Killing of Anežka Hrůzová

Anežka Hrůzová was a 19-year-old Czech Catholic seamstress who lived in the village of Věžnička and worked in the nearby town of Polná, then part of Bohemia, Austria-Hungary. On the afternoon of 29 March 1899 she left her workplace as usual but did not return home. Her body was found in a forest three days later, on 1 April 1899; her throat had been cut and her clothing torn, and a pool of blood, blood-stained stones, torn fragments of her garments, and a rope were found near the scene. Because relatively little blood was found near the body, and because her disappearance coincided with the Jewish holiday of Passover, local authorities and residents began to suspect a case of Jewish ritual murder — a form of antisemitic blood libel.

Suspicion fell on several vagrants seen near the forest that afternoon, including Leopold Hilsner, a 23-year-old Jewish man who had reportedly been seen frequently in the area. A search of Hilsner's home found nothing incriminating, and he said he had left the area before the killing could have occurred, though he could not fully establish his alibi. He was arrested and tried at Kutná Hora from 12 to 16 September 1899. The physical evidence against him was a pair of trousers with stains that chemical experts said might be blood and that appeared to have been recently washed; two witnesses said they had seen him near the scene that afternoon. Both the prosecuting attorney and the Hrůza family's attorney raised the theory of ritual murder during the trial. Testimony indicated that Hilsner could not have carried out the killing alone, yet he was sentenced to death for participating in it; no accomplices were identified or prosecuted.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a Charles University professor, intervened publicly on Hilsner's behalf and filed a legal appeal citing procedural errors in the trial, and Austria-Hungary's supreme court ordered a new trial in Písek. While awaiting retrial, Hilsner was confronted by fellow prisoners who told him a gallows was being built for him and pressed him to name accomplices in exchange for a lighter sentence; under this pressure he named two other men, both of whom later demonstrated alibis and were never prosecuted, and Hilsner recanted the accusation. Investigators also connected Hilsner to the earlier disappearance of Marie Klímová, a servant who had gone missing on 17 July 1898; a female body found in the same forest that October was believed, with great probability, to be hers, though decomposition prevented investigators from determining how she had died.

Hilsner was tried for both the Hrůzová and Klímová cases together in Písek between 25 October and 14 November 1900. Witnesses' accounts grew more specific than at the first trial, including descriptions of a knife allegedly used in ritual slaughter. He was found guilty of both killings and sentenced to death on 14 November 1900. Emperor Franz Josef commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on 11 June 1901, and requests to reopen the case were denied. Hilsner was pardoned by Emperor Karl on 24 March 1918, after nineteen years in prison, and lived afterward in Velké Meziříčí, Prague, and Vienna until his death on 9 January 1928. His conviction was never formally annulled, and no one else was ever charged in either killing. While the killings themselves were never conclusively solved, the antisemitic ritual-murder theory underlying the prosecution has since been widely rejected, and Hilsner's innocence of that specific charge is broadly recognized; a memorial plaque at his last residence and a tombstone over his grave both describe him as an innocent victim of ritual-murder allegations.