I don’t believe in destiny, I don’t believe in signs, but sometimes the universe works very hard at trying to convince me they do exist.
Follow me: Kaspar Hauser was a German boy who had grown up in a total isolation in a dark room, who may have been a descendant from the House of Baden, and who died by stabbing in 1833.
His death in particular interests me, as he came home on December 14th 1833, with a deep wound and a strange note in a purse that may have been written by him or not, claiming that a stranger had stabbed him. He died 3 days later of his wound. Because of many inconsistencies in his story, doctors concluded he had wounded himself, in an attempt to revive the interest about his case.
Four doctors who performed the autopsy were unable to determine if he had stabbed himself or was murdered, but Kaspar’s chest had no hesitation marks, and he was stabbed through four layers of thick clothing, two indications that usually tend to indicate murder rather than suicide.
Whereas a medical study done in 1928 supported the idea he stabbed himself, some forensic analysis done in 2005 said that it was ‘unlikely that the stab to the chest was inflicted exclusively for the purpose of self-damage, but both a suicidal stab and a homicidal act (assassination) cannot be definitely ruled out’.
Of course, Kaspar Hauser’s death reminds that of Elliott Smith, who also did not present any hesitation marks and was stabbed through his clothes. Even the mysterious note has a parallel in both stories, although it was not a suicide note in Hauser’s story.
On the Fortean Times website, the following is reported about Hauser’s case:‘But as any modern forensic scientist will know, suicide by self-stabbing in the chest or abdomen is quite a rare phenomenon. It is both a painful and an uncertain method of suicide, and most people lack an adequate knowledge of anatomy to make a lethal hit. If a dead body is found with a stab wound to the chest, there are several ways to differentiate murder from suicide. A suicide often has ‘hesitation marks’, where unsuccessful attempts have been made to penetrate the chest wall; there were none on Kaspar’s chest. It is also known that a vertical line of entrance of the stab wound in the chest, as in Kaspar’s case, would indicate murder. Suicides usually bare their chest, and certainly very seldom stab themselves through four layers of thick clothing as Kaspar was presumed to have done. Thus it seems very likely that he was in fact murdered.’
I find it interesting it is OK to conclude about murder for a case almost 200 years old, mostly based on these two things (lack of hesitation marks and stabbing through the clothing), whereas they did not conclude on anything about Elliott’s case, which presented these two same characteristics.
But I was talking about signs, and I am getting there: Werner Herzog made a movie about Kaspar Hauser, and decided to cast Bruno (aka Bruno S) Schleinstein as Kaspar himself. And yes, he is the same Bruno S. Elliott sings about in ‘Color Bars’ from the ‘Figure 8’ album: ‘Bruno S. is a man to me/You're just some dude with a stilted attitude’
But it is just a weird coincidence, nothing else.