HOPP EXECUTED END OF A GHOUL'S CAREER

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 70, 24 March 1914, Page 7

HOPP EXECUTED END OF A GHOUL'S CAREER

MURDER AND ATTEMPTED MURDER. (By Telegraph Press Association.— Copyright.) (Received March 24, 10 a.m.) BERLIN, 2.3 id March. Carl Hopf, who was found guilty of poisoning with arsenic his father, his first wife and two children, and of attempting to murder his mother and his second and third wives, has been executed. [The trial of Hopf caused great excitement in Germany. The bodies of his two wives, two children, and his mother, were exhumed, and arsenic was found in each case. The evidence showed that Hopf was an evil liver, always needing money. He attempted to poison his mother, in order to inherit £1500. His second wife developed an inexplicable illness, and divorced her husband. Later she 'died of tuberculosis. The third wife, who was present in Court, became ill a few months after the marriage. The doctor, suspecting poison, ordered her removal to the hospital, and Hopf was arrested. A police witness gave evidence that he was first attracted to Hopf's purchases of bacteria by the inexplicable infection with typhoid of several charwomen working in the house. The infection waß traced to Hopf's laboratory. Hopf obtained the cultures of cholera, typlius, and anthrax glanders from an official in the Bacteriological Institute at Vienna, merely by writing "Bacteriological Laboratory" on the head of the notepaper. He stipulated that he must have the most virulent varieties. Hopf gave evidence tha.t he kept Saint _ Bernard dogs for breeding, and required the poisons for experiments on clogs. He also tried them upon himself. His first wife took the arsenic to make herself beautiful. He explained that the arsenic found in the body of one dead child was injected after death. The arsenic in his father's body was the result of drinking a certain mineral water. Hopf's third wife gave evidence that he had insisted on insuring her life, and demanded her consent to be cremated after death, oil the ground that such was customary in his family.]