A GERMAN "FAMILY MURDERER."

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 4, Issue 1246, 5 December 1882, Page 2

A GERMAN "FAMILY MURDERER."

Tho First District Criminal'. Court 0f..... Berlin and a jury hart bießtufjagid in trial of h cm« which would coitninly liavo.fi afforded Da Quincey some intoning* material for hit essay on " Murder at one of the fiim Arti," . The' chief actor in the tradegy wat a mat) named Conrad, aged 34, who begari 1 ;", life ai a philosophic tailor, tomowhat after V the style of Kingsley's Alton Locke, and nftor roaming through the gituiut of various occupations, including military service ended by strangling in one night his wife and four children. Conrad the "family murderer," ai the newspaper! term him, is a man, for hit station in life, of greatsforce of character, intelligent, inquiring, V woll-rea'd, inventive, ready, and. of \ remarkable self possession. He had boon a diligent reader uf Schiller and of .Darwin, and hii desultory course of study had ended in making him, like many others of his class' in Germany, a believer in nothing whatever. Not only had he renounced all hit religious faith himself, but he had-com-palled hie wife to leave the Church, and brought up hie children in heathen darkness. He transferred hit affections fro in,.; hit own wife to another, an unmarried woman. He denied the paternity of two of hit children, and his household ..,, became a perfect hell. He wanted to be free to marry the ohjeet of bit lecondT: -love, and in the night-, between the 11th. : and 12ih of Augutt iait he strangled hit wife and four children while they slept, In the morning the corpses of the mothtr and her youngest child were found hauginj at-the buck of the door, while the dead bodies of the otb.tr three wen d»coroud similarly suspended in a wardrobe,'' On the mother't bed lay a volume of Schiller open.it the poem of the "Kin'derraorderin I.' 1 .' (child murderess) which the father had'placed theft so as to suggestion tho officers of justice that hie wife had committed .both infanticide and suicide. A letter of triumph, however, whioh Conrad wrote to hit mistress before the breath could have been long out of hit wife's body formed a strong link in an otherwise somewhat fragile chain of circonatantial cvidenea, to be vras found guilty itid condtianed to death.