Yeah that was his implication. He thought the German accusers knew they were lying. That makes it murder.
I know the Salem witch trial accusers/prosecution did repent but it’s not clear to me that the accusations weren’t just the result of hysteria rather than malice. Wasn’t Cotton Mather a believer in spectral evidence?
We do see that kind of hysteria now. The daycare child abuse trials were very recent.
Cotton Mather was a full-bore demagogue, who later thought that what he'd done was just a mistake.