Kinkowski, Martin, -1882; Muller, Philomena, -1881; Murder -- New Jersey
“‘Oh! I’ve got one,’ she said. ‘My name is Mrs. Kettler now. I’m not
Mrs. Muller any longer.’” She said, too, that her new husband was a
mason, kalsominer and paper hanger, and was getting good wages. A few
days after that Mr. Rost met him in the hallway of the house for the
first time, and asked if he lived there. He also told Kettler that
he believed Mrs. Muller had another husband living. His suspicions
had been excited by the woman’s talk of her dead husband and her
inconsistent lack of mourning attire or demeanor. On May 2nd, they sold
their furniture, and moved their trunks and bedding, no one then knew
whither. “The man,” said Mrs. Rost, “was a greenhorn,” and this was the
testimony of others in the building who had noticed him.
Among the persons by whom the woman had been employed was Moise Hahn, a
butcher in Third avenue. He said that she worked for him until May 1st,
when she quitted, as she intended to go to Europe. She was then living
with a foreigner whose name Hahn did not know, but whose description
corresponded with that of the groom in the marriage ceremony in Mr.
Mabon’s house. She told Hahn that she was going with him to Mulhausen
in Alsace.
Mr. Scherrer of Scherrer’s Hotel at 178 Christopher street, to which
place Norke had carried the trunks and bundles belonging to the woman
who gave her name as Mina Miller, informed the detectives that on
Monday evening, May 2, a German went there with an express wagon
containing four trunks, a bundle of bedding, and a valise.
“The man,” Scherrer said, “afterwards introduced a woman who he said
was his wife. She was very talkative and had all the money and paid
all the bills. The man told me that they were going to sail in the
steamship L’Amerique on the 4th inst., and were going to Mulhausen, in
Alsace. On the day they came to my place the man, who said his name
was Kettler, left the trunks here, but spent the night at Mr. Boker’s
place, two doors further down the street. On Monday, May 3, Mr. and
Mrs. Kettler and I had a long chat about the old country, and about
noon they left my place and went to the direction of the Christopher
Street Ferry. Mrs. Kettler promised my wife that she would come back
to bid us good-by. Late on Tuesday night Mr. Kettler returned alone.
I asked him where his wife was, and he said she had gone to spend the
night at her sister’s house, and was to meet him on board the steamship
in the morning. He seemed to me to be very much excited and uneasy, and
his behaviour struck me at the time as peculiar. The next morning he
had his trunks sent to the steamship wharf, and went away. That is the
last I saw of him.”
Louis Groth keeps a lager beer saloon in Thirty-ninth street, near
Ninth avenue. A friend of his living at 1511 Second avenue, in the same
house with Mrs. Muller, told Groth of her being there with Kettler.
Groth told Mr. Schmidt, Mrs. Muller’s brother, who lives at 555 Ninth
avenue, and he informed Mr. Muller of his wife’s whereabouts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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