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Crime Solved By A Painting (Russia, 1890s)

AmStramGram

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Just found this remarkable story in the "Memoirs" of Arkadi de Kochko (Kochkine), former head of the Moscow police department during the reign of the last Russian tsar :

In the 1890s a young teenage girl was found murdered in the attic of a house on Vassilievski island (St Petersburg). A local painter ("the painter B.") felt so compelled by this story that he painted the crime scene displaying the poor girl's body lying in the dark attic, with the sinister silhouette of the criminal leaving the room in the background. The man was depicted as an ugly hunchback with a red beard. As nobody actually knew who had perpetrated the crime, it was a work of imagination. However, due its hyper-realistic rendering of the scene, the painting was an instant success and was displayed in a local gallery ("Daziaro") where people crowded to contemplate the grizzly work of art.

About six months later, a visitor had a seizure while watching the picture and lost consciousness in front of the painting. When coming back to himself he confessed he was the murderer of the teenage girl and asked for God's mercy. As a matter of fact, this man looked exactly like the murderer depicted on the painting. Red haired, with a hunchback, with the exact same facial features. The man was immediately jailed.

Mr Tchoulitsky, then head of the Saint Petersburg police summoned the painter to ask him how he had managed to depict the murderer so accurately, as if he had managed to witness the crime in person.

The painter explained that he had visited the crime scene just after the police had found the girl's body, and therefore had the opportunity to depict everything minutely, safe the criminal.

Still, as he wanted to convey all the horror of the scene, he wished to add this figure into his painting, but lacked a proper model to depict the murderer. He simply felt such an horrible crime could only have been committed by an horrible man, ideally a hunchback with red hair. So he set upon finding a such a model in the city's populace and found the proper one in a neighbouring cafe.

The man used to come drink a tea in this cafe everyday around the same time, so the painter spied upon him for five consecutive days to draw his features, finally adding him to his picture.

Little did he know that the model he had randomly chosen (with a hint of prejudice against red haired people ...) was in fact the actual murderer. Hence he managed to haphazardly produce an almost perfect "eye witness" account of the murder, which convinced the murderer that the hand of God was behind the piece of art !

At least that's what Arkadi de Kochko tells in his memoirs ...

It seems that he was not a direct witness of this case however, so he might just have retold an embellished tall tale from the late tsarist era.

Source : Arkadi de Kochko, "Détective du Tsar" (title and book in French)
 
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