REJECTED LOVER.

Western Star, 5 December 1933, Page 2

REJECTED LOVER.

AUSTRIAN’S REVENGE. SUICIDE IN VIENNA. The chief of police revealed recently how a photographer employed at the General Hospital in Vienna infected a girl who resented his wooing with bacilli stolen- from the Pathological Institute, before killing himself by gas poisoning. The photographer, Felix Fiala, aged 32, was found dead in the institute, where he had remained overnight to develop plates. Beside his body was a note to the police stating that he intended to commit suicide because he was in desperate! financial straits.

But this statement proved untrue, for Fiala lived with his mother, earned plenty of money, and had no debts. Berta Graubauer, aged 28, a typiste at the institute, was taken to . hospital suffering from a mixture of typhus and paratyphus, and the doctors state that the infection undoubtedly was from mixed bacilli.

Fiala had access to all -bacillus cultures at the institute. He wrote a farewell letter to the girl, warning her that she would suffer “terrible punishment” for rejecting him. Berta, who is betrothed to. another man, told the doctors that she remembered Fiala bringing her bread and butter at 10 a.m. on a Friday—a usual custom in Vienna offices, where work always starts early and the first “breakfast” is merely coffee. The girl found the note from Fiala when she arrived at work on the Monday. It "concluded : “Look in the laboratory.

Berta went to the laboratory with the house porter and found Fiala dead with a gas tube in his mouth.' She thought his threats were insane ravings. Berta is now dangerously ill and incapable of undergoing a police examination. Bacilli stocktaking *is proceeding at the institute for -the purpose of ascertaining whence Fiala stole the cultures.