KATHY GASPER'S CAREER.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3530, 17 July 1920, Page 5

KATHY GASPER'S CAREER.

' FRAULEIN RUINS A RHINE ' " ; ’ ' CORPORAL. A pretty German girl who boasted to her parents that she was now making 2000 marks a week (nominally £100) as against 25 marks -a month less than a year ago, stood between two British sentries at the Summary Court in Cologne charged with receiving 204 stolen tins of army petrol. With her in the dock were three German tradesmen who were also implicated, while in custody, awaiting another part of the building wa s a young corporal of the Royal Army Service Corps, with whom the girl had been keeping company, and whom she described as * 'her partner.*’ * Kathy Gasper was the girl’s name, and she had been living apart from, her parents since she met the corporal last July. An undated letter to her father was read in which she said: —

“I know you have seen me on tho trams, and because I was so welldressed you think bad of me. Thank God, I am quite smart enough to earn money without selling myself, though if I had been bad a year ago I could have made much more.

"You turned me out because T. a poor girl, was 200 it is !u debt, but I have not gone beggii . anyhow. Every Saturday I buy 40.000 cigarettes at IS phonnings each, and sell them lor 23 pfennings. They are unloaded direct from an English lorry to a German lorrv with a double floor, and so they

po safely into Germany.” The girl added that she also Sold, corned beef, rabbits, flour, oats, and petroleum, and occasionally motor cycles. but she was" unhappy because of her drunken landlady (whom she dare not prosecute as she. the girl, was posing as' a Belgian"). and wished to go home again. The letter proceeded:— “The more so as my partners’ wife, a nice yonng English, woman, is coming to Cologne in the next few weeks and we all want “to live together. I am already her friend and companion. We would get foml enough. I lumo had no German bread since August—■

every clay four to seven pounds of meat, with butter, cheese, ham, and potatoes —everything as it was before the war.” The girl confessed to several transactions with the corporal. She said he and two German chaffeurs brought a lorry load of petrol to a store, and they sold it for 10,000 marks. She and the soldier then absconded to' Solingen, where they were arrested. On the girl’s behalf it was. urged that as she had lived with the corporal she was under his influence, but the President, remarking that she on a lip r confederates had brough'f. about the ruin of the soldier’s career, passed six months’ imprisonment on all the accused.