A dark tale of adultery, witchcraft and murder could end today, 225 years after it began, with a decision to rehabilitate the last witch to be executed by a court of law in Europe.

Anna Göldi, a maid, was beheaded after being found guilty of witchcraft by a court in the Swiss Alpine town of Glarus, in 1782. Campaigners including journalists, lawyers and MPs are now demanding an official rehabilitation, arguing that she was a victim of a conspiracy between the local church and the judiciary.

“The authorities must apologise for this historic injustice and take responsibility for an innocent victim of juridical persecution. We were the last to murder a ‘witch’, and we should be the first to pardon one,” said Walter Hauser, a lawyer and author who initiated the campaign. MPs have taken the matter to the Glarus cantonal parliament after local authorities refused to declare an official rehabilitation of the unfortunate maid.

This year Mr Hauser published a bestselling book called The Juridical Murder of Anna Göldi, revealing evidence that he found in local archives that shows how Göldi was denounced by her employer, Dr Johannes Tschudi, an influential judge and politician who apparently got her pregnant and then orchestrated a mock trial that led to her execution.

Göldi, 40, is believed to have wanted to make public her amorous relationship with Tschudi, a married father of two. To avoid being stripped from all public offices, as adulterers would have been in those days, the wealthy judge conspired with his friends and relatives in the church and the court to charge her for attempting to poison his children by witchcraft.

Göldi was tortured into making a full confession, and was subsequently decapitated with a sword by a court executioner, the last of the tens of thousands of alleged witches that were put to death by courts across Europe.

The case sparked an international scandal at the time after a court clerk copied the trial files detailing the witchcraft charges and the torture and leaked them to a liberal German newspaper, which accused Switzerland of medieval practices in the Enlightenment Age.

Margaret Vuichard, a Glarus MP for the Greens who is supporting the rehabilitation campaign, told The Times: “The fate of this poor maid is compelling. An official rehabilitation would be a symbolic gesture that would also honour the thousands of women who suffered horrible deaths as victims of such absurd trials.”

The witch-hunt began in the early 14th century in Europe and more than 50,000 people, mostly women, were burnt, hanged or beheaded over the following three centuries for practising witchcraft. The Glarus case happened when persecution had virtually ceased and more than 90 years after the famous witch trials in the American town of Salem, described in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.

The story of Göldi has been told in two novels, a film and a BBC documentary. An Anna Göldi museum was opened this year and a foundation bearing her name was established with the declared aim of fighting injustice in the judiciary and promoting minority rights and press freedom.

But despite the ever-growing prominence of the case, the Glarus evangelical church and the local government refuse to offer any official apologies. A spokesperson for the local government said that Göldi’s innocence was beyond dispute and that an official rehabilitation was not necessary.

A grim end

— Elin i Horsnäs was executed in 1611 in Sweden. It is thought that she had had an affair with the witch-hunter who accused her

— In Ireland in 1324, Lady Alice Kyter’s fourth husband fell ill and accused her of using witchcraft to kill her first three husbands. She persuaded the Lord Chancellor to overrule her arrest, but her maid was burnt alive for her alleged role

— Anne Boleyn was accused of witchcraft after Henry VIII claimed that she had cast love spells on him. She was beheaded in 1536

— The Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the 1690s ended in the hanging of 19 men and women, now regarded as victims of paranoia and jealousy

Sources: Häxorna, Alf Åberg; bede.org; tudorhistory.org

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