EXECUTIONER IN CHIEF.

Taihape Daily Times, 30 January 1919, Page 3

EXECUTIONER IN CHIEF.

ECHO OF HOUNDSDITCH MUBDEES. PETERS’ LIFE IN LONDON. Jacob Peters, who is responsible for sending hundreds of men and women to execution in Moscow, is the man who was suspected of having been concerned in the Houndsditch murders in December, 1910, and with the Sidney-street affair in January 1911. He was born in 1886 in Courland, I and oame to this-country in 1909, when he secured employment as a presser with a firm of wholesale so- | cond-hand clothes dealers in North London, now carrying on business in Whitechapel. On December 22, 1910, Peters was arrested on suspicion of having been concerned in the murdier of three police officers by shooting them ;at Houndsditch on December 16, and, with others, he was committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court in April, 1911. The evidence against him was that he was seen with a man named Luboff, assisting. George Gardstein, one of the principals engaged in the murders, who had been accidentally shot by an accomplice. There was evidence that he had been in company of some of the persons

engaged in the murders, before and after the committal of the crime. BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT. The defence was an alibi, and it was suggested that Peters was mistaken for his cousin Fritz Svaar, his double, who was undoubtedly engaged in the murders. Svaar lost his life in resisting 'arrest at ’Sydniey-street on January 2, 1911. At the trial the Judge said that there was an element of doubt in the evidence, and Peters was acquitted. Afterwards he returned to his old firm, with whom he remained until April, 1917. On May 1 of the same year the London Russian delegate Committee sent Peters to Russia. Soon after Peters’ arrival in Russia he became a Bolshevik. After the November Revolution, when the Leninists came to power, he occupied a post in the Foreign Office, but it was only lately he achieved world notoriety as the President of the Committee for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage. This organisation has Unlimited powers for dealing summarily with all who oppose Soviet authority, and Peters, in his position, has power of life and death over anybody in Russia. A neutral who visited him lately on a number of occasions to plead for the lives of innocent people, said that he had become a mere furious animal, signing death warrants all day, often without looking to sec what he was signing.

In 1913 Peters married tan English girl, and since his departure for Russia she has received several letters from him, the last being at the «nd of last year. She had also heard of him indirectly through friends who had returned from Russia. Before Litvinoff left England on September 25 he sent his secretary to Mrs. Peters, With an offer that she might accompany the Bolshevik party if she chose but she refused. HIS ENGLISH WIFE. The English wife of Jacob Peters is living at Islington, whete she has been since her husband went to Russia, seventeen months. Mrs. Peters’ i a good-looking young woman, who before her marriage was ■a Miss Freeman, of Worcester. Three of her brothers are in the British Army, one of them at the front. She refuses resolutely to believe that her husband can be a monster in human shape signing away hundreds of lives daily at Moscow. "It is unthinkable,” said Mrs. Peters, producing letters from ' her husband, ‘‘ He was a kind husband and father, and never breathed a word against Great Britain, to me before he went away or by letter since. As an Englishwoman I think it only just I should say this. ’ ’

The letters shown were all domestic in tone, and the only references to ■Russia were allusions to the “hard work’’ in -which Peters was engaged. “Tell my darling baby that she will ; see me soon,” he wrote in his last letter and in another he said: “Look well after our darling, and the knowledge that she thinks of me will give me strength in my work. I cannot forget our darling, Maisie, in the midst of the hardest' work.” Mrs. Peters stated that other letters had probably Jeen stopped by the censor, as her husband wrote regularly twice a week. “Baby constantly speaks fondly of her father,” she said. was never happier than when spending his evenings at home with us.” “My reason for not going to my husband in Eussia when Mr Litvinoff recently invited me to join his party of deportees was that I had not sufficient time to get ready. On several previous occasions I had seen Mr. Litvinoff in regard to my journeying to Eussia with the child. Being English, it was never easy to make up my mind to go so far as things arc at present. ’ * Some time ago Mrs. Peters worked at munitions, and thought she might have to go out to work again, as she received no money from Russia. Recalling the Houndsditch murders in 1910. and the Sidney-street affair in January. 1911, in connection with which her husband was arrested and acquitted, Mrs. Peters said: “I did not know him then, and during our twelve months’ courtship, in 1912-1913 he told me everything so that I should not marry him in ignorance of his record.”