While punishment was to be meted out to the entire Jewish population of Russia, the fate of the Velizh community was particularly tragic.  It was subjected to the terrors of a unique state of siege.  The whole community was placed under suspicion.  All the synagogues were shut up as if they were dens of thieves, and the hapless Jews could not even assemble in prayer to pour out their hearts before God.  All business was at a standstill; the shops were closed, and gloomy faces flitted shyly across the streets of the doomed city.

The stern command from St. Petersburg ordering that the case be “positively probed to the bottom” and that the culprits be apprehended gladdened only the heart of Strakhov, the chairman of the Commission of Inquiry, who was now free to do as he pleased.  He spread out the net of inquiry in ever wider circles.  Terentyeva and the other female witnesses, who were fed well while in prison, and expected not only amnesty but also remuneration for their services, gave more and more vent to their imagination.  They “recollected” and revealed before the Commission of Inquiry a score of religious crimes which they alleged had been perpetrated by the Jews prior to the Velizh affair, such as the murder of children in suburban inns, the desecration of church utensils and similar misdeeds.

The Commission was not slow in communicating the new revelations to the Tzar who followed vigilantly the developments in the case.  But the Commission had evidently overreached itself.  The Tzar began to suspect that there was something wrong in this endlessly growing tangle of crimes.  In October, 1827, he attached to the report of the Commission the following resolution:  “It is absolutely necessary to find out who those unfortunate children were; this ought to be easy if the whole thing is not a miserable lie.”  His belief in the guilt of the Jews had evidently been shaken.

In its endeavors to make up for the lack of substantial evidence, the commission, personified by Khovanski, put itself in communication with the governors of the Pale, directing them to obtain information concerning all local ritual murder cases in past years.  The effect of these inquiries was to revive the Grodno affair of 1818 which had been “left to oblivion.”  A certain convert by the name of Gradlnski from the townlet of Bobovnya, in the government of Minsk, declared before the Commission of Inquiry that he was ready to point out the description of the ritual murder ceremony in a “secret” Hebrew work.  When the book was produced and the incriminated passage translated, it was found that it referred to the Jewish rite of slaughtering animals.  The apostate, thus caught red-handed, confessed that he had turned informer in the hope of making money, and was by imperial command sent into the army.  The confidence of St. Petersburg in the activity of the Velizh Commission of Inquiry vanished more and more.  Khovanski was notified that “his Majesty the Emperor, having observed that the Commission bases its deductions mostly on surmises, by attaching significance to the fits and gestures of the incriminated during the examinations, is full of apprehension lest the Commission, carried away by zeal and anti-Jewish prejudice, act with a certain amount of bias and protract the case to no purpose.”