SHOCKING TRAGEDY IN BERLIN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6566, 2 December 1882, Page 2 (Supplement)

SHOCKING TRAGEDY IN BERLIN.

o For the last few days the First District Criminal Court and a jury have been engaged in the trial of a ciise which would certainly e have afforded De Quincey some interesting "I material for his essay on " Murder as One of the Fine Arts/' Berlin has not had to listen to such a sensational and painful story of 8 I crime for a long time, and certainly the lilack " calendar of the city of intelligence is by no ~ means pleasant reading. The chief actor in f the present tragedy was a man named Conrad, 1 aged .34, who bean life as a philosophic tailor, '] somewhat after the style of Kinesley's " Alton Locke," aud after roaming through the gamut of various occupations, including military service, ended by strangling in one night his wife and four children. The trial of the murderer, which excited the deepest interest, r.s it was feared that the evidence '' against him might possibly break down, has disclosed a terrible degree of soeiahlepravity well calculated to make the humanitarians of e the nineteenth century pause and think. Conrad, the "family murderer," as the nows- ' papers term him, is a man, for his station in a life, of great force of character, intelligent, n inquiring well-read, inventive, ready, and of e remarkable self-possession. He had been a diligent reader of the poet Schiller and of .' the naturalist Charles Darwin, and his g dejolutory course of study had euded in mak--0 ing him, like many others of his class in Gerii many, a believer in nothing whatever. Not only had he renounced all his religious faith himself, but he had compelled his wife to leave the Church, and brought up his children k in heathen darkness. The struggle for existence grew harder with him. He transferred his afl'ections from his own wife to another, an "* unmarried woman. He denied the paternity of two of his children, and his household became a perfect hell. He wanted to be free ',' to marry the object of his second love, and with one blow he cut the fivefold knot that '"J bound him to his vows. In the night he strangled his wife and four children whilo Q they 'slept. In the morning tho corpses of ° the mother and her youngest child were found e hanging at the back of a door, while the dead ,' bodies "of the other three wera discovered similarly suspended in a wardrobe. On the 1 mother's bed l:iy a volume of Schiller open at ° the poem of tho "Kindermorderinn ,, (child- ■" murderess), which the father had placed there so as to suggest to the officers of justice that S his wife had committed I'oth infanticide and n suicide. I'll is was tho critical point in the 11 whole ease —whether the father or mother ? had committed the terrible crime, and lint for the judicial habit here of cross-questioning D I prisoners, there is no saying how far the diae holical cr.ift and coolness with which Conrad 3 planned and executed the deed, with his calm aud self-collected demeanour in court, might not have aided him. A letter of triumph, however, which ho wrote to his mistress before the breath could have been long out of his wife's body formed a strong " link in an otherwise somewhat fragile chaiii j of circumstantial evidence, so ho was found 3 guilty and condemned to death. His own j theory was that, having had a quarrel with his wife on tho night in question, he rushed ] out of her insupportable presence into another j room, where be fell asleep, and that then the mother did the fearful huvoc. In tho mornj ing he sent for a locksmith to pick the lock j which he himself had fastened, and he made ainost dramatic pretence of weeping and fainting when confronted with his own handiwork. I. Fiction, however, yielded to reality when f. sentence of death was pronounced upon him, I and when, altogether collapsing, ho had to be J brought round with wine. To detail the social depravity revealed by this trial would ' only shock your readers.