Beating the Devil

To the rest of the world, Switzerland is a land of placid tranquillity and order nestling amid picture-postcard scenery. Yet of late it has been the scene of doings that would make the ministrants of Rosemary's Baby blush. For the past four weeks, the gruesome evidence has poured forth in a Zurich courtroom. On trial are six people, including Joseph Stocker, 61, a defrocked and excommunicated South German priest, and his fanatically religious mistress, Magdalena Kohler, 54. The charge:

that they beat to death a pretty teen age girl while trying to exorcise the devil from her body.

"I would like to have a friend of my age," 17-year-old Bernadette Hasler wrote shortly before she died, "and if I cannot have a friend, I would like at least to have a cat or a parakeet to whom I could talk." At the time, not even her family would talk to her any more because they believed her guilty of "Teufelsbuhlschaft," or coupling-with-the-devil. Her tormentors considered this an act so evil that excorcism by prayer was useless. The devil had to be flailed out of her.

A Final Yes. From 1958, the entire Hasler family had been under the influence of the Stocker-Kohler "holy family." The ex-priest and his mistress believed that they had been chosen by God to lead the survivors of a coming apocalypse. Minutely detailed instructions for the group came from a Carmelite nun, known as "the Little Star," over her "direct telephone to heaven."

On these orders, the sect established a home for girls in Singen, Germany where Bernadette lived after 1962, and a Swiss mountain retreat, where she lived her last days as a virtual prisoner. Under the pressure of "Mother" Kohler's morbid sexual curiosity, justified as "looking into souls," the girl wrote hundreds of pages of grotesque "confessions": the devil visited her several times a day; he had walked beside her, his black fur glistening, at Holy Communion and often made love to her; he had promised her she could have ten sexually diverse husbands and rule the world with Satan. After months of piecemeal punishment, Bernadette's Calvary finally came on May 14, 1966. During a four-hour exorcism session, interrupted only for rest and prayer, the couple and four other men beat and tormented the girl with walking sticks, a riding crop and a rubber truncheon. She was made to eat her own excrement, then sent out on all fours to wash her clothes. Finally Stocker asked her whether she repented. After she mumbled a final yes, he left her alone, and alone she died.

Hangman Without Pay. Dr. Carl Jung, the late Swiss psychiatrist, once observed that mountains are not only geographical barriers; they can also limit the horizons of the human spirit. In many of the country's remote Alpine valleys and gorges, medieval habit and thought persist so strongly that Stocker and Kohler's defense counsel found it worthwhile to call for theological testimony to justify the defendants' religious zeal.

The staid burghers of Zurich, so obviously part of the modern world, re acted to the unfolding murder story with a primitive moral fury that the tabloid Blick described as "terrifying." Despite the judge's plea for temperance, police cars taking the accused to and from the court needed extra protection against would-be lynchers and were covered with spittle. Newspapers received hundreds of suggestions for punishment no less demonic than poor Bernadette's exorcism. One writer suggested tying the couple to a telephone pole and "delivering them to the people's anger until their God delivered them." Another wanted to seal them into a barrel full of spikes and set it afire.

The court was swamped with threatening letters, including a postcard promising that "the entire courthouse will be blown up if they don't get the maximum penalty." Though Switzerland has no death penalty, one letter writer offered his services as a hangman "without pay." At week's end the six were found guilty; they will be sentenced this week. The worst they can expect is 20 years, for "inflicting injuries that could be reasonably expected to cause death."

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