Peltzer legal case

The judicial case Peltzer was a spectacular criminal case in 1882 before the grand jury in Brussels , where the brothers Armand and Léon Peltzer were charged with murder and murder involvement in the lawyer Guillaume Bernays. The murder, its history and the trial were processed several times in literature and film.

Involved people and history

Julie Bernays, née Pecher

Julie Bernays, b. Bad luck

Julie Bernays, née Pecher (* 1851 in Antwerp ; † 1928 there) was the daughter of Édouard Pecher, the Belgian consul in Rio de Janeiro . In 1872 she married Guillaume Bernays, a lawyer specializing in commercial and maritime law . After the problematic birth of their son Édouard Victor Marie Guillaume (1874–1940), the couple grew apart. Julie accused her husband of his frequent absences and accused him of having an affair with the housekeeper, among others. The couple was considering divorce, but a convened family council intervened and convinced both of them to continue to live under certain conditions and because of the child - as a brother and sister - "under one roof".

Guillaume Bernays

Guillaume Bernays

Guillaume Bernays (* 1848 in Koblenz ; † murdered on January 7, 1882 in Brussels) was a doctor of law. After studying in Brussels, he settled in Antwerp as a specialist lawyer. On the occasion of his marriage to Julie Pecher in 1872, Guillaume, who came from a Jewish family, converted to the Catholic faith.

A year later, Bernays was first contacted by Armand Peltzer, who was looking for an accomplished lawyer for his two brothers Léon and James, who had gotten into massive financial and legal trouble due to a fraudulent bankruptcy. Bernays, who briefly knew the two brothers from his wedding, agreed and was impressed by Armand's personal and financial commitment to his brothers. Over the next few months and years, the previous lawyer-client relationship developed into a close friendship, in which Guillaume's wife also played a part.

At the same time, despite the compromise solution reached, the difficulties in Guillaume's marriage to Julie increased and the mutual allegations of affairs intensified. This mainly concerned the allegation that the “friend” Armand Peltzer, who had moved to Antwerp, entered into a liaison with Julie , which had become a public rumor in the city. Another attempt in 1881 to dissolve the marriage failed this time due to the intervention of Guillaume de Longé, judge at the court of cassation and friend of the family, who convinced the couple to sign an agreement in which the "status quo" of the family Bernays and Armand Peltzer - due to rumors - was banned from the house.

Armand Peltzer

Armand Peltzer

Armand Peltzer (* 1843 in Verviers ; † 1885 in Löwen ) came from the Protestant copper master family Peltzer , who lived in Stolberg ; his parents were the businessman Herman Peltzer (1801-1867) and his wife Ida von Gülich (1820-1917). He had emigrated from Elberfeld , where his grandfather had moved, to Verviers for business reasons , in order to build a new existence where other relatives from a cousin line were already active as internationally successful cloth manufacturers. Armand studied engineering and lived in Verviers and Buenos Aires , where he started a trading business. In 1869 he married Maria Charlotta Böcking (1847-1870) in Verviers, who had a daughter Marguerite (1870-1942) a year later and died a few days later as a result of childbirth. Due to Armand's many trips abroad, Marguerite came into the care of her grandmother Ida von Gülich.

After hearing of his brothers' fraudulent bankruptcy in 1873, Armand sold his business in Argentina and moved to Antwerp, where he referred his brothers to the lawyer Guillaume Bernays and gave them a large amount of his assets to settle bankruptcy. The friendship that arose during this process with the Bernays couple, who were becoming increasingly estranged, was put to the test for the young single widower by public rumors, which assumed that he had started a liaison with Julie Bernays. Nevertheless, Peltzer kept in touch with the Bernays family, especially Julie, until he was finally banned from the house in 1881 by the couple's second marriage agreement. Thereupon he looked for a way to get rid of the meanwhile unloved “rival” and made a momentous decision with his brother Léon, who had moved from New York to Antwerp especially for this plan .

