in the years following 1928, a MAN WITHOUT A HEAD appeared with the Janbowskij Circus, touring southern Poland. Over his shoulders and head he wore a draped frame, the top of which supposedly indicated a neck. The frame, covered a by gauze, had slits at breast height through which the artiste watched the audience and where he was going. At the climax of the number, to a roll of drums, the cloth which lay over the alleged neck was pulled away and a bloody stump was revealed, frightful for the audience to behold.

This artiste from the district of Gomel, seized with jealousy about his young wife, a trapezist, knifed her trapeze partner and presumed lover to death. He then packed his unfortunate wife into a chest and buried her alive in a peat bank. She was still wearing the spangly costume in which, to thunderous applause, she had left the big top.

The very fact of burying alive the person he had supposedly loved more than anything else was considered especially dreadful by the judges in Lodz. The murder of the rival, they would have been more likely to excuse. And so there remained only the death penalty, which was carried out by beheading. The story ran in picture newspapers around the world, illustrated not by the actual photograph of the beheaded murderer, but by the publicity shot of his circus act “The Man Without a Head.”