GIPSY BLUEBEARD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8793, 3 December 1906, Page 2

GIPSY BLUEBEARD.

MYSTERY -OF VANISHED WIVES. ATROCIOUS CRIME IN A WOOD. GENEVA, October 9.— So revolting was the evidence given yesterday in the trial of a gipsy named Vadoech at iSt Gall that the Judge was compelled i to order in an extra force of police to 6ave the prisoner from the wrath of the spectators in Court. He was finally sentenced to ten years' penal servitude and perpetual banishment from Switzerland for brutally torturing his girl-wife in the heart of a lonely wood. The Judge described the crime as th© roost horrible and repulsive of the present century. Vadoech was, born near Vienna in 1871, of gipsy parents. At eighteen he arrived in Germanj', and married a girl fifteen yeara of age, who died mysteriously six months after the ceremony. Three days after the burial of his first wife he married another girl, who met with a similar 'fate, after giving birth to two children. A third marriage followed,, and within four months of this marriage Va^ doßch made a murderous attack upon his wife, for which ha was sentenced to> three years' imprisonment. It is not known how many young women he " married," abandoned, or got rid of between the period of hie releasa from prison and his appearance in Bohemia last year, when he married a pretty gipsy girl only sixteen years old- With her dowry he bought a horse and' van, and, accompanied by his sons, Pepi, aged fifteen, and Max, aged thirteen, and come other of his children, hei again commenced his wanderings. At Memmingen, in Germany, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in the town for robbery. He was liberated in May 14 last, and joined his young wife and children at St Gall. The girl during her husband's absence had spent tEe little money he had left her, and all of them were nearly starving. Vadoech celebrated his arrival by beating his wife and children every night. On June 10, at the little village of Murg, on the shores of Lake Wallenstadt, he sent bis son Max to buy a pair of scissors, and at ten o'clock at night foe pulled hie young wife out of the van by her hair, and. ordered Max to take a rope and a lanitern and^follow him into the forest. There he tied his wife to a tree with the rope, and fixed her head by tying her long tresses around the trunk. He compressed her throat until the tongue protruded, and transfixed the tongue to the chin by piercing it with a long needle. Taking the scissors from his horror-stricken eon, he cut off the tongue, the lips, the ncse, and th« ears of the unhappy, girl. When some days after she recovered consciousness, Vadosch amused himself by twisting the girl's broken arm, and laughed when she groaned. On July 13 the mutilated wife managed to escape from the van and reach | the police station at St Gall. Her husband was at once arrested. The woman, who still cannot speak, sat in Court during the trial, covering her disfigured face with her Irande. J