The Curious Case of Kaspar Hauser - Professor Turi King

The mystery of Kaspar Hauser and whether he was the hereditary Prince of Baden is considered to be one of the greatest historical mysteries of the 19th century. Previous genetic research trying to answer the question gave conflicting results. Professor Turi King discusses her work and the work carried out by the team, led by Walther Parson, which brought new genetic techniques to bear on the question and which shows that Kaspar Hauser was not the hereditary Prince of Baden.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The Curious Case of Kaspar Hauser.A couple of years ago, I was contacted by a
lovely colleague of mine, Walther Parson, who's at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck. He
was asking if I wanted to be involved in a case.Now Walther's an old friend and renowned for
working on high profile cases. So, this was an easy yes, but he didn't tell me what the case was

(00:25):
about. And I would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before anything could be discussed
with me. And even then, I wouldn't be told the full case until after the work
was done. What he did tell me was that it was going to be a high-profile case.
After we did the work, he told me it was the Kaspar Hauser case, and it turns out he
wasn't kidding about how famous it is. It's claimed to be one of the biggest historical

(00:49):
mysteries of the 19th century. So, what's the story? And where does DNA come into this?
Okay, so let me take you back to Whitmonday, May 26th, 1828, when a young lad turns up on the
streets of Nuremberg, seemingly from nowhere. He was thought to be around 16 years old,

(01:12):
was in generally good health, but could barely walk or speak and didn't like bright sunlight.
He carried a letter addressed to the captain of a cavalry regiment. This letter, apparently from
an anonymous individual, who said that the boy had been given into his custody in 1812,
and since then he had apparently been the boy's caretaker and had kept him in total isolation.

(01:36):
Another letter Kaspar had on him was apparently from his mother, addressed
to the stranger who took him in, saying that Kaspar's father was a cavalryman who had died,
and she was too poor to look after him.Now, according to Kaspar, as long as he could
remember, he lived in a small, dark dungeon, completely alone. He had just three toys to

(01:58):
play with, two horses and a dog, all made of wood. He said he was provided with bread and
water but didn't see the person who brought it. Now the thinking was that there must have been
opium in his drinking water, because while he was asleep from the effects of the drug,
someone was looking after his hygiene, such as cutting his hair and nails.

(02:20):
Not long before he was released, a man appeared, who took care not to reveal his face to Kaspar,
but who taught him how to repeat a few phrases. For example, I would like to become such a rider
as my father was and taught him how to walk and to write the name Kaspar Hauser. After that, the man

(02:40):
walked home to Nuremberg, where he left him.Although it seemed pretty clear that Kaspar
Hauser wasn't his real name, that was the name he continued to use, and that he became known by.
Well, Kaspar became a bit of an international sensation, and in the following months he was
examined by doctors and, taking into account his limited speech and walking when he first

(03:02):
appeared and his subsequent development, it was thought he must have been put into
isolation from the age of about 3 to 4 years.While many thought that the whole story of
him being kept in a dungeon was a bit farfetched and that he may be a fraud,
many distinguished individuals took him into their care, and he became a bit of a celebrity, with

(03:23):
visitors to Nuremberg hoping to get a glimpse of him. And he featured in the newspapers in Germany.
As you can imagine, rumours began to swirl around his unusual story and as to his possible origins,
including one that maybe he was of noble birth, and this was the start

(03:43):
of the hereditary prince theory for Kaspar Hauser.Now, to explain this, you're going to have to stay
with me, because there are three people called Carl over a family tree of four generations. So,
I'm going to call them Carl 1, 2 and 3 to distinguish them. You may need to go look

(04:04):
up this family tree to understand this and to complicate things, you'll see that on some
websites they go by the English version of the name, which is Charles. But from
here on in I'm going to be using the name Carl.The theory was that Kaspar was actually the son of
Carl, Grand Duke of Baden, and his wife Stephanie de Beauharnais. I'm going to refer to this as Carl

(04:26):
3. He's the youngest of the Carl's, and he was the son of Carl 2, who was the son of Carl 1,
still with me? More about Carl 1 in a bit.Now Carl 3 and Stephanie had had a baby son,
apparently born healthy on September 29th, 1812, and who had he survived, would have

