The woman’s body in the brick pond

On October 29, 1962, Stefan Mitteregger filed a missing person report for his severely depressed wife, Karoline Mitteregger, a 45-year-old brunette measuring 1.72 meters tall, at the police station in Vienna’s 10th district, Favoriten. Six months later, a laborer found a badly decomposed female corpse in the water of a brick pond. Based on her shoe, which had the pencil mark “S 3 M” on the sole, the cobbler who had repaired the shoes was identified. This made it possible to determine the identity of the female corpse. It was indeed the wife of Stefan Mitteregger, who had been missing for six months. As she had suffered from depression, the police initially assumed it was suicide. But the head of the security office, Hofrat Dr. Heger, was puzzled by one detail. Why was the dead woman still wearing her glasses? This question nagged at him. Why hadn’t Karoline Mitteregger taken them off when she went into the water? He asked the public prosecutor’s office to order an autopsy. The autopsy determined that the cause of death was drowning. Since the body was already badly decomposed, no traces of external violence could be found. The time of death was determined to be 2:00 a.m. based on her non-waterproof wristwatch, which had stopped eleven minutes after 2:00 a.m., and the half-digested lentils that the medical examiner, Dr. Wilhelm Holczabek, had found in her colon, which she had eaten for lunch the day before Karoline Mitteregger disappeared. During a routine examination of the stomach contents, the medical examiner Dr. Gottfried Machata found no medication or drugs. However, spectroscopic and volumetric blood tests and gas chromatography tests revealed that Karoline Mitteregger’s blood contained 53 percent carbon monoxide-bound hemoglobin. This high dose must have rendered Karoline Mitteregger unconscious, who then drowned in the brick pond. But how did the unconscious Karoline Mitteregger get into the water and where did the carbon monoxide come from? There were no gas pipes within a radius of one and a half kilometers. So Karoline Mitteregger could not have poisoned herself at the scene of the crime, or could she? The police were now investigating in all directions. Karoline Mitteregger had already attempted suicide and had been under constant observation by her relatives ever since. She had no contact with friends or neighbors. Her husband, who worked as a music teacher, devotedly cared for his mentally ill wife and their three children. The two older sons were studying and the younger daughter was attending high school. The police ruled out that the family had anything to do with Karoline Mitteregger’s disappearance. But who then could have killed Karoline Mitteregger? Perhaps Karoline Mitteregger had taken her own life after all? If so, how? That was the question. In February 1960, a woodturner’s apprentice was found dead in the basement. He had put a plastic bag filled with gas over his head and sealed it airtight with a string. But there was no gas line in the basement. How did the gas get into the plastic bag? The explanation was quite simple. The woodturner’s assistant had removed the plastic hose from the stove in his apartment, filled the plastic bag with gas, reconnected the hose, and laid down in the basement to die. This spectacular suicide dominated the media at the time. Had Karoline Mitteregger been inspired by it? The investigators reconstructed the course of events together with toxicologist Dr. Gottfried Machata. To do this, they removed the burner from the gas stove and connected various plastic bags to the outlet nozzle. The plastic bags were inflated with gas like balloons. They held them closed with their hands so that the gas would escape very slowly. A detective then ran from the Mittereggers’ apartment to the brick pond with a plastic bag filled with gas. When he arrived there, the plastic bag was still full of gas. Suddenly, the sequence of events made sense. At around 1:30 a.m., when all the other family members were asleep, Karoline Mitteregger had filled a plastic bag with gas and then sneaked out of the apartment. She went to the Ziegelteich, got into the water, and inhaled the gas in the plastic bag until she passed out, sank into the water, and drowned. But unlike the turner’s assistant, she had not put the plastic bag over her head, so she was still wearing her glasses. By reconstructing the sequence of events, it was possible to solve the unusual suicide, which at first appeared to be a murder. Because things are not always as they seem.