It may seem that everything stated below is nothing more than a legend or a fairy tale. Nevertheless, all these are real events that took place at the very end of the 19th century.
They are described in his memoirs, published in 1929 in Paris, by the former head of the Moscow detective police, and later the head of the entire criminal investigation department of the Russian Empire, Arkady Frantsevich Koshko.
This incident took place in St. Petersburg. The corpse of a 14-year-old girl was found in the attic of one of the houses on Sredny Prospekt, on Vasilyevsky Island. The child was strangled, and there was no doubt that the victim had been raped before his death. The whole city was seething: newspapers were full of articles, the public was worried, the police were knocked down. But time passed, and the killer was never found.
The shock from this crime was so great that the St. Petersburg artist B. decided to depict his vision of the murder on canvas. The canvas attracted people with its expression: the picture depicted an attic in great detail, and a portrait of a murdered child was reproduced.
Only in one thing did the artist deviate from the truth: guided by his imagination, in the background he painted the killer fleeing the scene of his crime.
With the palm of his right hand, he opened the attic door, half-turning at his victim. It was a disgusting hunchback: an ugly face, a huge mouth, small evil eyes, protruding ears, a red beard … The picture turned out to be magnificent and even won a prize. Naturally, the man in the street, still agitated by the unabated rumors about the murder, piled up to look at the canvas.
And then one day, among the crowd, staring at the canvas, there was a wild cry, and a man, falling to the ground, began to convulse. Those who ran to his aid were shocked: it was … a hunchback from a painting by artist B.! He was taken to the nearest pharmacy, where, having come to his senses, he demanded to take him to the police and there he confessed to the murder and told about its reasons.
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“From that very day,” he said, “the image of a strangled girl relentlessly pursued me, day and night I heard her heartbreaking screams … How could this happen - who could sketch me in this terrible moment? I can't imagine! This is some kind of obsession, some kind of devilry …
Girl in a white dress, late 19th century. Thematic photo
The head of the St. Petersburg detective police Chulitsky did not believe in miracles, and therefore decided … to arrest the artist B. on charges of either complicity or concealment of the crime. After all, how else could his "clairvoyance" be explained?
Upon his return from Italy, the artist was taken into custody, but alas - it turned out that he not only had a one hundred percent alibi, but he did not even know the hunchback-killer. And to assume that the hunchback himself offered himself as a "sitter" is absurd.
Finally, thanks to the story of the artist himself, the mystery was clarified. B. said that, like many others, he was shocked by what had happened.
Several times he went to the crime scene and made detailed sketches of the situation in the attic, in the dead room he painted the face of the murdered girl, according to the police, he knew in what position the body lay …
- I missed the main character - the hiding killer, - said B. - My imagination painted him for some reason physically disgusting, something like Quasimodo. Cherishing the idea of looking for Quasimodo, I went into the inn. And suddenly, fortunately for me, a man comes in, surprisingly corresponding to the image that has emerged in my imagination.
B. took out a notebook and began to carefully sketch the hunchback, but he was in a hurry and, having finished the ordered tea, quickly left. But the artist learned from the innkeeper that this visitor constantly enters the inn and at about the same time. So for five evenings the artist, drawing an imaginary killer, made a portrait of a real criminal.
The hunchback was sentenced to 20 years in hard labor: it was extremely rare at that time to be executed.