Crime Immemorial

It was New Year’s Day of 1902 in a rural town called Towitta, in South Australia. Thirteen-year-old Bertha Schippan and her twenty-four-year-old sister Mary were spending the evening at the family farm alone. Their parents, Matthes and Johanne, were visiting relatives, and their three brothers were away working on other nearby farms.

Sometime around ten p.m., according to Mary’s later statement, she awoke suddenly and found that a bearded man was lying on top of her. She managed to struggle free from beneath him and fled the house in order to run to a neighboring farm for help from her brothers. Unfortunately, she left her thirteen-year-old sister Bertha alone with the alleged intruder.

By the time the siblings and the authorities returned to the Schippan household, however, Bertha had been savagely murdered, stabbed more than three dozen times. There was no sign of the bearded man Mary claimed had broken into the house.

Almost immediately, suspicion fell on Mary herself; though there was nothing but circumstantial evidence suggesting that she was the culprit, there was also no evidence pointing to anyone else. Mary stood trial for the murder of her sister in 1902, an event that was widely covered in the media, but she was ultimately acquitted.

Later, there was local speculation that if Mary had not been responsible for the crime, then perhaps the girls’ allegedly abusive father Matthes may have done the deed, or maybe Mary’s boyfriend, Gustav Nitschke, who was twenty-one years old at the time. Both men, however, had solid alibis for the time of the crime, and neither was ever charged.

The murder of Bertha Schippan remains one of South Australia’s oldest cold cases.