Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1879 — A Real Desperado. [ARTICLE]

A Real Desperado.

As Canton Vaud, albeit neither Catholic nor Conservative has given a large majority in favor of the revision of article 65 of the Federal constitution forbidding capital punishment throughout the Confederation, it may, perhaps, be inferred therefrom that the electors are convinced, from their experience of the last five years, that the abolition of the death penalty was a mistake, for nowhere has serious crime been more rife than in Vaud, and the cantonal authorities are just now complaining bitterly of the trouble and expense they are beingput to in respect of a prisoner of homicidal propensities of whom they are the involuntary custodians. The name of the prisoner is Christian Wyes, and he appears to have been an evil-doer from his youth upward. Though still under 40, he began his career of crime more than twenty years ago, being sentenced in 1858 to a term of imprisonment for a robbei*y committed at Vevy. In 1863 he was condemned to eight years* solitary confinement for robbery with violence, and a murderous attack on the gendarme by whom he was arrested. During this imprisonment he made a ferocious onslaught on a turnkey with a chisel, of which he had surreptitiously possessed himself, and nearly Killed the man. No sooner was Wyss released from prison than he resumed his evil course. Two years thereafter he was brought before oi criminal court at Pay£rlie on a charge of breaking into the house of the pastor of Ressudens, whom he half strangled and left for dead; and though he recovered for a time, he did actually die not long afterward of the injuries inflicted on him by his assailant. For this offense Wyss was sentenced, in 1873, to thirteen years’ solitary confinement. Before the year was out he attacked another turnkey, this time with a knife, and though the poor man was hurt to death, he survived his wounds a few weeks, a circumstance which, indicating as it

did a possibility of ultimate recovery, induced the magistrate by whom the murderer was tried to take an indulgent view of the case and add only two years to his sentence. Alter this event, and seeing that Wyss who is not only a creature of ferocious temper, but of great strength and almost herculanean proportions, continued to threaten his jailers and made several attempts to escape, the authorities resolved to provide him with a prison of his own, A separate cell of solid masonry Was, therefore, bull t for him. Light was admitted by a single heavily-barred window, and the door was of suchstrength as seemingly to defy the prisoner’s utmost efforts to break out. In this door was arranged a small wicket, through which Wyss was fed like a wild beast, for no one ever entered his cell, where he remained day and night heavily ironed. But one day last week when a guardian of the prison was conveying

to Wyss his matutinal supply of food he perceived that the door had been tampered With. An alarm was forthwith given, and investigation made. It seemed that the prisoner had managed, nobody could tell how, to break a piece of iron from one of the bars of his window. This, by dint ofhard work—using the floor of his cell as a whetstone—he had ingeniously shaped into a sort of chisel, with which he had forced back one of the bolts of his door, and would, doubtless, had he not been found out in time, nave forced them all and regained his freedom. It required almost a regiment of gendarmes to secure Wyss and carry him to another cell, thereto be kept chained to the floor until his own den should be onoe more ready to receive and, as his custodians hope, to retain him. If, before this time ba out, Wyss should commit any more murders, it is very likely, in the present temper of the Voudois people, that he will be hanged. The case of this malefactor has been their strongest argument in favor of the restoration of capital punishment, for in the absence or power to inflict the death penalty, a prisoner sentenced to a long term of imprisonment may commit murder with impunity. On the other hand, there cau be no question that deprivation of life is really a more merciful doom than such a punishment as that which Wyss is now enduring in his solitary cell at the Voudois Penitentiary.