What could the accused say to rebut such seemingly overwhelming evidence? He had, nevertheless, a case, and a strong case. He explained first that he had changed his name because he had been told of the Kingswood murder, and of the discovery of his papers. They were undoubtedly his papers, but they had been stolen from him. His story was that he had landed at Hull, and was on the tramp to London, when he met two other Germans by the way, seamen, Adolf Krohn and Muller by name, and they all joined company. Muller had no papers, and was very anxious that Karl Franz should give him his. On the borders of Northamptonshire the three tramps spent the night behind a haystack. Next morning Franz awoke to find himself alone; his companions had decamped, and his papers were gone. He had been robbed also of a small bag containing a full suit of clothes.
This story was discredited. It is a very old dodge for accused persons to say that suspicious articles found on the scene of a crime had been stolen from them. Yet Franz's statement was suddenly and unexpectedly corroborated from an independent source. The day after he had told his story, two vagrants, who were wandering on the confines of Northamptonshire, came across some papers hidden in a heap of straw. They took them to the nearest police-station, when it was found that they bore upon the Kingswood case. One was a rough diary kept by the prisoner Franz from the moment of his landing at Hull to the day on which he lost his other papers. The inference was that it had been stolen from him too, but that the thieves, on examination, found the diary useless, and got rid of it. Another of the papers was a certificate of confirmation in the name of Franz. Now, too, it was proved beyond doubt that the letter written by Madame Titiens was not intended for the accused. The recipient of that letter might no doubt have been an accomplice of the accused, but then it must have been believed that these men kept their papers together in one lot, which was hardly likely.
Another curious point on which the prosecution relied also broke down. A piece of cord had been found in Franz's lodgings, exactly corresponding with that bought at Reigate, and used in tying the victim. But now it was shown that this cord could only have been supplied to the Reigate shop by one rope-maker, there being but one manufacturer of that kind of cord; and this fact rested on the most positive evidence of experts. Franz had declared that he had picked up this bit of cord in a street in Whitechapel, near his lodgings, and opposite to a tobacconist's shop. On further inquiry it was not only found that the rope factory which alone supplied this cord was situated within a few yards of Franz's lodgings, but his solicitor, in verifying this, picked up a scrap of the very same cord in front of a shop in that same street!