THE COURTROOM SKETCH from William Hartley shows Franz von Veltheim, a colourful German character, who also used the name Franz Ludwig Kurt. A naked body, with hands tied and apparently strangled, found in the River Thames in 1897 was thought to be Franz von Veltheim at one stage because his wife, Maria Louisa von Veltheim (née Yearsley) identified the body several weeks later, after it had been exhumed. Two other women came forward also claiming to be married to him.
But, at the time, von Veltheim was in South Africa as a member of the Cape Mounted Police. He was involved in fomenting rebellion against the Transvaal President Paul Kruger in the events preceding the Boer War and had shot and killed the brother of Solomon Barnato Joel, who was involved in business connected with the Witwatersrand Gold Rush. The jury members were ‘Boers’ who apparently acquitted von Veltheim through a mixture of anti-Semitism and antagonism towards the British. Later, von Veltheim sent a series of letters to Solomon Joel that were a mixture of threats and demands for £16,000, and was brought back to stand trial from Paris by Detective Inspector Pentin of the City of London police. Von Veltheim claimed that his letters were a prearranged code whereby his expenses for political subversion were being claimed, but he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude. Franz von Veltheim was released from prison on licence in May 1918 and deported from a repatriation camp in Spalding on 14 February 1919.
1975
Balaclava, tethering wire and other items from the Donald Neilson case