“‘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.
Mr. Schmidt was at his home at 555 Ninth avenue last evening. He told our reporter who called that he saw his sister for the last time on the Sunday before the murder. Previous to that, upon the information from Louis Groth that she was living with Kettler in Second avenue, he saw her there, and remonstrated with her. He also had a talk with Kettler, who, however, said nothing of any proposed marriage. He said, however, that he knew Muller. Muller told Schmidt that he didn’t know Kettler. Schmidt says that when his sister Mina called at his house on Sunday she got a bank book containing $40 which he had been keeping for her, and told him that she had sold her furniture, and had altogether $116. She was going to marry Kettler on Tuesday, May 3, and go with Kettler to Alsace, which was his former home. Her brother says he told her he did not want her to marry again while she had a husband, but she said she was determined to do so.
Mr. Schmidt has a brother August, a musician, living at 49 Avenue A. and two sisters now living one of whom is married. Muller, he says, was attentive to the unmarried sister, and Mrs. Muller and he continually quarrelled about this intimacy. Their disputes were so violent as to attract the attention of the people in the house where they lived in Thirty-ninth street, and once Mr. Muller was badly whipped, it is reported, by some friends of Mrs. Muller.
Muller and his wife were married in 1874, and lived for three and a half years in the house at 338 West Thirty-ninth street. Muller made cigars and kept a small store there. When he and his wife could stand each other no longer, said Mr. Schmidt, they separated, and Mrs. Muller for a while lived in a house in the same block. About three months previous to the murder she left the neighborhood and secured employment in the butcher shop of Moise Heahn in Third avenue. Muller sold his store out on April 1, and removed to his present place in Thirtieth street. Mr. Schmidt said that Kettler, after marrying his sister, undoubtedly led her to the lonely place of the murder for the sole purpose of killing and robbing her of the $116 which she had, and the gold watch and chain.
As Mrs. Muller left her brother’s house on Sunday she said to the saloon-keeper on the ground floor, “I’ve got another man—a nice man now—and I’m all right again.”
Kettler had been only seven months in this country.