Léon Peltzer

Léon Peltzer

Léon Peltzer (* 1847 in Verviers; † 1922 in Klemskerke near De Haan ) was a globetrotter who tried his luck as a businessman in many countries, but often without success and mostly with unfair or even criminal means. Léon and James Peltzer ran an import-export business in Antwerp. As a result, they had already briefly become acquainted with the Bernays family and were invited to their wedding in 1872. After the bankruptcy of the import-export business and the conclusion of proceedings for delaying bankruptcy, Léon Peltzer tried to regain a foothold as a businessman in Manchester , Buenos Aires and London , but was often held in local prisons for embezzlement and fraud. Eventually he ended up in New York under the pseudonym "Fréderic Albert" and got a job at the company "Goodman & Kraker". In 1881, Peltzer canceled his contract there on the grounds that he had to move to Canada to help a friend. In truth, however, he returned to Antwerp to support his brother Armand in his criminal venture.

Murder plan and execution

Murder victim Guillaume Bernays

After the marriage of Guillaume and Julie Bernays had been contractually stipulated again and Armand Peltzer had been banned from the house, Peltzer saw no other option than to murder Guillaume in order to be able to enter into an official relationship with Julie afterwards. As he was well known in the Bernays family and their surroundings, his brother Léon, who had returned to Antwerp and who was still indebted to Armand in his insolvency proceedings, agreed to take over the execution. In order to clarify the details, they met several times for conspiratorial meetings under false names in Paris and Brussels.

Léon Peltzer procured a revolver, had a wig made and rented a prestigious business space at 159 rue de la Loi in Brussels under the pseudonym "Henry Vaughan". He posed as a shipowner who wanted to discuss the modalities for a new shipping line between Bremen, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Australia with the lawyer for the law of the sea, Guillaume Bernays. Due to an allegedly crowded schedule, Peltzer / Vaughan insisted on holding the meeting in the Brussels office. Bernays, who actually rarely left his Antwerp office for business deals, went to Brussels on January 7, 1882. There he was murdered by Peltzer in “Vaughan's” office with a shot in the neck, although the exact sequence could never be clearly clarified.

Then Peltzer went to Switzerland via Germany and Austria. Since the corpse of Bernays had not been discovered until then, he sent a letter in English from Basel dated January 16, 1882 to the examining magistrate, in which he confessed as Henry Vaughan that he had shot Bernays by an unfortunate accident and announced rue de la Loi No. 159 as the place of the crime. Bernays' body was discovered by the police on January 19, 1882.

Investigations and Proceedings

Peltzer criminal trial

Because the police did not make progress in their investigation into the identity of Henry Vaughan, despite a reward of 25,000 Belgian francs , they published various documents and the “confession letter” of January 16 in the press. A pharmacist recognized Léon's handwriting from Verviers and reported this to the police. On February 16, 1882, the latter issued an international arrest warrant against Léon Peltzer, who was subsequently arrested on March 7, 1882 while fleeing at Cologne Central Station . His brother Armand had already been arrested days before, as he was the alleged lover of Bernay's wife and was initially the prime suspect.

The entire investigation lasted ten months, during which more than 300 requests for mutual legal assistance were issued and 107 witnesses were heard. Finally, the trial took place before the jury in Brussels from November 27 to December 23, 1882, during which the judge was only able to prevent the audience present from showing his bitterness in an inadmissible manner towards the accused. The main defendant, Léon Peltzer, got involved in contradictions regarding the actual course of events in the Rue de la Loi. He tried to portray his act as an accident in the course of an argument that had arisen when Bernays discovered his identity. Ultimately, as far as the exact process was concerned, there was evidence. Both Léon, the executor, and his brother Armand Peltzer, the client, were found guilty and sentenced to death. Since the death penalty was no longer being carried out in Belgium at that time, the court converted their sentences to life imprisonment and they were imprisoned in Leuven prison.

