Mendel Beilis -- Why not Knives?

I was just rereading The Anvil, my "murder mystery" version of the research I did into the Mendel Beilis trial.  And I had another a-ha moment, like the one I had while reading a Sholem Aleichem novel, that led to one of the posts.

The issue is this. Andrey is dead. On March 26, 1911, the day before his funeral, the government has two medical examiners performing a second autopsy. (The first was done on March 22 and didn't point to ritual murder, so it was useless to the government.) And one of the things the two examiners did, was insert shvaiki into the wounds to see if they would fit. 

On day 20 of the trial, the autopsy reports were read out. Both of them refer to slits cut in the body, which certainly should have suggested knives to anybody who was on the ball.

On day 22 of the trial, one of the medical examiners who is testifying (on government pay, the three defense medical experts refused even repayment of their expenses), says that shvaiki were bought in the bazaar and tested with the wounds. He says this as coming from one of the medical examiners who worked on March 26, 1911. 

That's all they say about testing the wounds.

A shvaika is a leather-working tool generally used to punch holes. 

There is no discussion in the transcript about buying various knives to test. Just a shvaika. This smells. It smells of the murderers telling somebody in the government what they did and what they used to commit the murder. 

In fact by the time I finished the translation, I suspected that A. V. Vygranov, ostensibly assisting the police, was in tight with Vera Cheberyak. I suspect it even more now; I believe Vera boasted to him about murdering Andrey, and he helped her cover things up in March, and misled people looking into the murder, like journalist Brazul-Brushkovsky. 

So, given what Vygranov knew, I suspect he gave the M.E.s shvaiki saying they came from the bazaar. The tool wound up in a drawer in the M.E.s' office. The March 26 M.E. made several statements that showed he was a numbskull, including admitting that he never looked at the corpse. So the idea that he would question where the shvaika really came from doesn't wash. He didn't have that many brain cells.

And in August 1911, sure enough, shvaiki turned up among evidence found on one of the hills of Kiev. This evidence turned out to have been planted -- and to have nothing to do with the case. The clothing in the plant was not Andrey's, although people were supposed to conclude that it was.

The shvaiki in that find belonged to a man dragged into the case specifically to say that they were his tools. People were supposed to conclude that he was in on the murder -- although testimony suggests that he wasn't Jewish, such as his argument with attorney Shmakov about Purim. This material was planted by a stool pigeon known to Polishchuk, one of Nikolay Krasovsky's "assistants". The other "assistant" was Vygranov, and the transcript shows he was active for at least a year after he was "disgraced" and Krasovsky quit the police.

So the government knew about the use of at least one shvaika in the murder, and they made damned sure the M.E.s knew about it, and that Krasovsky got some as part of the evidence in the case. And then their paid M.E. claimed that they were not stabbing tools in the legal definition of such weapons, the point apparently being that you couldn't say Andrey was stabbed. Which is just nuts. 

And the government did have a knife to talk about. Krasovsky turned up a knife with a reddened blade. He found this on the Zaitsev factory grounds, where the government pretended that the murder had taken place. But it was found near the hut of a Christian who lived on the grounds, and the government didn't want to try a Christian, they wanted to try a Jew. So it was just too damned convenient that the government already knew about the use of a shvaika. And also conveniently, they never called "hut-man" to testify.

Now. The reason for this panto was to prove ritual murder, which is the lie that Jews slaughter children for their blood. Jewish kosher slaughter requires a knife. Given that the government faked witness testimony, forged documents, and planted evidence, why didn't it use the knife and claim that it was dropped near the hut to cover up for the Jews? I don't know. It's not like they were all cooperating to purposely stage the stupidest trial they could. It's more like Vygranov had such a cynical view of police and judicial operations, he did everything he could to make them look like idiots. It didn't take much effort with some of them, as the transcript shows.

I know what you're going to say. Two of the murderers besides Vera were still alive, and they testified at trial. Not because the government wanted them to. The government staged an elaborate hoax and pretended at trial that a robbery gave the murderers an alibi. If the murderers stuck to that during the trial, and refused to answer any questions that might incriminate them (which was their right), then there's no problem.

And in fact, nobody asked them about the shvaiki when Singaevsky and Rudzinsky testified on day 18. Not even to say, "Do you know what a shvaika is?" So there was never a chance of self-incrimination. Why the government was so hung up on the shvaiki that it couldn't just present one more piece of fake evidence, we'll never know. 

You can say all you want that I'm making a megillah out of this one statement. The entire case is like this, however, one piece of nonsense after another in the testimony. 

The fact is that Vera Cheberyak and her cohorts murdered Andrey in revenge, believing that he had known about their plans for a robbery and squealed to police.