ENGAGED 1,300 TIMES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 326, 11 April 1928, Page 13

ENGAGED 1,300 TIMES

ADVERTISEMENTS BRING RESULTS

Franz Leifke, a handsome man of 40 with black moustache and soulful eyes, has been arrested at the office of a newspaper here, says the Berlin correspondent of the ‘Daily Mail,” just as he was collecting the 331 answers to the following advertisement: Civil servant, widower, desires to meet a widow, about 30, with a view to matrimony. No objection to child. Some property desirable, but not essential. And a very good tiling it was for the 331 widows that the police pounced on Franz, for whom they have been looking since the summer of 1925. They state that he has been making a comfortable living for the last 15 years, with the exception of the year which he passed in prison, by swindling girls and widows who were anxious to marry. Between 1912 and 1924 he had swindled some 900 of them and carried on his profitable life-work of getting engaged in every part of Germany. He was at last caught and sentenced to 10 years* hard labour, but after a year he escaped and resumed his old life. Franz's method was very simple. He inserted a modest advertisement in the chief newspaper of the place he was working in—even the best German newspapers accepted such advertisements —and started a correspondence with four or five of the women who replied. He arranged to meet one of them, and he MHUi such a pastmaster in the art of inspiring confidence and of awakening affection that he usually succeeded in extracting money or jewellery from his victim.

When he had fleeced her he sent a little note to say that he was going away for a fortnight, and turned liis attention to another promising widow. It is stated that his victims in the last year are as many as 400.