Julie Bernays and James Peltzer, the third brother and former business partner of Léon, were suspected of complicity and / or complicity and were also indicted in the process. However, they could be exonerated of any suspicion and were acquitted.

aftermath

Armand Peltzer died after three years in prison at the age of only 42 on October 10, 1885 in Leuven prison. His daughter Marguerite married in 1889 at the age of 19 and had a son and three daughters, all of whom were born in Cologne. She also took in her grandmother Ida von Gülich, who was her “surrogate mother”, until she died in Cologne in 1917.

Léon Peltzer later appeared remorseful and negotiated with the prison director as well as with various editors about the publication of a book on the Bernays murder. This contributed to his early release for good conduct by the Belgian Minister of Justice Henri Carton de Wiart on October 17, 1911. With the help of his sister Adele Ernestine, married Clason, who lives in Stuttgart , he first moved to London and, although already over 65 years old, found a job as a manager in Ceylon a few months later . At an unknown point in time he returned to Belgium and died on July 3, 1922 by drowning in the North Sea in Klemskerke near De Haan. The investigative authorities assumed a suicide.

Julie Bernays married her lawyer Fréderic Delvaux, who had represented her in court, in 1886, and took his family name. She later worked as a columnist for an Antwerp daily newspaper and wrote small children's stories. Julie Delvaux died in Antwerp on May 10, 1928. Her son Édouard Victor Marie Guillaume, born in 1874, later became a lawyer in Antwerp and the father of two children; he died in 1940.

James Peltzer was the first to publish a book about the affair in 1885, in which he gave a detailed account of the circumstances that led to the crime and the trial itself. Later, the Peltzer legal case was processed several times in a journalistic way and the basis for scripts for theater performances and film productions and also in the comic Tif et Tondu , l'affaire Peltzer by Willy Maltaite (“Will”) was discussed.

literature

• Le procès Peltzer: compte-rendu complet des débats , Revue pour tous, 1883
• James Peltzer: Mémoire concernant la condamnation d'Armand Peltzer , Éditions Lefebvre, Bruxelles, 1885
• Gérard Harry: L'affaire Peltzer , La Revue Belge, Brussels 1927
  • L'affaire Peltzer - le crime de la rue de la Loi. , Goemaere , Brussels 1944 (new edition)
• Ivan Vanham: 159 rue de la Loi - récit historique: l'Affaire Peltzer, la plus surréaliste des annales judiciaires belge , Éditions ATM, Braine-le-Château 1999
• Le crime parfait des frères Peltzer . In: René Haquin and Pierre Stéphany: Les grands dossiers criminels en Belgique , Volume 1, Éditions Racine, 2005, pp. 33–43 digitalisat (French)

play

• Edmond Picard : Le juré , monodrama in 5 acts, 1887
• Archie Mayo : The Man with Two Faces , feature film, 1934

Filmography

• Claude Barma: L'Affaire Peltzer, Émission française de la série En votre âme et conscience , January 14, 1958

Web links

Commons : Affaire Peltzer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Paul Lindau : The murder of the lawyer Bernays ; in: Eblox, read history online

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} murder. In:  Die Presse , January 23, 1882, p. 6 (online at ANNO ).
2. ↑ The murderer of the advocate Bernays. In:  Neue Freie Presse , March 9, 1882, p. 18 (online at ANNO ).
3. ^ Proceedings against the Peltzer brothers. In:  Wiener Zeitung , November 29, 1882, p. 3 (online at ANNO ).
4. ↑ A sensational murder trial. In:  Steyrer Zeitung , December 31, 1882, p. 2 (online at ANNO ).
5. ^ The murder of the advocate Bernays. In:  Neue Freie Presse , December 15, 1882, p. 7 (online at ANNO ).
6. ^ Willy Maltaite ("Will"): Tif et Tondu, l'affaire Peltzer , original page of the comics from 1980
7. ↑ L'Affaire Peltzer in the Internet Movie Database (English)