BEHEAD GERMAN "BLUEBEARD": THE BARRE DAILY TIMES, MARCH 24, 1914

The whole thing, the cable said, was over in twelve seconds. That was the detail Frankfurt sent across the Atlantic, and The Barre Daily Times in Vermont set it on page 3 on March 24, 1914, under the nickname the man had carried through his trial: the "Bluebeard of Germany." The paper spelled him Carl. He was Karl Hopf, a Frankfurt druggist and fencing master, and on the morning of March 23 he had been brought out into the courtyard of the prison at Preungesheim to die for poisoning his own family.

The report spends nearly all its words on the last minute. Hopf was led to the block and stood there while the death warrant was read aloud, and after it a statement refusing to commute the sentence. He listened quietly. Then, the paper says, he was seized without warning in the middle of the reading and thrown down with his head on the block. He cried out in terror, and at once the executioner's blade fell. The night before, a local paper reported, he had asked for bread, sausage and beer, written a letter to his last wife and shown the chaplain no remorse.

What the cable leaves out is what made the case famous in Germany. Hopf had bought live cultures of typhoid and cholera by mail, posing as the head of a laboratory, and in 1912 he used them on his third wife, Wally, who survived only because her parents got her into a Frankfurt hospital and a doctor there recognized poisoning. After his arrest in April 1913 the court chemist Georg Popp found arsenic in the exhumed remains of his relatives and, in what Frankfurt later called a first, in the cremated ashes of his mother.

This is a short cable report reprinted in a small-town American paper, not a court record, and its account of the verdict is wrong. It says Hopf was found guilty of murdering four people, his father, his first wife and his two children. On January 17, 1914, the Frankfurt jury convicted him of one murder, that of his first wife, Josefa, who died in 1902; of attempting to murder his second and third wives and two of his children; and it acquitted him on the counts concerning his father and his mother. He was sentenced to death for the murder and to 15 years for the attempts. The cable describes an axe and a block; the record of the execution gives the guillotine.

The Barre Daily Times printed this on March 24, 1914, and the issue has long been in the public domain. The scan is the Library of Congress copy in Chronicling America, and the citation and the Library's rights statement appear in full beneath it. That statement treats any American paper published more than 95 years ago as public domain in its entirety, and a 1914 issue sits well inside it.

Four paragraphs and a headline, transcribed word for word from a clean column with nothing marked illegible. The paper's spellings stand: "Carl" for Karl throughout, and "Frankfort" for Frankfurt. The dateline is printed letter-spaced as "Frankfort - on - the - Main" to fill a justified line, and it is set here with plain hyphens; no word was changed.

The Barre Daily Times, March 24, 1914, page 3, column 2: a short single-column story headed BEHEAD GERMAN "BLUEBEARD." with a two-line deck, "Carl Hopf, Accused of Murdering Four, Pays Penalty at Frankfort," and four paragraphs from Frankfort-on-the-Main. Text only. — The Barre Daily Times (Barre, Vermont), March 24, 1914, page 3, column 2: "BEHEAD GERMAN 'BLUEBEARD.'" Library of Congress, Chronicling America (LCCN sn91066782).Select the scan to open it at full size. The full newspaper page: JPG or PDF.Rights: "The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety. Any newspapers in Chronicling America that were published less than 95 years ago are also believed to be in the public domain, but may contain some copyrighted third party materials." This issue was published in 1914.

Transcription

Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.

BEHEAD GERMAN "BLUEBEARD."

Carl Hopf, Accused of Murdering Four, Pays Penalty at Frankfort.

Frankfort-on-the-Main, Germany, March 24.—For murdering his father, his first wife and his two children, Carl Hopf, a druggist of this city, who was nicknamed the "Bluebeard of Germany," was beheaded yesterday.

Hopf was found guilty in January of the murder of these four persons and the attempted murder of his second and third wives and several other persons.

The actual execution of Hopf was over in 12 seconds, but was a most terrifying scene. After he was led to the block the death warrant was read to the murderer. This was followed by a statement from the kaiser refusing to commute the death sentence.

As Hopf stood quietly listening to the reading of the kaiser's statement he was suddenly seized and thrown down with his head on the block. He cried out in terror, but immediately the axe of the executioner fell and Hopf's head was severed.

Notes: the paper spells the name "Carl"; SKC's page uses "Karl". Kept as printed. The place-name is printed spaced as "Frankfort - on - the - Main" in a justified line; set here with plain hyphens. No words were illegible.