THE REAL SHERLOCK HOUSES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 129, 30 May 1908, Page 15

THE REAL SHERLOCK HOUSES.

OFFICES TTXKAVELS BEKLIS MTHtDEB. One of the most brilliant pieces of detective work beard of outside action for many a long day has been performed by Detective-Inspector Wannowski, of the Berlin police, who on Tuesday April 14th. put his hands on August Heidert, a cobbler, aged 43, and charged him with the murder of a boy named Herman Blecher. On Wednesday, April 5, portions of a dismembered human body were found in a sack in the Berlin Zoological Gardens. Further search disclosed another package of remains, and the police surgeons set to work to put the body together. This they did so successfully that .it could Dβ recognised as that of a boy about fifteen years of age. Then .Inspector Wannowski carefully examined some rags of clothing found with the mutilated remains. In a piece of lining was a torn pawn-ticket. This was pieced together, and then the trail was followed up, with the result that it was found that the ticket related to a small article pawned by a boy named Herman Blecher. The latter Wannowski nest discovered had been apprenticed to a tailor, but had run away from his master, and had been seen on the night of the murder with two men in a low tavern in the East end of Berlin. Keen on his clue, the detective searched all the slums of the city, and was at last rewarded by the discovery that one of the men with whom the boy had been seen bad later been arrested for theft, and was in the Atoabit Gaol. THREE HOURS , CAB CHASE. Interviewed, the prisoner declared that the boy went OS with the other man, whose name he did not know, but whom he had occasionally seen in the company of a girl named -'Bertha." The latter had told him that she was afraid of the man In question, because lie had once attempted to strangle "Bertha" had, therefore, to be found, and, after exhaustive inquiries by quite an army of detectives, was discovered in a workhouse infirmary, and identified as a girl named Eckardt. She declared that she did not know the stranger's name, but said she believed she could find his lodging where he had tried to choke her. if she started out from the "thieves* kitchen," where she h2d met him. Accordingly, accompanied by Wannowski. she drove for hours about the "Scheunenviertel" in a cab till finally she hit on the stranger's apartment in the Lietzmann Strasse. The police forced the door, and found everything in perfect order, but search in a cupboard brought to light unmerous garments saturated with blood and a large butcher's knife. The room also contained a huge block, newly covered with linoleum, on which, it is assumed, the murderer dissected his victim. The final incriminating proof was an apron of a peculiar gaudy pattern, in which the remains of the boy were wrapped up. This was shown in a way that would not excite her suspicions to Heidert's wife, who is in hospital, and she immediately identified it as hers, saying that she had left it in hex lodging when taken ill four months ago. Heidert. who is described as a degenerate, subject; to morbid propensities, and who had been confined in an asylum, was arrested at two o'clock on Tuesday morning in the streets in the vicinity of the great fire at the garrison church, being pointed out to the police by the waiter of the tavern where he had been seen with the boy. Heidert was drunk when captured, but sobered immediately on being charged with the crime. He strenuously denies his guilt, but the proofs seem overwhelming.