(04:47):
been the hereditary Prince of Baden and would have later replaced his father Carl 3, as duke.
Unfortunately, though, the baby boy died just over two weeks later and because Carl 3, himself, died
just six years later without any male heirs, he was succeeded by his uncle Ludwig, English form is
Louis, the younger brother of his father Carl 2.Now then Carl 2, and Ludwig were the sons of

(05:15):
Grand Duke Carl Frederick, he's Carl number 1. Carl 1 married twice. Carl 2, and Ludwig were
from his first marriage. His second wife was Louise Caroline Geyer von Geyersburg.
Now Louise was considered to be of a lower rank to Carl 1, so it was proclaimed that any children she

(05:38):
had with him would not be recognized as being of dynastic rank, and that any male children
from her marriage could not take on the title of duke, unless all the male line descendants
of Carl 1's first marriage had died.Well, what do you know, but that's what's
happened. And Louise’s eldest son with Carl 1, Leopold, became Grand Duke after Ludvig died.

(06:04):
This whole turn of events got people thinking. People started saying that Louise, to ensure one
of her kids would be Grand Duke, had dressed up as a ghost, the white lady, kidnaped Carl 3 and
Stephanie's baby son, out of his crib and replaced him with a dying baby of one of her servants.

(06:25):
The swapped in baby then dies and is buried as the prince, while the true prince actually survived,
and Kaspar was now that young prince as a teenager. This rumour gained even more
traction when, in October 1829, Kaspar was found in the cellar of the house he was staying in, in
a pool of blood with a cut wound on his forehead.Kaspar said he had been attacked by the man who

(06:49):
had brought him to Nuremberg, who told him that he would have to die before he could leave the
city. Some saw this as further proof that he must be a person of significant interest,
such as the true prince, but it's important to note that at this point,
Kaspar was getting into arguments with the man who was looking after him, schoolmaster Friedrich
Daumer. After Daumer's suspicions grew that Kaspar had a tendency to lie, so some people suggested

(07:16):
that Kaspar had orchestrated this story as a distraction to gain more attention and sympathy.
Okay, well, it certainly worked, because after this, the king of Bavaria, Ludwig I, ordered
that henceforth Kaspar was to be guarded around the clock, which only added to the speculation
that Kaspar must be of political importance.The authorities gave Kaspar a police escort to

(07:39):
somewhere thought to be safer, in the home of Johann Biberbach, one of the municipal
authorities. Then a few months later, in this new home, Kaspar is found with a slight head wound,
apparently from a gunshot, this time after supposedly falling from standing on a chair and
by mistake grabbing a pistol which was hanging on the wall and firing a shot on the way down.

(08:04):
Again, there had been issues with the Biberbach family being concerned about Kaspar lying,
and so it's thought that maybe Kaspar engineered this as another distraction.
Needless to say, all this created a bit of a sensation, and the English aristocrat Lord
Stanhope, intrigued by the rumours of Kaspar’s potential noble origin, became his benefactor,

(08:27):
and transferred him to the care of a schoolmaster called Johann Meyer in Ansbach.
Stanhope all but adopted him, paying his living expenses and spending large amounts of money,
trying to find out his identity, and intending to have him come and live in England. But he too
began to doubt Kaspar's credibility, and the relationship began to sour. Kaspar's

(08:50):
relationship with Meyer was also strained, again, with Meyer not happy with Kaspar's apparent lying.
It all came to a head in December 1833, when Kaspar and Meyer had a huge argument,
and a few days later Kaspar arrived home with a wound in his chest, having apparently been
stabbed by an unknown assailant in the palace gardens, in Ansbach. He died three days later.

(09:16):
Some say he was murdered; others say it was an accidental death from a self-inflicted injury.
He was buried in the city cemetery in Ansbach. His tombstone carved with, in Latin, here
lies Kaspar Hauser, the riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious.

(09:36):
Later, another monument was erected on the spot where he was stabbed in the court garden,
carved with, here a mysterious man was killed in a mysterious way.
There is a museum in Kaspar Hauser Platz, the square named for Kaspar,
where the bloodstained clothes he was found in, the two letters and some of
his personal belongings are exhibited.A monument to him, known as the Child

(09:59):
of Europe, was erected in 1981, which is one of the tourist attractions of the town,
and shows up on various travel guide websites.In 2013, the 180th anniversary of Kaspar's death,
the sculptor Ottmar Horl made 150 sculptures of Kaspar and placed them around the city. And

(10:21):
Ansbach holds a Kaspar Hauser Festival every few years, complete with its own website.
Alongside the numerous books, there are various films about the case,
including the 1974 documentary thriller directed by famed German filmmaker Werner Herzog,
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. The Case of Kaspar Hauser is even alluded to in Blade Runner 2049.

