A RUSSIAN CRIME.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIV, Issue 4, 6 January 1910, Page 3

A RUSSIAN CRIME.

MURDERER'S WAY OF. PAYING

HIS DEBTS

STRANGE STORY

The police have now satisfied themselves as to the nature of the crime committed some weeks back in St. Petersburg under mysterious circumstances that aroused the suspicion among the public that the victim was another 'Azeff." As reconstructed by the police,"the story is as follows:— A Moscow engineer named Gilevich insured his life for £10,000 in five separate policies, alleging that he wished thereby to guarantee certain creditors in the event of his death before certain undertakings of his ripened into profits. He paid two years' premiums in advance, and attempted, but in vain, to repeat the operation with other insurance offices. His intention was to procure a corpse sufficiently like himself, or so much mutilated as to be indistinguishable from himself. With this object he first lured away to Kiev a young man with promises of a good post in a new company he was getting up. Jne young fellow- became suspicious and bolted, informing the police of his suspicions. Gilevich appears to have committed various smart tricks in various towns to keep him in funds, and had, indeed, always lived freely, gambling and leading a gay life on means that seemed wholly inadequate to his outlay. ' A STRANGE BARGAIN. One afternoon there came to a widow's house, where ,a bill in the window advertised "Apartments to Let, a person calling himself Theodorov (the name under which Gilevich attempted to v carry out ibis coup at Kiev), and hired the room on condition that the lady vacated the whole iiat, leaving only a servant in order to watcli over her interests. Without any of the usual bargaining, the stranger paid up in advance all she demanded, and next day she vacated her own rooms in the flat, "which were temporarily wanted for a friend from the provinces." The stranger came in, avoided handing his passport to the yardman for presentation to the police, alleging that to-morrow, when he unpacked, would do, and immediately sent off the servant to a railway stniion 20 miles away to .fetch his luggagewinch did not exist. The servant returned late at nigl.t. s <ml Juuikl the flat locked np, could not get in, and passed the night- with fellow servants of another f<^. N-t day the rooms remain^ Ir^,.,] ~p. ;•„,] it W;iS iio t until affc'/i- mi.!,''!,-,- ;.!-. :! t tl:« combined wtsdom ol ti-.i. -,- 1 -™..i>- ;m/! <!■.■- semitowns, tho y,m!in;!M. >-,:!\v- r. o fl- -on-

elusion that something must be wrong. The police broke open tho house, and, entering, found a body lying in the bed of the new lodger, no signs of anything like a struggle in the room, and-nothing more than an overcoat and a .travelling basket with a few clothes in. The body was decapitated and the head reposed under the left arm. There were three mortal stabs in tho trunk. The features had been mutilated bt-yond recognition, and the skull entirely scalped

GILEVICH'S BROTHER

By the body lay a double-edged dagger and a razor. The maker's names on all the garments in the room had been cut away, and also burnt. Tho body v.v.s removed to the police mortuary, and the first, visitor to laentify it was. a student named Uilevich, a younger brother of the engineer, who testified positively to the identity. He was allowed to depart but later on, after the failure or the sister of the brothers Gilevich to identify, and the doctors' positive evidence that the body was not that ot a man who had suffered a certain organic disease Gilevich has suffered irom, the young student was arrested Tne body was eventually proved pretty satisfactorily to be that of a washerwoman's son who had recently visited his mother finely dressed, and boasting of an altogether impossible rise in life for one of his. station, and then had disappeared altogether lhere no longer remains any mystery about this horrible crime, but the on]y arrest is that of the student uilevich, who obstinately refuses to give any aid to the police, and all Russia is being scoured for tJie engineer Gilevich, so far in vain