Detective Stanton told our reporter that an empty watch case had been found in the room at 510 West Thirty-sixth street. On the yellow trunks labels were pasted with the address:
Monsieur Joseph Reymann,
No. 52 Rue Clissant,
Paris (France).
The purpose of this address was, it is supposed, to induce Scherrer to believe that he was to take the French steamer.
Seide says he has ascertained that on Monday night, May 2, Kenkouwsky applied at Becker’s Hotel in Christopher street, for a room, but refused to write his name. The entry is in the hotel clerk’s hand. “Louis Kettler, Room No. 1.”
Coroner Wiggins began an inquest in the case in Hoboken on the afternoon of May 19th. Simon Muller, the husband of the murdered woman, testified: “Coroner Wiggins told me on Wednesday that my wife had been found murdered in Guttenberg. I told him that it could not be so, for that she had gone to Germany with a man from Alsace. I went to the French steamship wharf on the day I heard they were to sail, and watched for her until the ship sailed, but she did not come. I was married to her five years ago. Our married life was unhappy, and on the 5th of last January she left me. She had then between $75 and $100.”
Carl Schmidt, the brother of the murdered woman, testified: “I last saw my sister Philomina at my place, 555 Ninth avenue, New York. She came to my house on Sunday, May 1, at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. She told me she was going with a man named Louis Kettler to Mulhausen, in Alsace. I asked her why she was going. She replied that Kettler was well off at home. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘what treatment I have had from my husband.’ I told her that I knew he did not treat her right, but that she should not go with this man, as she did not know him at all. And further, I told her that she must first get a separation from Muller before she could go with another man. She answered, ‘I don’t care how it will result, I will go with him. My husband tried to shoot me.’ She also told me that she had known Kettler for four weeks, and he had told her that he had property in Mulhausen, and that he would give her a good home there. Kettler, she said, was richer than the whole Schmidt family. She left me at about 6½ o’clock to go to my other sister’s house in Tenth avenue, between Nineteenth and Twentieth streets. I never saw Kettler but once, and that was on a Sunday in April in Second avenue, near Seventy-ninth street, in my sister’s apartments. On May 2nd a cousin of my wife met Kettler on the street and asked him when he and Mina were going to Europe. He replied that he was not going to Europe. The cousin then asked what Mina would do, and he said she would go to the country, where she had friends to stay with. Kettler then suggested that the cousin and he should go off together, and leave Mina behind. Since the 3rd of May, on the 9th or 10th of the month, I think, the woman Sacks saw Louis Kettler passing up on the opposite side of the street. When she noticed him she called my wife, who was in the room with her, to the window.”
The Rev. Dr. Mabon, the pastor of the Grove Reformed Dutch Church, on the Weavertown road, at whose house the murdered woman and Kettler were married, testified that he had performed the ceremony.