(10:48):
In the world of science, there's something known as a Kaspar Hauser experiment,
where an animal is reared in isolation to find out which behaviours are innate.
And in psychiatry, there's a Kaspar Hauser syndrome,
which is a psychological condition characterized by social and intellectual deficiencies,
which is due to abuse or isolation in childhood. In short, Kaspar Hauser is pretty darn famous.

(11:14):
Okay, so it's a big mystery, was Kaspar actually the Prince of Baden? Well, these days we can try
to answer that question using DNA. Can we get the DNA from any of Kaspar's items,
such as his hair or blood from the clothing, and compare it with somebody from the Duke
of Baden’s family, to see if there's a match?Well, in the last 25 years, multiple genetic

(11:38):
analyses have been carried out to investigate this possible aristocratic origin. The bit of
DNA they and we targeted for the analysis was mitochondrial DNA for a number of reasons.
To remind you, mitochondrial DNA is passed down through the female line. So, if Kaspar
was really Stephanie de Beauharnais’ son, then he would have inherited her mitochondrial DNA.

(12:02):
And any living female line relatives of Stephanie would also have identical or
near identical mitochondrial DNA as her.In the mid-1990s, DNA from the blood stain
from the underwear that Kaspar was wearing, from the incident in 1833, was compared
against the mitochondrial DNA of female line descendants of two of Stephanie's daughters.

(12:26):
They looked at two sections of the mitochondrial DNA in what's known as the control region.
This is a section of DNA that is known to have more variation among the population,
where we expect people to differ if they aren't related through the female line,
and so has been used in cases like this.This study didn't find a DNA match between

(12:48):
Kaspar and Stephanie's descendants. But just to confuse things, in 2001, 2002, tests done
on two lots of hair samples, one from when he was alive and one from after he died, swabs from the
trouser blood stain and from a hat, gave varying different results, and though some of those were

(13:08):
not a perfect match, they didn't exclude Kaspar from being maternally related to Stephanie. The
results were never published scientifically.To break the stalemate, and because there's new
technologies these days, we carried out new DNA testing on both anti and postmortem hair samples,
using two different methods, primer extension capture, which was used to capture the control

(13:34):
region of the mitochondrial DNA, and also massively parallel sequencing,
which allowed us to get near 100% coverage of the mitochondrial genome.
And we did the work in two separate labs, each using a different method alongside the
use of blind samples, where we were also given a sample that was nothing to do with the case,

(13:57):
and we had no idea which was the Kaspar sample. So basically, different samples were analysed
by different labs and by different methods.We got really clear results. The DNA from
Kaspar Hauser was the same across the hair samples and also matched
the blood sample analysis of the 1990s.The mitochondrial DNA type that we found

(14:22):
for him is known as haplogroup W, which is a West Eurasian mitochondrial DNA type.
We calculated an upper limit of 1 in 410, that a randomly selected person of the
West Eurasian population would be haplogroup W.We know that the three relatives of Stephanie,

(14:43):
descendants of two of her daughters, as well as a descendant of Stephanie's great grandmother,
all shared the H1bs mitochondrial DNA type, so it doesn't match the samples from Kaspar.
We calculated that we can therefore exclude Kaspar as being Stephanie's son,
with a probability of 99.9994%.We started this study asking if

(15:11):
DNA could finally answer the question as to whether Kaspar was the Prince of Baden,
and from the DNA analysis, we can say with a very high probability that Kaspar was not related to
Stephanie, and so not the Prince of Baden.What we can't answer is who was Kaspar.

(15:32):
Using mitochondrial DNA, we can't say much more than he is of West Eurasian ancestry
on his maternal side, but we cannot narrow it down to a particular region.
We also don't want people to take from the research that is evidence for the theory that
Kaspar was a fraud and that he completely made up the story of his past. We cannot rule out

(15:55):
that he may have been a victim of some sort of crime, such as kidnaping or child abuse.
At the end of all of this, the true identity of Kaspar Hauser remains a mystery.