Unsolved for 90 Years: The Girl in Two Suitcases

At eight that evening she was in the Koruna passage at the foot of Wenceslas Square, with Velingerová, and a street photographer took the last picture of her alive, laughing among acquaintances. The sergeant arrived in uniform, and he was not alone. On his arm was a Slovak woman Otýlie knew from Žilina, Antonie Koklesová, a woman of the streets with two years of schooling, who signed her name Antony. There was a quarrel, Velingerová said later, and then the three of them went to a tavern in Štěpánská street, U Kupců, and stayed until eleven.

A tall, curly-haired blond man who came there on weekdays, always with a different girl, and who had already taken her there twice, bought her a glass of muscat wine. After midnight she wanted fruit, and he sent the food-runner for an apple and lent her his knife. She ate half of it and left the rest on the plate.

She would never come back to Velehradská street, and her landlady never saw the rent.

The case found at Košice was pigskin, seventy by forty by twenty-two centimetres, hand-stitched, worth about a hundred and thirty crowns, with two brass locks. The case found at Bratislava was cheaper, dark brown vulcanised fibre, a little smaller, with two nickel locks. Both had the same English patent locks, a design registered in 1930. Both had been repaired, badly, more than once. Inside were newspapers of several different dates, a man's underwear, a woman's slip, a sponge, and a magazine called Proud with two marriage advertisements placed by women, both of whom the police traced, both alive.

The papers printed the photograph on their front pages. Crowds stood in Bartolomějská street all day. Within a week about seven hundred letters had come in, and after that they came by the dozen every day. The police did something else with them: on the Monday morning they put the cases and the bedding on public show at headquarters, and thousands came to look.

Three mothers said the face was their daughter's. A woman from Olomouc named her daughter Jarmila, who was alive. A mother from Slatiňany wept over the window and said the dead girl was her Marie, twenty-one years old, and detectives took her by train to Pardubice, where they found Marie alive, feeding chickens, and the mother wept again. A third girl, from Olomouc, was recognised by her mother, by a friend, and by her own fiancé, and she was alive too. Her sisters recognised her, but it was the police who put the name on the file, and they did it with her own hands.

The man she picked out was Josef Pěkný, a staff sergeant-major in charge of stores and accounts at Karlín. He was thirty-nine, born in Michle, a fitter by trade, and a decorated veteran of the Czechoslovak Legion, the Czech and Slovak prisoners of war who had changed sides in Russia and fought their way across Siberia to come home. He was divorced, with a son, and he lived in Michle, in Táborská street, with his new companion, Antonie Koklesová.

He added something nobody had asked him. At half past five on the afternoon of the first of September, he said, he had given notice to his landlord, a man named Doležal, and from half past eight that evening he had been out looking for new lodgings. Those were the hours in which two men carried two suitcases into two Prague stations. The alibi came from the woman who had shared his evening, and the headline in Venkov read: the sergeant's alibi given by a friend of Vranská's. The police did not search the flat in Michle. Nobody checked whether he moved out.

The letters kept coming, and the paper kept printing them. The police announced that one of his letters carried a fingerprint, and that every registered prostitute in Prague would now be fingerprinted for her own protection. The Phantom wrote back that it was pointless. He always wore gloves, he said, and he would cut the fingers off his next victim and pour acid over her head. Some of the letters he delivered to the newsroom by hand. A psychologist consulted by the paper concluded that the writer certainly owned a writing desk.

The grave was chosen, the paper added, so that she could be exhumed at any time, if the case required it. It never did.

The hours he had accounted for with a flat hunt were the hours the suitcases went into the trains, and the Museum's director says it plainly: he lied, and he lied in the one direction that would keep him away from two railway stations.

Nobody asked him why he had copied the murder of 1933. He had been sixteen at the time. Kalivoda then wrote an essay for the police journal explaining that the bourgeois police of the First Republic could never have solved the Vranská case, while a socialist team, working together, had solved Černínová in twenty-four hours. In 1966, near the end of his career, he admitted in print that he would never crack it either.

Covid put a year into the waiting. To compare the hairs with anyone, they needed living relatives of the people in the file, and they went looking for the descendants of the two people who had shared Otýlie's last evening: the sergeant and Antonie Koklesová. The sergeant's daughter, when they found her, said no.

The original protocol, written by Professor Hájek and his assistant Dr Vlk in the week the body arrived, had never left the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Studničkova street, and in the file there was only the digest of it. The Museum's team went to the institute and found the original, and it said something the summary had not. She had died of a single deep cut to the throat, made from behind, with her head pulled back, a cut the protocol's readers at the Museum could only call almost military. The weapon that fitted the wounds was a heavy blade with weight behind it, a sabre, for instance, of the kind a sergeant of the period carried.

The evidence was indirect, Galaš said, a chain of it, but a jury court of the day would have tried him on it. The city had hunted a surgeon; the wound was a soldier's.