Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1902-11-15 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

GUILTY?  OF STA  'TLING SKETCHES.]  eluded that as soon as the murderer had given the landlord his message he stepped aside from the doorway into o, dark corner on the left, mounted a stone bench which stood there for the use of customers, and with uplifted weapon awaited his victim. Seeing no one in the passage in going downstairs, Rupprecht no doubt stepped just ow,side the door and turned to look down the street. At that instant the weapon fell, and tottering inside the door, Runprecht sank down where a few seconds later they found him. _ _  As the- murderer had got away entirely unobserved, the streets being deserted at half-past ten on a February night, and as he had left not a. trace behind him, the officers of justice had to look to the dying man for a clue to the miscreant's identity. On the evening of the next day, Saturday, finding him conscious, they asked him who struck the blow. "Schmidt," he replied. "What Schmidt ?" they enquired, and he answered Woodcutter." Further, he said that this Schmidt the woodcutter lived in the part of the city known as The Most, that he had used a hatchet, that he (Rupprecht) had recognised him by his voice, that Schmidt owed him no money, but that there had been a quarrel between them. His answers, it must be understood, were of the briefest, for the most part limited to a single word, and be was so obviously incapable of making a coherent statement that no question was put to him as to the nature of the quarrel. _ _  Two days after this, on Monday, the lath, his mental condition having, as the result of trepanning, slightly improved, he was more formally examined, but, though he was able to recognise the examining magistrate, nothing more definite was gleaned from him. He repeated that his assailant was Schmidt, the woodcutter, but when asked whether he lived in the Walsh, the Schutt, or The Most, he was silent, and when the question was put "Does he live on the Hohes Pilaster?" be distinctly answered "Yes." Then he became incapable of further utterance, and early the next morning he died.  Though Rupprecht had supplied something in the nature of a clue, the examining magistrate was conscious that he had a difficult piece of work before him. The number of Schmidts in Munich was legion, and several of them were woodcutters. The claims of each of these woodcutter Schmidts to the attentions of the law were carefully reviewed, and at last the number of suspects was brought down to three. One of them, Abraham, whose home was on the Hohes Pilaster—where on the second oocasion Rupprecht said his assailant lived—began to prevaricate as soon as the first question was put to him. Taken to the bedside of the dying man he at first denied that he knew him, but in the next breath said, "That is Herr Rupprecht, I know him well. What is the matter with him?" "Why did you say you did not know him?" he was asked. "Because that is Mr Rupprecht," he replied! At this he was sternly ordered to give a proper anewer, but instead of doing so he launched out into general assertions of his innocence, adding, "On Friday night I was cutting pegs at the house of my mother-in-law till- eleven o'clock." When asked at what time he went home he said, "I stayed until past nine  SISSISSVVOSS6O96O9SSS A a. 4v S&SSISSSS IP 116 ;ill' 116