Hans Schmidt: The Priest Who Cut His Girlfriend to Pieces

 

Hans Schmidt and Anna Aumuller

Hans Schmidt, 33, was an assistant priest at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in New York City. He was also a murderer, a counterfeiter, and possibly one of the strangest men ever to sit in the electric chair at Sing Sing.

His victim was Anna Aumuller, a 24-year-old German immigrant Schmidt claimed to love.

He killed her, cut her body into pieces, and dumped the remains in the North River. When detectives asked why he did it, Schmidt said, “I killed her because I loved her.”

That was one explanation.

His other story involved St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a blood sacrifice, and voices telling him to kill.

Things only got stranger from there.

On September 4, 1913, some children playing along the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River near Ninety-sixth Street found a pillowcase. Inside was the torso of a young woman.

A few days later, more body parts washed ashore near Weehawken. Then, on September 10, still more pieces turned up at Keansburg, New Jersey.

The woman’s head, left leg, and arm were never found.

Police didn’t know it yet, but the dead woman was Anna Aumuller. She’d come to America from Germany a couple of years earlier and found work as a housekeeper at St. Boniface’s Church.

That’s where she met Hans Schmidt.

Schmidt had immigrated from Germany in 1907 and bounced around churches in New Jersey, Missouri, and New York. In December 1910, he landed at St. Boniface’s as a curate.

Anna worked in Pastor Braun’s home. Somewhere along the way, the housekeeper and the priest became lovers.

They may have considered themselves husband and wife. Detectives found a marriage license for Hans Schmidt and Anna Aumuller dated February 26, 1913.

Of course, Schmidt was a Catholic priest, which made the whole arrangement a little complicated. By September, Anna was pregnant. Schmidt said she was five months along when she died.

The six faces of Hans Schmidt

On the evening of September 2, Schmidt went to Anna’s apartment at 68 Bradhurst Avenue.

According to his confession, he slipped into her bedroom and kissed her on the forehead. Then he cut her throat.

He tasted Anna’s blood. Once he was sure she was dead, he dragged her body into the bathroom and cut it apart with a butcher knife and a carpenter’s saw.

He bundled the pieces into five or six packages. Schmidt wasn’t sure exactly how many, which tells you something about the state of his mind—or the quality of his story.

Either way, disposing of Anna’s body took two days.

Schmidt carried the packages aboard the Fort Lee ferryboat and waited until he could dump them into the North River without being seen. Sometimes he stood around for hours waiting for his chance.

Toward evening on the second day, Schmidt carried the blood-stained mattress and bedding to a vacant lot on 144th Street and started a fire. A group of boys hanging around the lot helped him gather wood.

The boys were happy enough. It was a cool night, and the fire kept them warm. They did not know they were helping a priest destroy evidence from a murder.

For all the planning Schmidt put into disposing of Anna’s body, a couple of pillowcases brought the police straight to his door.

Detectives traced the pillowcases wrapped around Anna’s remains to George Sachs’s Manhattan furniture store. Sachs had sold twelve of them.

Police accounted for ten. Sachs remembered delivering the other two to 68 Bradhurst Avenue. That was all Detective J. J. O’Neill needed to hear. He watched the apartment for four days but saw nothing useful. Late Saturday night, Inspector Joseph Faurot decided they’d waited long enough.

Faurot rang the doorbell repeatedly. No one answered, so he sent Detective Frank Cassassa around to the back of the building.

Cassassa climbed the fire escape and pried open a window with his jackknife. It didn’t take long to figure out they’d found the right apartment. A long, blood-stained butcher’s knife lay on the counter. Next to it was a carpenter’s saw.

In another room, detectives found two photographs of Anna, one a bust portrait and the other a full-length study. Bits of underwear scattered on the floor resembled the cloth wrapped around her torso, and a spool of milliner’s wire matched the wire used to tie the bundles found in the river.

Then there was a receipt for bedding made out to H. Schmidt. The police finally had a name. Now they needed to find Hans Schmidt.

A letter addressed to Anna led detectives to Joseph Igler, the man who’d helped her get settled after she arrived in America.

Igler said Anna came over on a Hamburg-American liner about two years earlier. He helped her find work at St. Boniface’s Church. After that, he had little to do with her.

Inspector Faurot headed for St. Boniface’s and talked to Pastor Braun. Braun remembered Anna. More importantly, he remembered Hans Schmidt.

Schmidt had served as a curate at St. Boniface’s after being recommended by a pastor in Trenton, New Jersey. Braun said Schmidt performed his duties well enough, but there, “There was always something about him that seemed mysterious.”

Anna Aumuller

Braun compared Schmidt to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His facial expressions and moods changed from one moment to the next, and Braun admitted the priest sometimes scared him.

In May 1912, Schmidt left St. Boniface’s for a temporary position at St. Joseph’s Church on West 125th Street.

That’s where detectives found him.

Schmidt was asleep when the detectives arrived. They woke him and showed him a photograph of Anna.

He fainted.

When Schmidt came around, he gave the police one of the strangest confessions they’d ever heard.

“Yes. I killed her because I loved her.”

Then he blamed St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

“The reason I killed Anna,” Schmidt said, “was that St. Elizabeth, who ordained me, told me to give a sacrifice in blood.”

