We fear his career after leaving Bucharest was not all it should have been, as the following paragraph appeared in January, 1906, in the Daily Express.

“George Manolescu, the celebrated swindler, has lately escaped from the prison of Sumenstein in Germany by feigning madness and pretending to be General Kuropatkin.”

Another impostor, Leonhard Bollert, has stated that he was born in 1821. His father served as sergeant-major in the fifth chevau-legers regiment, and soon after the birth of the boy left the army, married the boy’s mother and settled with his family in his own birthplace, a small town in lower Franconia, where he gained his livelihood as a provision merchant. The boy, who was greatly gifted, was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Würzburg, where he learned the trade thoroughly. After serving six years in the same regiment as his father, he went to foreign parts, incidentally embarking upon a life of criminal adventure which lasted nearly forty years. While in the service of one of his employers, he was sentenced, for embezzlement, to a term in prison, which he served in Würzburg, a town which seems to have been at that period a high school for criminals. He then successively progressed, with longer or shorter intervals between the terms, through the prisons of Plassenburg, Kaisheim, Lichtenau, Diez in Nassau, the house of correction in Mainz and the Hessian penal institution, Marienschloss. By his aptitude and his thorough knowledge of shoemaking, he everywhere earned for himself recognition and good results. How he employed his time when at large could not be definitely established. At one time he served a Hungarian count, with whom he made long journeys. It must have been then that he acquired his refined manners and his aristocratic bearing. Why he left his employer at the end of six months is not clear. Probably some of his master’s coin found its way into his own purse. Bollert used to relate to a small and select circle of friends the more startling incidents of his career with great pride,—such as his appearance at Wiesbaden as an officer and bogus baron. He also served in the papal army for a short time until it was defeated and dissolved. He was not indifferent to the fair sex and, as a handsome man, claimed to have had many successes.

During his last period of liberty in 1870, Bollert followed the profession of burglary and swindling on a large scale. The scene of his activity extended from Munich to the Rhine. He was clever at disguises and used a variety of costumes, wearing false beards of different hues; he possessed the complete uniform of a Bavarian railway guard, in which he once got as far as Bingen without a ticket. He plied his nefarious trade in Frankfurt, Würzburg, Heidelberg, Darmstadt, Nürnberg and Augsberg. At hotels he managed by means of false keys to enter the rooms of people who were absent, and often carried away all the articles of value he could lay hands on. In Frankfurt he was once arrested, but succeeded in breaking out of the prison. In Würzburg he was again caught and here the Court of the Assizes sentenced him to thirteen years’ penal servitude.

No one would have taken Bollert for a dangerous and bold burglar. In spite of his fifty-one years, he presented a handsome appearance, had a great charm of manner and looked well even in a convict’s dress. His expression was gentle, his address was civil and conciliating, but not in the least cringing; his bearing toward the officials was never too submissive, but always polite. Ladies, whose feet he measured in his capacity of chief shoemaker, were never tired of describing the elegant manner in which he bowed, and they took a great interest in the history of this attractive convict. He was entrusted with the purchase of all the leather required by the board of management of the prison, and not only acquitted himself of this task to their entire satisfaction, but also cut out the most perfect shoes the officials’ wives had ever worn. He was a Catholic and soon became an acolyte, serving the mass with a fervour never before manifested by a convict in prison. In his intercourse with the other prisoners he was always reserved, and he was and remained the “gentleman”—they always spoke of him as “Herr” Bollert. He never descended to frauds or low tricks, he never betrayed any one; but openly expressed his contempt for the behaviour of many of his companions in misfortune, without their daring to resent it. If he was offered a glass of wine or beer in the house of one of the officials, he never mentioned the circumstance. How was it that a man capable of thus altering his conduct, one may say his whole character, for a series of years, fell back into the old vicious course of action, upon being freed from restraint?

Bollert completed his thirteen years in prison, grew somewhat paler and older, but preserved his erect, graceful carriage. His end was never definitely known; no information reached the prison after his last release. Before his departure, the chaplain presented him with an old great-coat which he had repaired and remade, and he wore it with such a grand air that an acquaintance of the chief superintendent who had accompanied Bollert to the railway station, asked, “Was not that the attorney-general?”

CHAPTER VI
TYPICAL MURDERERS

Andrew Bichel, the German “Jack the ripper,” murders many women for their clothes—John Paul Forster murders a corn-chandler in Nürnberg and his maid-servant—Mysterious circumstances cleared up by clever inferences—Circumstantial evidence conclusive—Sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in chains—Rauschmaier, the murderer of a poor charwoman, detected by his brass finger ring—Sentenced to death and decapitated—The murder of August von Kotzebue, the German playwright, by Karl Sand, to avenge the poet’s ridicule of liberal ideas—Wide sympathy expressed for the murderer and strange scene at the scaffold.

A chapter may be devoted to some of the especially remarkable murders recorded in German criminal annals, which go to prove that the natives of northern regions, while outwardly cold-blooded and phlegmatic, will yield readily to the passions of greed, lust and thirst for revenge. The case of Riembauer, the abominably licentious priest, who murdered the victims he seduced, and who long bore the highest reputation for his piety and persuasive eloquence, rivals any crime of its class in any country. Germany has also had her “Jack the ripper,” in Andrew Bichel, who destroyed poor peasant women for the pettiest plunder. Murders have been as mysterious and difficult of detection as that of Baumler and his maid-servant at Nürnberg, and conversely, as marvellously discovered as by the telltale brass ring inadvertently dropped by the murderer Rauschmaier when dismembering his victim’s corpse. The murder of the poet Von Kotzebue by the student Karl Sand was a crime of exaggerated sentimentalism which attracted more sympathy than it deserved. Quite within our own times the killing of an infant boy at Xanten unchained racial animosities and excited extraordinary interest.