NEW YORK CRIME.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 108, 7 April 1936, Page 9

NEW YORK CRIME.

ACQUITTAL GRANTED. NEW YORK, April 3. The jury to-day acquitted Vera Stretz on a charge of the murder of Dr. Friedrich Gebhardt. The defence contended that she fired with the German industrialist’s own revolver in self-defence when he attempted to attack her.

A New York cable dated November 12 stated that the shooting occurred there at an early hour that, morning of a distinguished and wealthy German financier and economist bv a young , American woman, allegedly his secretary and self-styled fiancee. An extraordinary feature of the incident was that a close friend of the man received a frantic transAtlantic telephone call before dawn from the former’s wife in Germany, who somehow had learned that her husband was killed. Dr. Friedrich Gebhardt, aged 43, one-time associate of Fritz Haber, who discovered synthetic nitrogen, and professor of economics at American universities, and at the time of his death interested in a wellknown brokerage house at New York, was found dead in a his night clothes in a fashionable fiat, where Miss Vera Stretz, aged 31, a university graduate and teacher at New York schools, also had her quarters. She was apprehended by the nolice, and a revolver was seized j with used shells. Miss' Stretz admitted the shooting. She had in her possession 100 love letters that Gebhardt had sent her from Germany. Gebliardt’s wife and two daughters, aged 17 and 15, were living on his estate at Baden Baden, and it was from there that Frau Gebhardt first tried to reach her husband by telephone. She failed, and then communicated with a friend and obtained confirmation of the shooting.