St. Elizabeth ordered him to kill Anna. He dumped her remains in the river “because every sacrifice must be consummated in blood and water.”

The detectives didn’t know what to make of it. Schmidt kept talking.

He described cutting Anna’s throat, tasting her blood, carving up her body, and throwing the pieces into the river. He also told detectives Anna was five months pregnant when she died.

If Schmidt was trying to make himself look insane, he was doing a pretty good job.

The day after Schmidt’s arrest, police arrested a New York dentist named Ernest Arthur Muret. His real name was Herman Artur Heibing, and he had a few secrets of his own.

Muret was tied to a counterfeiting operation on the top floor of the Bradhurst Avenue building where Anna was killed.

Detectives found a printing press, white paper cut to the size of dollar bills, and copper plates for $10 and $20 notes. Some of the paper already carried the seal of the United States.

A search of Muret’s dental office turned up engraving equipment.

Muret said he’d helped Schmidt buy some supplies, but he insisted he knew nothing about counterfeiting and had nothing to do with Anna’s murder.

The police kept digging.

They discovered Schmidt and Muret had used at least five hideouts around New York City. Each man went by as many as ten different names. Detectives even found a false beard and mustache in one of Muret’s rooms.

Muret had been playing this game for a while. Papers in his office showed he’d left London one step ahead of Scotland Yard after impersonating a physician. Back then, he called himself Adolph Mueller.

On October 28, 1913, a jury found Muret guilty of counterfeiting and sent him to prison for seven years.

And with the dentist safely tucked away, attention turned back to the murderous priest.

Alphonse Koelble, Schmidt’s attorney, had a problem.

His client had confessed. Police had found the knife, saw, wire, photographs, and bedding receipt. Schmidt had also babbled about saints ordering blood sacrifices and admitted tasting Anna’s blood.

There weren’t a lot of good defenses left. Koelble settled on insanity “because that is the only possible defense.”

Hans Schmidt went on trial in November 1913. The case dragged through the end of December, and on New Year’s Eve, Judge Foster finally dismissed the jury.

They were hopelessly deadlocked. Ten jurors wanted Schmidt convicted. Two didn’t.

For the second trial, Schmidt’s attorneys came up with a new story.

Anna hadn’t been murdered. She died from complications during childbirth. Schmidt panicked, cut her body into pieces, and dumped the remains in the North River.

In other words, their client was guilty of dismembering his dead girlfriend and throwing her into a river.

Not murder.

Medical Examiner King didn’t buy it. He told the jury Anna had been killed in bed by a blow to the back of her head.

Detective George Smith added another ugly wrinkle to the case. Police had found a pad of blank death certificates in Schmidt’s room at the St. Joseph’s rectory.

Schmidt told Smith he’d been looking for a poison that could painlessly kill the incurably sick, elderly, and infirm. He planned to put them out of their misery. Whether Schmidt really intended to become some sort of one-man death squad is another question. But it certainly didn’t help him in court.

On February 5, 1914, the jury found Hans Schmidt guilty of first-degree murder.

He was sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.

Schmidt was supposed to die during the week of March 23, 1914, but his attorneys won a stay of execution while they fought for a new trial.

The appeals dragged on, and Schmidt’s story changed again.

In December 1914, Dr. Justin Herold and Dr. Henry T. Cottell supported the claim that Anna had bled to death after a botched abortion. Schmidt hadn’t cut her throat.

That raised an obvious question.

Why had Schmidt confessed to doing exactly that?

Schmidt had an answer. The police were fools for believing him.

The courts weren’t impressed.

Judge Benjamin Cardozo ruled Schmidt must die under his original sentence. Even then, another three months passed before the priest finally reached the electric chair.

Hans Schmidt died at 5:52 a.m. on February 18, 1916.

His attorney, Alphonse Koelble, released Schmidt’s last statement. Like most condemned men, Schmidt said he didn’t do it.

“I will be put to death for lying and not for murder, for poor Anna Aumuller died from the results of an operation,” Schmidt wrote.

He blamed the police.

“Had the police not shown such a wonderful facility for believing everything I told them, and had they made any independent investigation, they would speedily have shown that an operation had caused the girl’s death.”

Think about that for a moment.

Schmidt confessed to cutting Anna’s throat.
And tasting her blood. He described cutting her body apart and throwing the pieces into the river because St. Elizabeth ordered a blood sacrifice.

Then he complained because the police believed him.

Was Hans Schmidt insane?

He didn’t think so.

“It may be that shortly after the girl’s death, I was mentally deranged, but I never have been insane, though I admit I may be abnormal.”

A year earlier, Schmidt had offered an even better diagnosis. He said the alienists—the psychologists and insanity experts of the day—should have declared:

“This Hans Schmidt is not legally insane, but a most astonishing darned fool and a sublime jackass.”

For once, Hans Schmidt may have gotten something right.

Anna Aumuller was dead. Schmidt had cut her body apart and dumped the pieces in the North River. Whether he murdered her in her sleep, botched an abortion, or believed a saint demanded a blood sacrifice went with him to the electric chair.

The police never found Anna’s head, left leg, or arm.

But they found Hans Schmidt. All because of two pillowcases.

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