[Footnote 1:  A popular form of the name Shemariah.]

[Footnote 2:  The Russian form of Yozel, a variant of the name Joseph.]

Protracted investigations failed to substantiate the fabrications of Terentyeva, and in the autumn of 1884 the Supreme Court of the government of Vitebsk rendered the following verdict: 

To leave the accidental death of the soldier boy to the will of God; to declare all the Jews, against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises, free from all suspicion; to turn over the soldier woman Terentyeva, for her profligate conduct, to a priest for repentance.

However, in view of the exceptional gravity of the crime, the Court recommended to the gubernatorial administration to continue its investigations.

Despite the verdict of the court, the dark forces among the local population, prompted by hatred of the Jews, bent all their efforts on putting the investigation on the wrong track.  The low, mercenary Terentyeva became their ready tool.  When in September, 1825, Alexander I. was passing through Velizh, she submitted a petition to him, complaining about the failure of the authorities to discover the murderer of little Theodore, whom she unblushingly designated as her own child and declared to have been tortured to death by the Jews.  The Tzar, entirely oblivious of his ukase of 1817,[1] instructed the White-Russian governor-general, Khovanski, to start a new rigorous inquiry.

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 74.]

The imperial order gave the governor-general, who was a Jew-hater and a believer in the hideous libel, unrestricted scope for his anti-Semitic instincts.  He entrusted the conduct of the new investigation to a subaltern, by the name of Strakhov, a man of the same ilk, conferring upon him the widest possible powers.  On his arrival in Velizh, Strakhov first of all arrested Terentyeva, and subjected her to a series of cross-examinations during which he endeavored to put her on what he considered the desirable track.  Stimulated by the prosecutor, the prostitute managed to concoct a regular criminal romance.  She deposed that she herself had participated in the crime, having lured little Theodore into the homes of Zetlin and Berlin.  In Berlin’s house, and later on in the synagogue, a crowd of Jews of both sexes had subjected the child to the most horrible tortures.  The boy had been stabbed and butchered and rolled about in a barrel.  The blood squeezed out of him had been distributed on the spot among those present, who thereupon proceeded to soak pieces of linen in it and to pour it out in bottles.[1] All these tortures had been perpetrated in her own presence, and with the active participation both of herself and the Christian servant-girls of the two families.

[Footnote 1:  According to her testimony, the Jews are in the habit of using Christian blood to smear the eyes of their new-born babies, since “the Jews are always born blind,” also to mix it with the flour in preparing the unleavened bread for Passover.]