When on the twenty-first of the month (Old Style) the church was broken into and robbed, and the two guardians murdered, their skulls being battered in, as it was thought, with iron or leaden weights, great indeed was the consternation amongst the faithful from the highest to the lowest. The Tsar himself went to visit the scene of the tragedy. To the _mujik_, intensely religious, not to say superstitious, the effect was stupefying. An ordinary murder leaves him calm and cold, and the death of the watchers was an affair of small account. What mattered a _mujik_ or two more or less? The violation of the holy shrine was quite another matter. After long and painstaking inquiries, circumstantial evidence showed that one Gudzevitch, a soldier, was the murderer. As to that there could be no doubt. But the man’s confession was necessary, and this could not be obtained. Not all the cunning of judge and lawyers, not all the pious exhortations of the arch-priest, Polissador, of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, who visited him several times a day, were able to extract a word from him. He remained as hard as a flint, stiffly protesting his innocence in the face of every proof. Of repentance not a hint. As the _Journal de St. Pétersbourg_ put it, “There was nothing for it but to proceed to extreme measures.” There was at that time in prison another soldier named Baouschkin, belonging to the Kharkov regiment. It was determined to shut this man up in the same cell with Gudzevitch in the hope that he might be able to worm something out of him. On the seventh (nineteenth) of January, Baouschkin made his report. He declared that Gudzevitch asked him for what crime he was in prison, and that, on hearing that it was for murder, theft and arson Gudzevitch tried to induce him to confess that he was the murderer of the two watchmen at Peter the Great’s house; he argued that, as he must suffer, it would put him in no worse position, and what a kindness he would be doing!