A BLIND DETECTIVE

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2509, 5 April 1881, Page 4

A BLIND DETECTIVE

Jandcr, the Berlin bank clerk, who levanted some weeks ago with a vast sum of money in stock, and securities, and contrived to evade the pursuit of the Prussian detective police until very lately, with an ingenuity that entitles him to high rank among the cleverest criminals of modern times, was run to earth and arrested last Thursday at Kiel, whence he was forthwith conveyed closely guarded and heavily ironed, to the capital. A considerable portion of his booty has been recovered ; but some valuable lottery shares and coupons of railway scrip purloined by him could not be found when Ids person and baggage was searched, nor could he be induced to confess what be bad done with them. They have, however, since been discovered through an accident little less than marvellous. On Saturday morning one of the gardeners employed in Bellevue Castle, a royal villa situated in the Berlin Thier garten, while attending to his duties in the grounds, noticed a fresh mould-cast apparently just thrown up,from which torn scraps of paper were protruding. Curiosity impelled him pick to up some of these fragments, and on examination he found them to be the tatters of the banker Sampson's pass-book with the Imperial Bank, Meininger Lottery shares, and coupons of other State securities. It has since transpired that Jander, fearing he might be tempted to run the risk of detection by endeavoring to convert these valuable papers into cash, resolved to destroy them, and, having done so, buried them in Bellevue Garden, where he at the same time assumed the first of his many disguises—that in which he managed to get away safely from Berlin. That securities thus, in all human probability, finally disposed of, should have been brought to light by the subter ranean engineering of a matutinal mole, is surely as surprising an incident as any hitherto recorded in the sensational chronicles of “ Causes Celebres.”