Board-and-Blade Apparatus

The Board-and-Blade Apparatus is a proposed reconstruction of the mechanism that might have thrown Alberte Goldschmid into a tree during the collision. It was not established as a recovered, working device: it took shape through Christian Habersaat’s drawings and the investigators’ questions about a board, a shovel blade, and a possible vehicle attachment. Its importance lies in that gap between a visually precise model and the technical evidence that could, or could not, support it.

The reconstruction takes shape

Christian Habersaat’s papers included a plan showing a tree beside the road and a bicycle in the thicket. Carl Mørck observed that the drawing needed to be accurate and thought technicians, rather than Habersaat himself, had probably made it. The plan mapped the relationship between the roadside, the tree, and the recovered bicycle; it was a reconstruction of positions, not by itself proof of how the collision happened.

A third drawing added a possible object that could have thrown Alberte upward. The depicted blade was set at an angle, about seven to eight centimetres above the road surface. Carl identified it as a shovel blade and accepted that its position could explain the upward trajectory proposed in the drawing. But he also questioned whether that arrangement looked capable of killing her. The exchange left two propositions distinct: the blade might account for the trajectory, while its capacity to cause the fatal outcome remained in doubt.

The apparatus therefore existed initially as a mechanical hypothesis assembled from a diagram and an inference. The drawing offered a specific angle and clearance from the road, but those measurements did not independently establish what had been fixed to a vehicle, whether the device had been used, or whether its impact could account for the death. The investigators treated the image as a basis for questions to test, rather than as a conclusive description of an object found at the scene.

Fragments, locations, and uncertainty

A splinter was recorded in Habersaat’s handwriting as lying in a straight line between the recovered bicycle in the thicket and the place where, according to the accounts, Alberte had been hit. That line made the fragment relevant to the proposed path of the collision, but location alone could not identify the larger object from which it came. An examination described the material as birch and could not determine with certainty whether it originated from the same board as another piece under consideration.

The distinction between a fragment and a complete board mattered as the inquiry developed. The splinter could connect the collision scene to the possibility of wooden equipment without proving that a particular board had been mounted on a vehicle. Likewise, Habersaat’s plan connected the bicycle’s resting place to the reported impact point, but it did not close the evidentiary distance between those positions and the proposed blade. The reconstruction depended on several links holding together, and each link called for its own assessment.

Testing the proposed vehicle attachment

Carl asked that Habersaat’s drawings be sent to technicians for examination. Their requested work included checking archived analyses of the wooden board, estimating how thick a board would need to be to survive the collision, and assessing whether it could be securely attached to the pictured VW Kombi without leaving marks on the vehicle. They were also asked to consider, in light of Habersaat’s drawing and the vehicle’s probable speed, whether the proposed mechanics were possible. These were tests of feasibility; ordering them did not mean the investigators had already established that the apparatus existed in that form.

The eventual technical account narrowed the possibilities. Technicians confirmed that the recovered splinter was plywood, but concluded that the board found in the water was not the board that had thrown Alberte into the tree. They also found that the boreholes Habersaat described could not have served to attach the board to a VW Kombi as proposed. An alternative involving hooks through the holes raised a further unresolved question: where could the hooks have been secured?

One suggested mounting point was the channel with a rubber gasket beneath the windshield wipers. The technicians’ reasoning was that fastening the board there would have sent both the windshield and the board flying, and that traces of such an event would have been expected. This conditional analysis exposed a practical problem in the reconstruction: an attachment could not be accepted merely because it could be drawn in place; its likely effects on the vehicle also had to fit the evidence. The available account establishes the difficulty with the proposed mounting, not a complete alternative design.

Significance of the unresolved mechanism

The apparatus marks the investigation’s effort to turn a puzzling trajectory into a testable mechanical account. Carl began by asking whether the death was certainly traffic-related and what the postmortem and collision scene showed; he then pressed on the absence of leads such as skid or tire marks. The board-and-blade theory offered a way to ask how a vehicle might have produced the reported result, but it did not eliminate the initial uncertainty about the scene.

The inquiry also shows why Habersaat’s precision could be both useful and insufficient. A drawn plan, a measured blade position, a fragment’s material, and an account of where objects lay each contributed different kinds of information. Technical testing then separated what the reconstruction suggested from what the surviving board and its holes could support. The object’s narrative role is consequently provisional: it gives the collision a concrete, examinable form, while the failed attachment theory prevents that form from becoming settled fact.