinerary.
An ordinary apartment building, appealing cornice, a heavy wooden door with a brass handle darkened by time.
He moved there in 1989, right after the fall of the wall, when half the residents of the GDR were moving away and the other half didn’t understand what was happening.
Herman understood.
He rented an apartment with a separate entrance on the second floor, negotiated a lease for a studio, and moved in his tools, books, and several unfinished works.
A wax head wearing a baroque era wig and a wooden mannequin without arms, to which he planned to restore limbs made of a special polymer.
The neighbors saw him carrying boxes.
No one helped.
He didn’t ask for help.
His work was delicate, requiring patience, a profession that had all but disappeared.
There were few commissions, but Hermann knew how to wait better than anyone his neighbors knew.
He could spend years working on a single piece, cleaning, reinforcing, and restoring what time had tried to destroy.
He believed that time could be outwitted, that the right technique, the right materials, and enough patience allow one to preserve things just as they were.
This idea, not an obsession, not a delusion, but precisely an idea, methodically developed over the years, ran like a common thread through everything he did, through every project, through every page of the handwritten notebooks that were later found in the bottom drawer of his desk, through every decision he made in the final years of his life.
His wife’s name was Clara, Clara Schultz, née Neumann.
They met in Erfurt in 1993, when she was working in the city library’s archives, and he came looking for old catalogs of museum collections.
He needed the original inventories of the Weimar Museum’s exhibits from the 1920s to verify the attribution of a mannequin that had been brought in for restoration.
Clara showed him into the archives, retrieved the necessary folders, and helped him navigate the cataloging system.
They talked for over 2 hours.
Then she offered him tea from the thermos she always brought to work.
He accepted.
They talked for another hour.
The following week, he came again without a specific request, he just showed up.
She wasn’t surprised, or at least she pretended not to be.
Six months later, they got married.
It was a modest wedding, a few of Clara’s colleagues from the library, her friend from school days, Heike Werner, and Hermann’s older brother Wilhelm from Dresden.
Wilhelm gave a toast in which he wished the newlyweds many years together.
It was the only time any of Hermann’s relatives had ever attended a family event.
Then her brother stopped replying to her letters, gradually, without explanation.
Clara asked about it once.
Hermann said, “We never had anything in common.
” She didn’t press the matter.
In the wedding photo photo, which they later found hanging in the apartment hallway, right above the stairs leading to the studio, Clara is laughing openly, with her head tilted back slightly.
She’s wearing a light-colored dress with a lace collar, holding wildflowers in her hand.
Next to her is Hermann in a dark suit.
He isn’t looking at the camera.
He’s looking at her.
Neighbors in the building later recalled that they had always been a little afraid of him, not because of anything specific, just his gaze.
He looked at people the way a restorer looks at an artifact, appraisingly, studying them, as if thinking about how it’s put together inside and what needs to be done to preserve it.
A woman from the third floor, Martha Seebert, recalled that she once ran into him on the stairs, and he looked at her silently for a few seconds, just looked, before saying hello.
Then he said, “Good afternoon.
” and walked past her.
She recounted this many years later saying, “I thought he was strange back then, but there are plenty of strange people.
We’re all a little strange.
” Clara worked at the same library until the year 2000, then transferred to teach German at a local school.
Her colleagues described her as calm, attentive, and a bit reserved.
She didn’t attend company parties, rarely stayed late after work, and never talked about her personal life.
But she was pleasant.
She always greeted people by name, always asked how they were doing, and actually listened to the answer.
Heike Werner, her school friend, said later that Clara never complained about Hermann.
She never said she was unhappy, but she never said she was happy either.
She simply didn’t say anything.
That in itself meant something, but Heike only realized it later.
They had no children.
Hermann didn’t like it when the house was noisy.
The house was always quiet.
In 1998, five years after their wedding, Hermann began keeping notebooks.
The first one, an ordinary school notebook, lined with a brown cover, began with theoretical reflections on conservation.
It discussed how any organic form decays, and that this decay is not inevitable, but merely a consequence of insufficient knowledge.
That the correct choice of preservative solution, proper preparation of the material, and consistent application of the technique allow Here he wrote the word in English, though everything else was in German.
The structure to be preserved indefinitely.
The first 30 pages were almost academic.
A list of sources in the margins, references to works on museum conservation, notes on the chemical properties of various fixing solutions.
Then the entries began to change.
In the notebook from the year 2001, anatomical diagrams appeared.
Not of museum exhibits.
In 2002, according to her colleagues at school, Clara began to look different.
Not worse, just different.
More cautious.
Several times she came to work and sat in the teachers’ lounge for a long time without going into her classroom.
Once a senior teacher found her standing by the window in the hallway looking out at the street.
He asked if everything was all right.
She said, “Yes, I was just lost in thought.
” She smiled and went into the classroom.
Around the same time, Heike Werner recalled a phone call she hadn’t been able to get out of her head for several years.
Clara called late in the evening, around 11:00, which was completely out of character for her.
She spoke quietly, as if she didn’t want to be overheard.
She said, “Do you remember when we read about Grinelius in school?” Heike didn’t remember anyone named Grinelius.
Clara said, “Oh, never mind.
” Then she paused and said, “You’re a good friend.
” And she hung up.
Heike called back.
There was no answer.
The next day, she didn’t think much of it.
A few months later, there was no sign of Clara.
In 2003, the neighbors stopped seeing Clara.
Not all at once, it happened gradually.
At first, she was simply seen less often.
Then she didn’t show up for weeks, then not at all.
