A “FAMILY MURDERER."

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1237, 2 January 1883, Page 3

A “FAMILY MURDERER."

Fob two days recently the First District Criminal Conrt of Berlin and a jury were engaged in the trial of a case which would certainly have afforded De Quincey some interesting material for his essay- on “ Murder as one of the Fine Arts.” The chief actor in the present tragedy was a man named Cbnrad, aged 34. who began life as a philosophic tailor, somewhat after the style of Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and hfter roamidg through the gamut of various occupations, including military service, ended by strangling in one night his wife and four children. The trial of the murderer has disclosed ? terrible de gree of social depravity well calculated to to make the humanitarians of the nineteenth century pause and think. Conrad, the (< family murderer.'* as the newspapers term him, is a man, for his station in life. -Z great force of character, intelligent, wellready, and of remarkable self-possession. He had been a diligent reader of the poet Schiller, and of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and his desultory course of study had ended in making him, like many of his class in Germany, a be

■ liever in nothing whatever. Not only had ,he renounced all his religious faith himself, but he had compelled his wife to leave the Church, and brought up his children in darkness. The straggle for existence grew ever harder with him. He transferred his affections from his own wife to another woman. He denied the paternity of two of his children, and his household became a perfect hell. He wanted to be free to marry the object of his second love, and with one blow he cut the five-fold knot that bound him to his vows. In the night between the 11th and 12th of August last he strangled his wife and four children while they slept. A letter of triumph which he wrote to his mistress before the breath could have been long out of his wife’s body formed a strong link in an otherwise somewhat fragile chain of circumstantial evidence, so he was found guilty and condemned to death. When sentence of death was pronounced upon him he altogether collapsed, and had to be brought round with wine,