FAMILY MURDERED.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXI, Issue LXII, 8 April 1911, Page 10

FAMILY MURDERED.

SHOCKING GERMAN CRIME

An appalling crime was committed towards the end of January by a stucco worker named Breitenbach, at Bochum. The man had recently been on bad terms with his wife/ whom he suspected of infidelity with a -male relative lodging in the house, but the quarrel which culminated in the tragedy seems to have arisen out of some quite trifling matter. After the couple had been wrangling tor some time Breitenbach attacked the woman with a knife and a hammer, and, having felled her to the floor, knelt upon her and sought to cut her throat. She struggled desperately for her life, and succeeded in eluding his clutches, jumping to her feet and escaping through the door.

The woman fled into the next room, where their four children, the eldest a boy of seven years, were sleeping, and crept under the bed. Breitenbach appears to have thought that she had gone to fetch the police, and the sense of . the catastrophe he had brought down on the family evidently drove him mad. After remaining for some time in the sitting-room, where the quarrel with his wife had taken place, he went quite coolly and collectedly into the bedroom and butchered the children one after the other in the most barbarous manner. He then tied them together in couples by the heads and hung them up on the bedposts 2 after doing which

he took down the curtain-cord and handed himself from the door-handle. His Ayife, who had watched the horrible scene, half-benumbed with terror and pain, at once flung herself from the window on to the pavement, almost at the feet of her own mother, who was on thp way '.to pay her a visit. She now lies in hospital in a moribund condition. Breitenbach showed some faint signs of life Avhen he was cut down, but expired shortly afterwards.