In the last days of April 1906 young women were going missing in Marrakesh, and the parents of one of them traced her to the shop of Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, a cobbler who also worked as a public letter-writer for people who could not write their own. His accomplice, a woman of about seventy named Annah, was seized by one of the families and tortured until she talked. The girls who came to the shop to dictate letters, she said, were given drugged wine and then beheaded. She died under the torture. Mesfewi was arrested and confessed.
He was an older man, well established in the quarter. Under his shop the authorities found a deep pit holding the mutilated remains of twenty bodies; sixteen more were found in the garden outside. He had killed them, he said, for their money, and often the sums were very small. The victims' names do not survive in the accounts of the case that reached the outside world.
Those accounts came mostly by cable from Tangier to American and European newspapers, which called him the Marrakesh Arch-Killer; the Times and Democrat of Orangeburg, South Carolina, carried the story on June 28, 1906. Morocco was then still independent under its sultan, six years before the French protectorate, and European diplomats already had a large say in its affairs.
He was sentenced to be crucified on May 2, 1906. Foreign representatives protested that the punishment was barbaric, and the sentence was changed to beheading. Feeling in Marrakesh ran the other way: people wanted him to suffer. Every day for four weeks he was led from his cell to the market square and given ten lashes with a rod of thorny acacia. Then, on June 11, 1906, he was walled up alive in a public wall. His cries could be heard for two days. By the third day they had stopped, and he was dead, by most accounts on June 13.