When asked, Herman replied briefly, “She went to visit her mother in Magdeburg.
Her mother isn’t in very good health, and it’s unclear when she’ll return.
” The library said she had resigned in writing by mail.
The school principal received a signed resignation letter.
The signature matched the one in her personnel file.
Herman delivered the package of documents in person.
People who knew Clara asked if he would say hello to her.
Herman would say, “I certainly will.
” He’d put on his hat and leave.
Heike Werner called Magdeburg a few months later.
She found her mother’s number through directory assistance.
Clara’s mother, Ingrid Neumann, 71 years old, said that her daughter hadn’t visited her.
She said she’d last seen her at Christmas in 2002.
She added that Clara had been calling less often lately than she used to, and that on her last birthday, she’d sent a card with a short message, just a few lines, unlike Clara’s usual writing style.
But she didn’t think much of it.
People change.
Everyone changes.
Heike Werner reported it to the police.
Two officers arrived, a young one and an older one.
Herman met them at the door, invited them in, and offered them tea.
The apartment was neat, clean, and odorless.
Several pieces of art hung on the walls, small framed wax portraits, something historical.
Herman took out a folder of letters, several envelopes with a return address in Magdeburg, handwritten in a handwriting that a graphological analysis later confirmed was identical to samples from Clara’s personal documents.
Then he called from her phone.
Her voice answered calmly and briefly.
Everything was fine.
She needed time and she would get in touch when she was ready.
The officers took her statement, drew up a report, and left.
No case was opened.
How Herman had reproduced her voice became one of the key questions of the investigation.
Edited audio recordings were found in the workshop.
Short fragments of her speech processed using software that in the early 2000s was not yet widely available, but already existed.
Several audio files dated 2002 were discovered on the computer’s hard drive.
He recorded her phone conversations, her voice during dinner, and her words when she read aloud.
She had a habit of reading aloud when she thought no one was listening.
He heard her.
He recorded her.
He wrote the letters himself, carefully copying her handwriting.
Dozens of pages of calligraphy exercises were found in notebooks where he reproduced time and again the distinctive features of her writing of individual letters.
Six years passed.
In 2009, Herman Schultz died.
A stroke.
He collapsed in his workshop at night, alone, and was found only in the morning when a neighbor downstairs smelled something burning.
A pot had been left on the stove.
They had to break down the door.
Herman was found on the floor next to his workbench.
The ambulance arrived quickly, but he was already dead.
He was 61 years old.
He had no heirs.
A notary took charge of his estate and hired appraisers from Airfort.
Forensic experts worked in the workshop for 3 days.
What Herman Schultz had done was unprecedented in German criminal investigation practice.
He used a combination of techniques, partly from classical taxidermy, partly from methods used to preserve museum wax figures, and partly from his own innovations, which were documented in detail in his handwritten notebooks.
The notebooks were dated.
The oldest one was from 1998.
In other words, he began developing the method 5 years before he applied it.
Forensic pathologist Professor Andreas Haas wrote in his report that he had never encountered a similar case before and found it difficult to provide a definitive diagnosis.
Clara’s cause of death could not be officially determined.
The condition of the tissues precluded definitive conclusions.
A criminal case was opened in 2009 and closed in 2012 following the death of the sole suspect.
Criminal psychologist Sabina Roth, who consulted with the investigators, wrote an analytical report, parts of which were published in a specialized journal in 2014.
She described Schultz’s case as an extreme manifestation of what is sometimes referred to in the literature as total control pathology, a compulsive desire to possess a person absolutely, eliminating the very variable of life
itself.
A living person changes, grows old, passes away, makes their own decisions.
A living person does not belong entirely to anyone.
Schultz was unable to tolerate this uncertainty and found a solution that seemed logical to him.
Roth noted in the same article, “Such cases are extremely rare, not because there are few people with such inclinations, but because most lack the specific knowledge and patience to carry them out.
” Herman Schultz had both.
His profession and his pathology were a perfect match.
The book resting on Clara’s lap was a hardcover novel published in 1971 with her name written in pencil on the endpaper.
Investigators determined that it had been her favorite book since her teenage years, the one she reread whenever she was feeling down.
How Herman knew this is unknown.
Perhaps she told him herself.
Perhaps he had simply been observing her long enough.
The book was passed on to her mother.
Ingrid Neumann died in 2013.
What became of the book afterward is unknown.
The house in Eisenach was sold at auction in 2011.
The new owners renovated it, repainted the walls, and turned the workshop into a children’s room.
The wedding photo remained in the hallway when the house was sold.
The real estate agent decided that the old portraits gave the house character.
A few months later, the new owner’s 9-year-old daughter asked who the people in the photograph were.
Her mother replied, “The former residents.
” The girl looked at it again and said, “The man is looking at the woman strangely.
” Her mother asked, “How strange?” The girl thought for a moment and said, “It’s as if she’s no longer alive, but he doesn’t know it yet.
” The photograph was taken down the next day.
When the journalist asked Heike Werner how she felt now, years later, she didn’t answer right away.
Then she said, “I feel like I shouldn’t have closed the notebook.
When I called Magdeburg and my mother said that Klara hadn’t come, I wrote that down in my notebook and closed it.
I decided I’d done enough.
What happened next wasn’t my business.
I shouldn’t have closed it.
I shouldn’t have decided that it was enough.
That’s the only lesson anyone who studies these stories takes away from them.
It’s not about monsters.
It’s not about methods.
It’s about the people around them who noticed something, sensed something, and closed the notebook.
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They only get darker.
And write in the comments, would you have closed the notebook or not?
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
