Grete Beier

About Grete Beier

Grete Beier (15 September 1885 – 23 July 1908) was the last woman who was publicly executed in the Kingdom of Saxony. Her inter-related crimes included fraud, abortion, conspiracy to commit the murder of a witness, and the actual murder of her formal fiancé.

Marie Margarethe (nickname, Grete) Beier was born on 15 September 1885 in Brand-Erbisdorf. She was the daughter of Brander Mayor Ernst Theodor Beier and his wife Ida Karoline, née Clausnitzer.

In 1905, she met the clerk Johannes Heinrich Merker and secretly became engaged to him without the knowledge of her parents. After she broke off the relationship with him because of his infidelity, she met, in 1906, the chief engineer Heinrich Moritz Curt Pressler. They became engaged at the request of his parents. Beier's relationship with Pressler was always cool, and because of his domineering nature, there soon arose a dispute between the two. She then secretly reconnected with Merker, who had become an embezzler. From this relationship, in the summer of 1906, she became pregnant and had an abortion in November 1906.

Pressler planned a wedding for 14 May 1907. Beier tried to prevent it. Merker tried, too, creating fake love letters to a non-existent Italian named Ferroni, sending these to Pressler.

After the April 1907 death of Kröner, a relative who was the administrator of the poorhouse in Freiberg, Beier falsified his will, stole jewellery and a checkbook from her parents' house, took Kröner's savings, and shared the money with Merker. At the same time, a reader request for the design of a will to appoint the bride as sole heir was answered and reprinted in a Freiberger newspaper. A few days later, Beier set up a fake testament to her groom and poisoned him with cyanide on the eve of the planned wedding in Chemnitz. She then shot him with a revolver in the mouth to simulate his suicide. Immediately after the act, she sent more letters to Ferroni to make the suicide appear believable.

In May 1907, the theft from the parents' house was detected. In the course of the investigation, Beier created other falsifications and lies to direct the suspicion to others. After her arrest in June 1907, an illegal abortion trial was also initiated. Shortly after, Merker was also arrested. In November of that year, Beier confessed to the murder of Pressler. She was found guilty and sentenced to death.

After a petition for mercy was rejected by the king, Beier was guillotined on 23 July 1908 at the age of 22 years by the state executioner, Moritz Brand, on the scaffold in the courtyard of the district court at the Albert Park in Freiberg.