A PARIS SENSATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9641, 5 November 1909, Page 5

A PARIS SENSATION.

TRIAL OF MADAM STEINHEIL.

EAGER SIGHTSEERS.

United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph Copyright,

Received November 4, 8.20 a.m. PARIS, November 3.

The trial of Madame Steinheil, charged with the murder of her husband and her stepmother, in May last, year has commenced in Paris.

Two hundred persons waited in a "queue" (in a line, under the control ot police), outside the court all night.

Some of them sold their places for 500 francs (£2O).

On May 31st, lyoß, M. Adolphe Steinheil, a well-known painter, and his mother in-law, Mme. Japy, were found to have been brutally killed by strangulation, while the painter's wife was found gagged.

The crime created intense excitement in Paris, and crowds flocked to the scene. Mme. Steinheil affirmed that a black-bearded man played the leading role in the tragedy, and that there were two other men and a woman implicated in the crime. The woman was red haired and wore a long black mantle. She held the muzzle of a ret/olver pressed against Mrs Steinheil's temple while the men were binding her hands and feet. The three men wore black soft hats with white brims and were enveloped in long black gowns. All three had beards, not false ones, she thought. The cord which was used in the strangling of M. Steinheii and his mother in-law had been cut from the window fusteners. Rain fell late at night, an hour before the crime was committed, and one thing that puzzled tne police was why no footprints were visible on the garden path. In the interior of the house there was not a single footmark. This and other suspicious circumstances led to the arrest of Madame Steinheil a few days afterwards. She then asserted that the vers on of the crime which she had given was unfounded, but that she was endeavouring to shield some personage whose arrest would astound Paris.