A SENSATIONAL TRIAL.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3123, 20 February 1879, Page 1

A SENSATIONAL TRIAL.

A trial for murder, which is exciting a considerable sensation in Switzerland, beKan recently, at Fribourg. From the opening of the trial, we find that on the 16th of October the body of a little girl, about eleven years old, was found hanging in a shed near the railway station at Fribourg. At first it was supposed that she had committed suicide, but the unanimous opinion of medical experts was that the child had been strangled b-fore being hanged, and that it was a clear case of murder. Search was then made for the assassin. Photographs of the murdered child were sent to every po'ice-station in Switzerland, and descriptions of her published in every country in Europe. For several weeks the affair remained an impenetrable mystery, and the detective! were about to abandon their quest in despair, when, by the merest accident* suspicion was thrown on a woman named Kuchat living at Corcelles, in Canton Yaud. The murdered child was proved

to be hers, and the theory of the prosecution was that she had wished to get rid of it because it stood in the way of a marriage she was about to contract with her present husband, her daughter having been born to her when she was a single woman in service at Leipsic. Not the least extraordinary part of the affair is that Henrietta Bergh, the maiden name of the murderess, was actually married to Jean Euchat at Corcelles at the very moment when all Switzerland was ringing with the story of her crime and the police were on her track. It appears that she has made a full confession to the examining Judge, but its tenor and the testimony of Jean Euchat by no means confirm the theory of the prosecution as to Henrietta's motive in taking her child's life. Euchat, it seems, knew of the daughter's existence ; and. although he had been told she was his wife's niece, he avers that even had he been aware of the truth he would still hare made Henrietta his wife. According to her statement, her motive for committing the crime was solely to save herself the expense of the child's maintenance, and she confesses that to this end she deliberately fetched her from Berne, where the child was staying with her uncle, strangledjflier with a shoe-lace, and hanged her to a beam in the shed in the hope that it' might be supposed she had hanged herself. This murder is likely to intensify the agitation for the re-enactment of capital punishment. People are asking if any punisment can be too severe for a mother in easy circumstances who strangles her child in order to spare herself the burden of its support.