SENTENCE ON VELTHEIM.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 8, 22 February 1908, Page 7

SENTENCE ON VELTHEIM.

TWENTY YEARS IN GAOL. The trial of Franz Moritz Ludwig von Veltheim, charged with attempting to blackmail Mr. Solly Joel, a brother of Mr. Woolf Joel, who was shot at Johannesburg in 1898 by the prisoner, has been concluded. Veltheim was severely cross-examined, and Mr. Joel was recalled to prove that prisoner’s version of his interviews with the late Mr. Barney Barnato was inconsistent with facts. The judge having summed up, the jury retired and finally returned with a verdict of guilty. The judge spoke in terms of the strongest condemnation of the prisoner’s life of crime, and sent him to penal servitude for twenty years. : . . • Inspector Pentin gave an outline of prisoner’s history. According to police accounts from various countries, his real name was JKurtze, his father having been a forester. Prisoner had been a bad character from childhood. He was a sailor in the German navy in 1880,. and deserted the same year, being suspected of stealing his captain’s gold watch and seal bearing a family crest. The captain’s name was von Veltheim. Later on prisoner served aboard a British merchantman. He went in 188 G to Fremantle and Perth, where, in 1887, he married a Miss Maria Yearsley. He then went to Capetown, and his wife went to England, and became acquainted with a gentleman whom prisoner, on rejoining his wife, attempted to blackmail. Prisoner was told that the matter would be placed in the hands of the police, but continued to write threatening letters to his wife’s frjend. Veltheim next bigamously married and defrauded and deserted several women. He obtained £l5OO from one, and underwent a supposed secret marriage with a young American lady at Saint Cloud, one of his friends on that occasion impersonating a priest. Later the prisoner obtained from a German widow whom he previously knew, and now promised to marry, £2BOO to invest on her behalf. She, finding he had squandered the amount, committed suicide. Prisoner served with the Cape mounted police, and, being requested to resign; began to blackmail the Joels, one of who in (Woolf Joel) he shot ddad. Later he raised a large sum of money on the pretence of being able to unearth Kruger’s • buried treasure, amounting to £3,000,000. . ■ .n ■ ' _ c: : Mr.'Justiee Phillimore, in emphasising the fact- that the-prisoner had been found guilty of one’of the most serious crimes, declared that the sentence and the punishment must be equally preventive. The prisoner was stunned' on hearing the sentence.