JEFFERSONVILLE, NY — Cue “The X-Files” music. Had the FBI’s special unit been around in 1892 (it was established by J. Edgar Hoover in 1946), Fox Mulder and Dana Scully would almost certainly have been assigned to investigate the bizarre murder of a well-liked German farmer on the Stone Arch Bridge in Kenoza Lake.

Sullivan County historian John Conway’s straightforward July 29 account of the tale to an overflow audience in the cozy, well-lit community room of the Western Sullivan Public Library’s Jeffersonville Branch was somehow more chilling than an atmospheric campfire telling. His cynical, clinical Scully approach cast the tale’s otherworldly aspects in glaring light.

First, he set the record straight, noting inaccuracies on the historical marker in Stone Arch Bridge Park. There was only one hex murder, that of George Markert by father and son Adam and Joseph Heidt, not several, as the marker indicates. And the murder took place in late January 1892, not 1882, as stated on the marker.

The indisputable facts of the case: Markert and Adam Heidt were brothers-in-law by Markert’s marriage to Heidt’s sister, Caroline. Although Caroline died not long after marriage and Markert remarried, there was no discernible ill will between the families. There was, however, a marked disparity of success between Markert and Heidt. Markert was generally thought by his neighbors to be intelligent and business savvy, running a prosperous farm and achieving comfortable wealth. Heidt was viewed by his neighbors as a deeply superstitious, dull-witted, ineffectual farmer.

Heidt began to see his brother-in-law’s success and his own farm’s failure as work of the devil. And when Heidt’s cows began giving bloody milk, he was convinced that Markert was a warlock (the male counterpart of a witch) bent on destroying him. After consulting Amish hexenmeisters in Pennsylvania Dutch country, he decided Markert had placed a hex (curse) on him one day during a “bro hug” that included three pats on the back.

Heidt was advised that, to remove the curse, Markert would have to be killed by three separate methods. He and the eldest of his five children, Joseph, contrived to meet Markert on the Stone Arch Bridge, where they stabbed, shot and bludgeoned him to death, then tossed his lifeless body into the Callicoon Creek, because running (living) water was thought to negate the devil’s power. When the body was recovered, the Heidts admitted to the deed, pleading self-defense against a practitioner of the dark arts.

The case drew the attention of The New York Times, which capitalized on its sensationalism in at least three articles and painted the Heidts as throwbacks to the Middle Ages. As reported in its pages, Adam Heidt was determined by the judge to be insane and was committed, on June 1, 1893, to Middletown State Hospital, where he died of “chronic melancholia.” Joseph Heidt was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to life in Dannemora Prison, now Clinton Correctional Facility. Age 22 at conviction, he served only 15 years before being released, and lived a quiet, unremarkable life thereafter.

Markert’s ghost is still said by locals to haunt the Stone Arch Bridge, with most sightings during frigid January nights. But, according to Conway, even more peculiar than the case itself was presiding district attorney Melvin H. Couch, who for years kept a lover in a hidden room at his office—fodder for another episode of “The X-Files”—or at least an adult movie.