Edgar Beese

Edgar Beese’s brief but crowded history is told as a chain of assumed names, reversals, and reported accusations. Once an aviator, he appears in Berlin as Beese-Arnim, Auclaire, Krachtowil, and finally von Arnim; the shifting identities trace a fall from an earlier life into crime, while the circumstances of the shooting of Pussi Uhl remain disputed.

Identity and Background

The account introduces Beese-Arnim as an aviator who had been shot down at 5,000 feet during the war. After returning home, he discovered that an insurance-company manager had taken his inheritance. The manager was an impostor, and Beese was left without the money. The narrative presents this fraud as the break after which he began using the name Auclaire, ashamed to face his family and already deeply compromised by his circumstances.

Aliases and Criminal Record

Beese’s later history is assembled from what the narrative describes as police records. He turned to crime and was imprisoned for two and a half years. At the time, he was using the name Krachtowil; after his release, he was deported to Poland. The account thus makes his aliases more than a list of names: each marks a stage in a life increasingly organized around concealment and official pursuit.

Berlin and Pussi Uhl

Afterward, Beese became involved in shady dealings in Berlin with Pussi Uhl. The narrative says that Uhl gave him the name von Arnim in a ceremony it declines to describe. From then on, he conducted his activities under that identity. This association culminates in the shooting in Uhl’s apartment: on August 14, 1928, Beese, as von Arnim, shot her. Detectives questioned him in connection with the case and identified him as its principal culprit, while the people around the affair refused to inform on one another.

The Shooting and Uncertain Motive

The account does not settle why Beese shot Uhl. It rejects jealousy as an adequate explanation, while allowing that jealousy might have been involved if money lay behind it. Its emphasis falls instead on money as the decisive stake. The narrator also disputes the detectives’ claim that Beese had completely collapsed: if he was distressed, the account suggests, it was because of the coming investigation and because he was angry that Uhl might die. It further attributes to him the fear that, if she died, he would lose his means of living. These explanations remain part of a shifting, partly speculative report rather than a confirmed account of his private motives.

Narrative Presentation

Beese emerges less through direct action on the page than through a rapid, newspaper-like accumulation of biography, police claims, rumor, and conjecture. The repeated names and the inheritance fraud give the report a pattern of imposture and dispossession, but its confident declarations are undercut by its own uncertainty about the shooting’s motive and Beese’s reaction. His story ends in that uncertainty: the suspected shooter is identified, yet the explanation for the shooting remains contested.