Peter Müller or Peter Muller (also known as ‘the horse collar maker’ or ‘the saddle maker’) (Gereonsweiler, c. 1748 – Herzogenrath, 27 May 1772) was a craftsman who made horse collars. He was from Ubach and was an alleged Bokkenrijders. During the third mass trial (1770-1778), he was one of the first to be arrested, and during his trial he became a (false) key witness.
Personal life
Little is known about the personal life of Peter Müller. He was most likely a son of Wilhelm and Mechtilde Wüllenweber. As a boy, he learned the craft of horse collar maker from a craftsman in Puffendorf. (These horse collars were placed around the neck or a horse or ox and could be used to draw carriages or carts. Just like saddles, they are a part of the horse's equipment, and Peter Müller was often called a saddle maker by writers or in documents.) When he was about twenty years of age, he married Maria Jaspers, the daughter of Joannes Jaspers and Agnes Hennes, and bought a house in the ‘Koijegat’ in Ubach. They had two daughters together, who were born in 1767 and 1771. (Because Müller was arrested in January 1771 and suspected Bokkenrijders were not allowed any contact with the outside world, it's very likely that he never met his youngest daughter.) During his trial, Müller accused his father-in-law and his brother-in-law, among others, of being Bokkenrijders.
Arrest
This first to be arrested during the third mass trial, Joseph Keyser, was very quick to accuse Müller of being a Bokkenrijders too. During his first interrogation under torture, Müller was named forty times. Keyser had been arrested for the theft of a horse, but the authorities forced him to confess many other crimes as well, crimes that were suspected to have been committed by the infamous Bokkenrijders gang. Under the pressure of torture, he confessed.
Müller apparently had a suspicion that he would be arrested, because he had fled to the lands of Gulik. Still he was caught, arrested and imprisoned in Burg Rode in Herzogenrath. He was about 22 years old. On 31 January he was interrogated under torture. He was probably the second to be arrested in the third mass trial and he was accused of the crime that began it all: the theft of a horse owned by farmer Schutz from Waubach. It's possible that this crime had been committed by both Joseph Keyser and Peter Muller together, and that Muller had let the younger thief handle the dangerous job of selling the stolen horse. During this, Keyser was caught and arrested, which led to a series of confessions, accusations and arrests.
Trial
On 31 January, Müller was interrogated under torture. After being tormented with thumbscrews for a while, he confessed. During this interrogation and at a voluntary confession on 6 February, Müller accused about twenty inhabitants of Ubach. It's possible that he only confessed to prevent being tortured again. On 13 February he escaped from prison, but he was captured the next day. On 23 February, he was confronted with Leonard Ploum, on 16 March with his brother-in-law Dirk Jaspers and on 14 May with Adolf Steins. During all these confrontations, Müller stuck to his accusations, even though other prisoners often withdrew their allegations after being confronted with those they accused. He made various voluntary confessions, possibly to avoid further torture: on 6, 8 and 21 February, 7 March and 19 and 28 June.
From 10 to 13 July, he made more voluntary confessions, in which he accused over fifty people of being involved in the robberies which were said to have been committed by the Bokkenrijders gang. These were people from the land of Rode and the land of Gulik. It's possible that he hoped to be kept alive longer when he made many confessions and accused many people, but he was still hanged on 27 May 1772 on the gallows on the Beckenberg in Herzogenrath. He survived for over a year.
Confessions
During the time he was imprisoned, Müller accused many people from the area he lived in; the majority of the adult men from his village was accused by either him or Joseph Keyser. Many of these people ended up being arrested and interrogated under torture, which caused them to accuse other people as well. This is how the third mass trial started; Peter Müller's confessions caused a chain of people insulting each other and the number of suspects kept growing.
Müller accused, among others, his brother-in-law Dirk Jaspers, the brother of his wife Maria. Dirk Jaspers made horse collars, just like Peter Müller. He was accused of having been involved in the theft of the horse of farmer Hendrik Schutz from Waubach. Jaspers accused Müller as well, after his arrest; he said that Müller was the gang's leader and received the gang members in his house, where they had to promise, with faces made black, never to betray each other.
