Death Sentences in Germany finding herself in bitter want for the commonest necessities of life, had killed her five children and then committed suicide. He conducted himself in the judicial investigation with perfect ease and self-possession, and being denied a lawyer's advice, by the German law, in this phase of the proceedings, de fended himself with remarkable clever ness and unusual presence of mind. But he was no match for the famous Rath Hollmann, the specialist for compli cated murder cases at the criminal court in Berlin. After the offered alibi had been all but completely broken up, and the "bitter want" theory had fallen utterly discredited to the ground, there remained only one perplexing feature, the most unexplainable fact that the door which formed the only available means of exit from Mrs. Conrad's room, the place of the murder, had been found locked by a bolt, only to be operated from the inside by being pushed into a corresponding socket in the door frame by means of a small upright handle at the opposite end of the bolt. The bodies of the five children were found in a large wardrobe, dangling from pegs, while that of the mother was suspended from a strong hook in the upper horizontal beam of the door frame. For some days the judge had been racking his brain to find a satisfactory answer to the question how the murderer could have made his get-away, leaving behind him the door bolted as it was found later, when he decided to make a thorough search of the room inhabited by Conrad who, as mentioned before, lived apart from his wife. Hoping to find some correspondence that had passed between the man and his sweet heart and might furnish damaging evi dence of one sort or the other, the judge was attracted by a pretty large collec tion of so-called sensational literature,
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and started at once to examine every one of the volumes, well acquainted with the habit in that class of people to preserve letters and other papers between the pages of their books. Coming in turn to a rather bulky novel, he could not fail to notice that the book opened, almost automatically, always between the same pages, the pages themselves showing every sign of being read and re-read, and being brooded over time and again. Grown curious, the judge fell to reading the text himself, and was soon fully absorbed in his task, which gave him the surprise of his life. The book was "Nena Sahib," by John Ratcliffe, and on the pages in question was described the murder of an Indian noble in his London mansion by a professional burglar in the pay of a third party. When the crime is discovered the door of the room is locked by a device ex actly as that in Conrad's case. The police officer in charge solves the mystery by finding a little hole bored above the bolt near the edge of the door, so that with the help of any suitable material, such as a piece of wire doubled up to form a loop, the handle of the bolt could be caught, the bolt pushed home, and the wire then re moved; the hole itself was found filled up with putty of the same indistinct color as the surface of the door—all this easily to be accomplished from the out side after leaving the room and closing the door. Rath Hollmann had nothing more to learn in Conrad's room, but hurried to the place of the murder, where he at once ordered the door removed. There was no longer any doubt possible. He found the telltale hole, a la Ratcliffe, filled up, for the matter of a variation, with sealing wax, and to make assur ance doubly sure there were sticking in the wax two short pieces of strong
