SCIENCE AND CRIME

Evening Star, Issue 19021, 17 August 1925, Page 8

SCIENCE AND CRIME

REMARKABLE DETECTIVE WORK IN LABORATORY. A remarkable achievement in unravelling crime by scientific methods has been accomplished by the Stockholm police. A sack containing the dead body of a young woman wrapped in bod sheets and weighted down with lead was fished out of the harbor in Stockholm. Tlio condition of the body indicated that it had been in the water fourteen days. A biological test was applied, and the dead girl was declared to have been either a Finn or an Esthonian. Detectives at once started on the scent by visiting all the Finnish and Esthonian vessels in the harbor and investigating among other things the bunks and linen cupboards of the ships. In the Esthonian tourist steamer Kalivpoeg the sheets from the bunk of the second mate, named Sergo, were missing. After a severe cross-examina-tion Sorgo related the circumstances of the crime.

The dead girl was the daughter of an Esthonian railway official named Wally, and ho had known her from childhood. She was extremely beautiful, but a coquctto. At the ago of twenty she married the director of a large'firm in Berlin named Paul Tonchio, but loft> him after a year, and returned with her mother to Hcval, wVwj sho met Sergo, whoso ship was in port. The former friendship was renewed, and Sergo declared that the girl, who was passionately attached to him, stole aboard his ship just before it sailed and hid herself in Ids cabin, where he found her lying dead, apparently from poison. Ho feared that suspicion would fall on him as the murderer, so he wrapped the body in his bed sheets, placed it in a sack, and dropped it overboard -when they reached Stockholm Harbor.

Later Sorgo withdrew this explanation, and said that in the course of a icalous quarrel the girl had become hysterical, and fallen heavily against the side of his bunk, and had died from the blow, A medical examination of tho wound in the girl’s head admitted the possibility of Sergo's story being true, and because of his otherwise excellent character ho received a light sentence.