THE RAILWAY MURDER IN BOHEMIA.
SOME of our readers may remember that justafter the murder of Mr. Briggs, and just before the arrest of Miller, an article appeared in the. Spectator, purporting to be a confession of the murderer—an imaginary confession, of course, based upon a careful calculation of the facts before the police. As it turned out, the confession—allowing always for a mistake as to the criminal's nationality, which the writer assumed to be German- Swiss—was curiously accurate ; so accurate, that he received a letter, half jocular, accusing him of being an accomplice. It was impossible, the writer said, that a man unconnected with the affair should have imagined so trivial a motive as an impelling force towards so great a crime. The writer of the letter had obviously never studied the annals of crime, which show that in -some natures ,greed always developer indifference to life ; and his curious effusion was forgotten, until the Freund affair occurred—the strangest repetition. of the Miller crime in all but minute details, which can be conceived. The difficulty in the Muller case, to men accustomed to the idea that motive and action must always bear some pro- portion to each other, was to correlate—it is a big word, but there exists no other — the, to their minds, immense magnitude of the crime with the, to them, inadequate character of the motive. Murder they understood, murder for revenge, or for fear, or for lust, or even for plunder, if such plunder were known to be accessible ; but murder under sudden temptation of small gain seemed to them unlikely, not worth a strict police inquiry. The writer in the Spectator, familiar, not with European, but with Oriental murders, held that the motive must, under the circumstances reported, be sought in one of those mad cravings which, under certain given circumstances, strike men in whose minds for any reason the special European horror of murder does not exist, and as the event proved, he was curiously right. Miiller, not by any means a man of the criminal class, but unusually callous, mur- dered Briggs under the influence of a sudden idea that Briggs' watch would suit him, would deliver him from certain trouble arising from want of cash ; and but for his confession on the gallows, would have been believed by thousands, not only of his own countrymen, but of Englishmen, to have been a victim of circumstantial evidence. He could not have committed a cold- blooded murder for a watch ! He was guilty nevertheless, and hundreds who before his death did not believe his guilt, will believe it now, when they see an exactly similar crime confessed and accounted for by just the same kind of criminal in Bohemia. Leopold Freund, the Bohemian criminal, was exactly in Miller's position. He had no money, or so little as to suffice only for a few days' maintenance, and he was so exasperated by a want which always seems to those who suffer it a little unfair, an artificial oppression as it were, that he was ready to commit any crime, or rather any act, for he probably was nearly conscience- less, rather than endure his poverty a day longer. That seems an unintelligible mood to Englishmen ; but Englishmen start from a notion about the Poor-law, which blinds them a little to the meaning of this feeling in a Continental mind. It is bad enough for a man in this country to have nothing, for he has to ask relief ; but on the Continent, to have nothing is to endure one of the most painful or even maddening forms of despair, to be nearly sure of death by hunger, unalleviated by human sym- pathy or- converse. Freund, once outside the cities, was in precisely this position, aggravated by the knowledge that he belonged to a race which outside the cities is too detested for him to hope anything from charity, and as he says himself, he was ready for any enterprise which promised money. The particular enterprise occurred to him only when, in the Railway Station of Brian, in Moravia, he saw Ernst Katacher, a wealthy brewer, counting, it may have been almost unconsciously, the receipts, bonds, &c., in his pocket-book. The sight of the property had on Freund the effect which the sight of Briggs's watch had on Miller,—it aroused an evil craving, which overcame the otherwise habitual reverence alike for life and the police. He must have that property, and Katscher the brewer or any- thing else which stood in his way must be put out of it.
We have always doubted, and doubt still, whether Miller made his mind up to murder on a sudden temptation arising from Mr. Briggs's somnolence, or whether he had formed his resolve on the station, andiellowed his victim intentionally intothe carriage. Why should he, so poor as he was, have taken a second-class ticket, if he had no special motive in riding second-class ? However that may have been, there seems to have been no doubt whatever about Freund. He intended to go to the next station, and naturally being in great poverty, but not, be it noticed, at the end of his resources, he purchased a third-class ticket, and when the idea of killing the Brewer occurred to him, tried to thrust himself into a second-class compartment. He might have succeeded in England, where " over- riding." is occasionally condoned, but guards on the Continent are more strict, and he was compelled to get out for a second- class ticket. By this time the idea of the murder was fully de- veloped in his mind, and in his case, as in. Miller's, it is strange to watch the business capacity with which he set about his work. Personal trouble was nothing, for he felt no agitation, but per- sonal expenditure was a very great deal. He wanted above all things to do his murder cheap. It was necessary to catch his victim asleep, railway trains on the Continent being patrolled by guards, who look in at every window, and any struggle, therefore, being dangerous ; but the Brewer might sleep anywhere, and Freund con,- sequently bought a ticket only to the next station. To buy one for a longer journey would have been a needless waste of capital, and Freund was not a man to waste anything, and was far too little agitated to care about repeated visits to ticket-offices. He was only absorbed in his enterprise, so absorbed that he forgot how unusual such repeated purchases are, and bought three tickets in succession, till at last he found precisely the opportunity he required. Herr Katscher took off his boots, stretched himself comfortably on his back, and was already dozing, when Freund cut his throat with a pocket-knife so deeply that he could not cry out. Katscher had but just strength left to resist, when a second cut finished the work, and Freund, rifling the body of the pocket-book, waited for the train to slacken speed, and got out through the window on the farther side. The darkness favoured his escape into the fields, and he walked on for about ten minutes; but the deed he had committed had destroyed his coolness. From the moment he stopped to examine his plunder, the cool, calculating assassin, who could economise a florin while planning an immediate murder, lost his head, and scattered traces of his progress, as if on purpose to enable the police to follow. He threw the pocket-book stained with blood into a field. He left a number of bank receipts addressed to Katscher in an inn at Kogetin, where also he left his blood- stained overcoat. He walked back to Proenitz, and though aware that his shirt was bloody, went out to make purchases before destroying it. When the police, put on the track by the Guard, who had been struck by the repeated purchases of
tickets, came upon his track, they found successively the pocket- book, the receipts, and the bloody shirt, proof ten times as strong as Miller's hat, proof so conclusive indeed that Freund at once gave up resistance, and made a full confession of his guilt, stating his motive as we have reported it, the helpless condition of his victim, and the number of stabs he had found it necessary to give. Like Miller, he had been " hard up ;" like Miller, the sight of property had aroused in him the longing to possess it ; like Miller, he had used the only weapon in his possession ; and as with Muller, the deed, and not the expectation of the deed, over- came his self-possession, and he left behind him the traces which conducted him to his doom.
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