Stockton Herald, South Durham and Cleveland Advertiser. — 1882-10-14 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

FAMILY -MURDERER.  The Times Berlin correspondent writes—For the last two days the First District Criminal Court and a jury have been engaged in the trial of a case which would certainly have afforded De Quincey some interesting material for "Murder as one of the Fine Arts." Berlin has not had to listen to such a sensational and painful story of crime for a long time, and certainly the black calendar of the city of intelligence is by no means pleasant reading. The chief actor in the present tragedy is a man named Conrad, aged 34, who began life as a philosophic tailor, somewhat after the style of Kingsley's Alton Locke, and after roaming through the gamut of various occupations, including military service, ended by strangling in one night his wife and four children. The trial of the murderer, which excited the deepest interest, as it was feared that the evidence against him might possibly break down, has disclosed a, terrible degree of social depravity, well calculated to make the humanitarians of the nineteenth century pause and think. Conrad, the " family murderer," as the newspapers term him, is a man, for his station in life, of great force of character—intelligent, enquiring, well-read, inventive, ready, and of remarkable self-possession. He has been a diligent reader of the poet Schiller and of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and his desultory course of study had ended in making him, like many others of his class in Germany, a believer in nothing whatever. Not only had he renounced all his religious faith, but he had compelled his wife to leave the Church, and brought up his children in heathen darkness. The struggle for existence grew ever harder with him. He transferred his affections from his own wife to another unmarried woman. Be denied the paternity of two of his children, and his house became a perfect hell. He wanted to be free to marry the object of his second love, and with one blow he cut the fivefold knot that bound him to his vows. In the night between the 11th and 12th of August last. he strangled his wife and four children while they slept. In the morning the corpses of the mother and her youngest child were found banging at the back of a door, while the dead bodies of the other three were discovered similarly suspended in a wardrobe. On the mother's bed lay a volume of Schiller open at the poem of the "Kindeimrirderinn" (child murderess), which the -father had placed there so as to suggest to the officers of justice that his wife had committed both infanticide and suicide. This was the critical point in the whole case—whether the father or the mother had committed the terrible crime, and but for the judicial habit here of cross-questioning prisoners, there is no saying how far the diabolical craft and coolness with which Conrad planned and executed the deed, with hie calm and self-collected demeanour in Court, might not have aided him. A letter of triumph, however, which he wrote to his mistress before the breath could hove been long out of his wife's body formed a strong link in an otherwise fragile chain of circumstantial evidence, so he was found guilty and condemned to death. His own theory was that, having had a quarrel with his wife on the night in question, he rushed out of her insupportable presence into another room, where he fell asleep, ond that then the mother did the fearful havoc. In the morning he sent for a locksmith to pick the lock which he himself had fastened, and he made a most dramatic pretence of weeping and fainting when confronted with the results of his nocturnal handiwork. Fiction, however, yielded to reality when sentence of death was pronounced upon him, and when, altogether collapsing, he had to be brought round with wine. To detail the social depravity revealed by this trial would only shock your readers.  In Michigan the law forbids the playing of ninepins, billiards, cards, and dice. The tract of the Canadian Pacific Railway is now laid for 425 miles west of Winnipeg. Mr Birkett Forster is engaged in making a series of drawings of cathedrals of England and Wales. The Birminpham School Board has petitioned Government in favour of power being granted to School Boards to establish training colleges for teachers. Mr Alma Tadema is engaged on a portrait of the Duchess of Cleveland, which will I be exhibited in next year's Academy. The various sections of the Liberal party in Germany are said to calculate with some confidence on gaining about 70 votes from the Conservatives at the coming elections. SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE ON THE AMITUDE OF CONSERVATIVES,—In the course of a mooing at Oldham at Saturday, a letter was read from Sir Stafford Northcote in which he said :-r" There never was a time when it more necessary for the Conservative party to be on the alert than at present, for in spite of all the applause which the Liberal organs are bestowing upon the Government, it does not require much penetration to see that a large section of the party are dissated at heprt, and that some strong radical measures will have to be administered to them, in order to take out the taste of the recent war policy. The situation is one which demands the utmost viligance on the part of the Conservative party, and I am glad indeed to see that they are alive to its importance:w