Photo Credit: Inge Hermann
What do Robert E. Lee, the world’s longest cold case (of murder by assassination), and a company of German immigrant soldiers in the Mexican-American War have in common? These seemingly disconnected pieces of history all center around one man, an infamous assassin who murdered a mayor in the Stuttgart district of Germany in 1835, deftly circumvented arrest by fleeing to America and soon after died heroically in defense of Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Veracruz.
In a never-before-told story, this unnamed assassin and his historical flight from Europe to the battlefields of America come together in an unrivaled true-crime mystery. In her book Death of an Assassin, Ann Marie Ackermann closely and methodically follows the fascinating lives of both the murderer/German immigrant soldier and the not-yet-famous general who would go on to become a dominant figure in the Civil War. She recounts a fascinating and long-forgotten story from history and transforms it into a spellbinding narrative made rich with its investigative detail and extensive research.
Ackermann is an American lawyer who relocated to Stuttgart more than a decade ago to better investigate this mystery, and her exhaustive research efforts have resulted in a wide-reaching tale that stretches from 19th-century European murder and violence across the Atlantic to the earliest battles of Lee’s military career. She will appear at the Wauwatosa Public Library, on behalf of Goethe House Wisconsin and cosponsored by Boswell Book Co., at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14.
