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The image of the mystery man gained further dimension as neighbors of the Stammers from their days at Serra Negra began to speak up. Some remembered how he would climb to the top of an eight-foot observation tower on the farm and scan the horizon through binoculars. Basilio Silotto, a farm worker, reported that Pedro had told him once that Hitler was a great man. When a defective person was born, the old European confided to Silotto in tones reminiscent of the Auschwitz researcher, he would soon vanish.
Those who had run across the man in his final years in Sao Paulo described him as lonely; he received visits only occasionally, from a son whom he introduced as a nephew and from a family emissary, apparently Hans Sedlmeier, the Mengele firm clerk. Pedro got no mail, kept no telephone and maintained no bank accounts. He slept with a Mauser pistol by his bedside, according to some reports; often he had difficulty getting to sleep and read or wrote deep into the night.
In his final years, according to Sao Paulo papers, Pedro fell in love with a housemaid, Elza Gulpian de Oliveira. But as the thin-faced, 34-year-old woman told it last week, the old man persistently refused to marry her, without explaining why. When she married another man in 1978, Pedro moped and pined. The last image of Pedro, from another former maid, Ines Mehlich, was his valediction as he left on his fatal seaside trip with the Bosserts in 1979: "I'm going to the beach because my life is ending."
All these details emerged, of course, from nothing more than personal reminiscences of Pedro. Still, the accounts of different witnesses did overlap in many details, all portraying an old man passing a somewhat joyless life of solitary introspection. "Given that many of the witnesses are virtually illiterate peasants," said Superintendent Tuma, "it is extremely unlikely they are participants in an elaborate international conspiracy."
As the dimensions of the drama widened in Brazil, a little more light was shed upon some of its shadowy supporting players. Wolfgang Gerhard, who seemed to have been Pedro's ubiquitous fixer, was, said Austrian Consul-General Otto Heller in Sao Paulo, a fanatic Nazi who brought out a fascist propaganda sheet called Der Reichsbrief (The Reich Letter). By the age of twelve, Gerhard had become a member of the Hitler Youth and later boasted of being a committed Nazi. Nonetheless, in the Austrian town of Graz last week, Gerhard's 26-year- old son Adolf firmly rejected the stories told of his father by the Bosserts and Gitta Stammer. "It's easy to put the blame on my dead father," he said. In fact, he continued, he himself knew nothing of Dr. Mengele, and could not "even remember a single unmarried man who would have visited our parents while we were in Brazil."
The Bosserts' part in their alleged protection of the former Nazi remained equally mysterious, particularly given Wolfram Bossert's vigorous denial of any Nazi affiliation. After raiding the Bossert home, Tuma noted that ! everything to do with the doctor was arranged lovingly and with great care. Apparently, said Tuma, "the couple had veneration for Mengele as a great leader."