We now come to the famous Kingswood Rectory case. On the 11th of June, 1861, Kingswood Rectory, in Surrey, was broken into, in the absence of the family, and the caretaker murdered. The unfortunate woman was found in her nightdress. She was tied with cords, and had been choked by a sock used as a gag and stuffed halfway down her throat. There had been no robbery; the house had been entered by a window in the basement, but nothing was missing from it, although the whole place had been ransacked. Trace enough was discovered to establish the identity of one at least of the murderers. A packet of papers was found lying on the floor of the room, and it had evidently dropped from the pocket of one of the men.
This packet contained six documents: a passport made out in the name of Karl Franz, of Schandau, in Saxony; a certificate of birth, and another of baptism, both in the name of Franz; a begging letter with no address, but signed Krohn; and a letter from Madame Titiens, the great singer, in reply to an appeal for help. Besides these, there was a sheet of paper on which were inscribed the addresses of many prominent personages; part of the stock-in-trade of a begging-letter writer. All these papers plainly implied that one of the criminal intruders into Kingswood Rectory was a German. Moreover, within the last few days several German tramps had been seen in the neighbourhood of Kingswood, one of whom exactly answered to the description on the passport.
A few weeks later, a young German, in custody in London for a trifling offence, was recognised as Karl Franz. He himself positively denied that he was the man, but at last acknowledged that the documents found in Kingswood Rectory were his property. He was, in due course, committed for trial at the Croydon assizes. The prosecution seemed to hold very convincing evidence against him. A Saxon police officer was brought over, who identified him as Karl Franz, and swore that the various certificates produced had been delivered to him on the 6th of April of the same year. Another witness swore to Franz as one of the men seen in the neighbourhood of the rectory on the 11th of June; while a third deposed to having met two strangers in a wayside public-house, talking a foreign language, and identified Franz as one of them. This recognition was made in Newgate, where he picked out Franz from a crowd of prisoners. Yet more: the servant of a brushmaker in Reigate deposed that two men, speaking some unknown tongue, had come into the shop on the day of the crime, and had bought a hank of cord. One of these men she firmly believed to be the accused. This was the same cord as that with which the murdered woman was bound.