“He gets no razor while he is my prisoner,” explained Cusack. “That would be too easy.”
The audience which assembled in court to witness Czolgosz’s arraignment to-day was not as large as was expected. Few believed that Judges Titus and Lewis would consent to serve in behalf of the accused assassin. Both the lawyers assigned to the case by Judge Emery are high in their profession, and it is well known that they are mortified and annoyed by the assignment. However, the law requires that the court’s behest be followed, and it is probable that the attorneys named will carry out the instructions of Judge Emery.
There is something in the family history of the assassin which sheds a baleful light on the acts of the present, and they were revealed in the very hour when he was standing trial for his life in Buffalo.
There was a time when the father of this young man took the law into his own hands. And this is the story of it:
The elder Czolgosz was one of the colonists in Presque Isle County, ruled over by Henry Molitor, who was an illegitimate son of King Louis of Wurtemberg, and who fled from Germany under sentence of death.
Stung to desperation by King Molitor’s tyrannies and vice, a band of colonists poured a volley of shots through the window of the company store on August 16, 1876, killing Molitor.
The principal actors in this tragedy, of whom the elder Czolgosz was one, were sentenced to prison for life, but were subsequently pardoned. Amid such surroundings Assassin Czolgosz was born and reared.
All that occurred twenty-five years ago. It could have had no influence on the life of the lad, if, indeed, he had then been born. But it in some degree shows the strain of blood in the family, and in some measure accounts for the stolid silence in which that young man sits when, for murder most foul, he is called before the bar of the people.
Following is the formal true bill returned by the grand jury of Erie County, New York, against Leon F. Czolgosz, the assassin of the late President McKinley: