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On May 24, 1704, at about ten in the morning, Agnes Catherina Schickin, a thirty-year-old serving woman from the town of Schorndorf in Württemberg arrived at the village of Krumhard. After asking for and receiving a glass of milk from a local peasant woman, Agnes was on her way out of the village when she saw four, in her words, "beautiful little boys"1 playing together by the roadside. She approached the children and asked for directions to Schorndorf. When one of the boys, Hans Michael Furch, the seven-year-old son of the local cowherder, said he knew the way, she offered him a gift and asked him to walk with her. The three other boys wanted to come along, too, but she dissuaded them. Agnes and the seven-year-old walked off into the forest alone.
Over the course of the day, Agnes took the boy deep into the forest, where they encountered several passers-by, who would later testify that they saw them walking, talking, and sitting down together. At four in the afternoon, a passing messenger saw the boy sitting down while she knelt before him delousing him. But this affectionate intimacy would come to an abrupt end. When the boy wanted to return home in the evening, she threw him violently to the ground. Begging for mercy, the boy tried to appease her by reciting his prayers, the "Our Father," and the Creed among them. This was repeated three times. Twice his prayers moved her. She even helped the trembling boy to his feet, but the third time, she felt "embittered." Throwing the boy to the ground again, she drew a knife and cut his throat so deeply that, as she later described, she could "look down into his neck." As his "bright blood" flowed, she said to him, "May God protect you, you sweet angel, you are an angel before God." Leaving him to die, she returned to Schorndorf where she told the first people she met about the murder and was taken into custody. Asked how she could justify killing an innocent child, she answered that the child was now "saved," she had only done it so that she herself could "leave the world" as well; "now...