Müller and Keyser also accused the shoemaker Baltus or Balthasar Kirchhoffs from the nearby village Merkstein. He was much older than Keyser and Müller and didn't come from their village. Because of this, many writers speculated that Keyser and Müller had heard somewhere that Baltus Kirchhoffs was a bad guy, maybe someone who had committed some kind of petty theft in the past or hung out with the wrong crowd.
Müller and Keyser turned on their guards. In Keyser's first torture session, in which Peter Müller was named as well, he already accused Leonard Ploum, a volunteer civil prison guard. Keyser said that Ploum had asked him to withdraw his allegations, and Müller ‘confessed’ that Ploum had a letter with seventy names of other gang members in it. The prison guards Joannes Dammers, Joannes Boijmans and Leonard Louppen were accused by Müller as well.
At one point, he also accused his father-in-law, Joannes Jaspers, of being a Bokkenrijder. However, this allegation was later withdrawn.
In Müller's confessions, the story of the oath popped up, which gang members allegedly had to swear before being included in the gang. He told the authorities that he and his comrades had sworn an oath of loyalty and had their names written down in a book that was thicker than two fingers on top of each other. At first Müller said that his name hadn't been written down in the book, but he later changed his story and said that this did happen, eleven or twelve years earlier. At that time, he would've been about eleven years old.
Fake crimes
Müller sometimes added unprompted details to his confessions; for example, he said that his fellow gang member planned to shoot the ‘schout’ (sheriff or baliff) of Ubach from his horse. The schout was present at this interrogation. Müller also told his interrogators that Baltus Kirchhoff's wife, Maria Notermans, participated in the robberies while dressed in men's clothes. (His confessions led to the arrest of Notermans, who managed to escape later.) He also told the story of a robbery that never took place, but which was supposed to be at the farm Drinhuysen in Ubach. According to Müller, 64 men left to rob the farm. They wanted to break in, but three servants came outside through the gate, causing the gang to flee.
Both Joseph Keyser and Peter Müller had a lively imagination; for example, both of them confessed to stealing a monstrance at the robbery of the rectory in Hoengen of 20-21 June 1770, even though the victim's statement didn't mention a stolen monstrance. Joseph Keyser said in his confession that Peter Müller gave a blessing with the stolen monstrance, sang the defensor noster aspice and then broke the monstrance in pieces. The pieces were shared around. The suspects after Keyser and Müller repeated this confession, but often changed the details: one story mentioned the monstrance being broken into pieces, the other story talked about the monstrance being sold in Vlasland or Cologne. These stories still went round three years later and kept being exaggerated more and more. One example of this is the prosecutor Van Steeland, who three years after Keyser's confession, said that Maria Notermans had urinated on the monstrance. Some of these stories even talked about the monstrance being used for target practice with pistols.
Death penalty
Peter Müller, like many other alleged Bokkenrijders, received the death penalty. On 27 May 1772, sixteen days after the death of the famous barber surgeon Joseph Kirchhoffs, who had been accused by Peter Müller, Müller was hanged on the gallows at the Beckenberg in Herzogenrath. He was executed together with Mayers and Schuermans. Müller had been the first to accuse Schuermans of being a Bokkenrijder.
Peter Müller was about 23 or 24 years old when he died.
In fiction
In the book ‘Bende van de Bokkenrijders’ by Ton van Reen, the main character witnesses how a young man called ‘White Peter’ is arrested for the theft of a horse. His arrest causes a mass trial against the Bokkenrijders. In this book, Peter really is a Bokkenrijder. He is arrested along with Hendrik Pijls, whose name isn't mentioned in the documents of the trial. In this fictive version of the horse theft, Joseph Keyser doesn't play a role.
References
Van Gehuchten, F. (2014). Bokkenrijders. De schande van Limburg. De derde en grootste bokkenrijdersvervolging, 1770-1778, Heerlen: Leon van Dorp. p. 25-39, 240
Van Eekelen, J. (z.d.). Bokkenrijders en afstammelingen > Muller, Peter > Peter Müller, zadelmaker in Ubach, gefolterd, galg 1772. johnve.home.xs4all. Geraadpleegd op 29 september 2022, van https://johnve.home.xs4all.nl/AFS_3/A361.html#365
Van Reen, T. (2014). De Bende van de Bokkenrijders. Breda: De Geus.
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