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| A photograph of the Schippan family, with Matthes (second from left) and Mary (to his right), Bertha is not in the photo. |
Around 8 p.m. Mary and 13-year-old Johanne who went by Bertha went to bed in their cottage while the boys slept 90 meters away in a galvanized iron room attached to a farm shed. Around 10 p.m. Mary said she awoke with something heavy across her chest. It was a bearded man.
Mary was able to get out from under him and ran to the barn. She sent one of her younger brothers to go get help. Bertha was still in the house with the man. The neighbor the boy ran to declined to help the family so he had to run 1 km to the home of Constable Lambert.
When they returned they found Bertha laying in a puddle of her own blood. She had been stabbed 40 times and her throat had been slit. There was no sign of the so-called bearded man.
Bertha was two weeks away from her 14th birthday.
Police didn't believe that an intruder murdered Bertha. Two months later Mary was put to trial. There was no solid evidence and everything was circumstantial evidence. Mary was in a relationship with 21-year-old Gustave Nitschke and they believed that she was scared Bertha would tell her father. The evidence was not strong enough to convict Mary.
Some believed that their father was the perpetrator of the crime. He was described as a nasty piece of work. He once fired a shotgun at a Nitschke boy leaving the boy to pick pellets out of his leg. But it wasn't possible with the time to travel that far by horse and be where he was that day.
It's unknown who the actual murderer was. It's possible that it was a member of the family, but maybe there was an unknown man who came into the home to murder the girls. Maybe Mary was lucky enough to get away and not suffer the same fate as Bertha.
SOURCES:
Wikipedia
ABC
Find a Grave
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