The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt, page 13
Trailing behind Agnes, Gillespie collected each item identified as property of Augusta Steinbach and gently laid it on the kitchen table. By the time Agnes finished sweeping the bedrooms, the table was covered with things Schmidt lifted from Augusta’s trunks.
Agnes wanted to see one last thing before she left: the furnace where Schmidt cremated Augusta’s remains. She wanted to say goodbye. She started trembling again when Gillespie led her down the steep flight of steps into the cellar to a dark corner where the furnace stood. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she peered inside the inky blackness. “Das heiraten teufel,” she whispered in a barely audible tone and then raced back up the stairs and out the front door. Within the hour, Agnes Domaniecki was on an eastbound train.
Adele Ullrich Braun was the next to go through the house. Unlike Agnes, Gillespie didn’t have to twist Adele’s arm. This was the next step in reclaiming the valuables Schmidt pilfered from her. She grew angrier with each new discovery. A gasp followed each time she recognized a piece of her jewelry: the diamond-studded gold watch that Gertrude gave her as a gift in New York, a necklace of amber beads and several pairs of gold earrings and finger rings. She uttered “Mein gott” when she noticed her two gold lockets. Schmidt didn’t even have the decency to remove the pictures inside. On a bureau in Gertrude’s room, she found her silver wristwatch. In all, she identified sixty-two different pieces of jewelry as hers.123
Fuming, Adele demanded Gertrude’s arrest as an accomplice in her father’s schemes. She reminded Gillespie that Schmidt, with sweet little Gertrude in tow, left her destitute when he abandoned her. She also noted that on the wanted poster produced by the Lakewood police, Gertrude’s picture appears next to Schmidt’s as a fugitive from the law. True, Gillespie acquiesced, but this was not Ocean County, New Jersey. It was Oakland County, Michigan. If Lakewood police wanted Gertrude, they would have to pursue her through their legal system. Gillespie refused to take Gertrude into custody. He just didn’t believe that she was anything other than one of her father’s dupes.
Adele, meanwhile, had done so much talking that she started to worry that she might have said something incriminating. Acutely aware of the political situation, Adele spoke with a reporter from the Detroit Free Press. Schmidt, she had told Gillespie, wanted her to lift her brother’s citizenship papers so he could give them to his brother, a German soldier, to escape the war and come to America. Now it appeared that Schmidt wanted the identity papers so he could masquerade as a naturalized citizen, but Adele did not want there to be any question about her loyalties.
“She was anxious,” wrote Free Press reporter John T. Wallace, “that it might be made plain that she and all her brothers and sisters, save one, were children when their parents came to America, that her father was naturalized while they were yet minors, and that all of them are therefore citizens of the United States.”124
While municipal workers turned over the earth at 418 Glendale Avenue in Detroit and relatives unearthed clues about their loved ones in the Bluebeard’s bungalow, a parallel dig began on Schmidt’s former chicken farm in Lakewood New Jersey.
Prosecutor Plummer decided not to wait for Gertrude’s map to arrive in the mail. He traveled to Lakewood to study the farm for places that could hold hidden graves. A cursory examination revealed a few possible spots. Schmidt had cemented over the basement, and a depressed portion of the barn’s dirt floor—about fifteen square feet—suggested that he might have buried something there. Plummer found the most promising spot under the floorboards of the kitchen, where Adele said Schmidt had concealed an old well: the perfect hiding spot for something.
At the crack of dawn on Saturday, April 27, Constable William Mason, acting under Plummer’s orders, showed up with a work crew to begin excavations. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered to watch. “While Ocean County is accustomed to fox hunts and paper chases,” a New York Sun reporter noted, the people seldom have “the opportunity of witnessing a real skeleton hunt.”
The reporter captured the mood as the diggers dragged the well with grappling hooks. When one of the laborers appeared to have hooked something, “the spectators surged forward spasmodically while the searchers leaned tensely over the well. Then the man who wielded the grappling hooks gave a little slack to his rope and jerked quickly. The clanking sound that came forth made it perfectly obvious to every one within hearing distance that if the hook had caught on to a skeleton it must have belonged to someone with an iron constitution.”125
For six hours, the workers dragged the well but came up empty-handed. They then dismantled a small shed that Schmidt used as an icehouse and dug down about four feet beneath it, but they didn’t find any skeletons there, either. At about four o’clock, they stopped work for the afternoon.
THE ENIGMATIC GERTRUDE SCHMIDT
Saturday afternoon, April 27, 1918
The Royal Oak Tribune described her as “18 years of age with large, brown eyes, and an open countenance. Her hair hung loose down her back. Her features are rather coarse except for her mouth which is of a delicate mould. Her hands and the frame of her body are large. She appeared unsophisticated and simple.”126 But Gertrude Anna Maria Schmidt was anything but simple.
Photograph of Gertrude from a passport application she submitted in 1920. National Archives and Records Administration, image by Photo Response.
Adele Ullrich Braun’s sordid tale of love and betrayal made investigators eye Gertrude with greater suspicion than before. Even press reporters, who just a few days earlier had depicted the coy teenager as another of her father’s victims, began to question Gertrude’s culpability in Schmidt’s entrapment of lonely women. Some described her as a manipulative accomplice and a compulsive liar.
Carol Bird, the Detroit Free Press reporter who compared Gertrude to an innocent child in an earlier article, now described Gertrude as a “shrewd” and “sagacious” character who used sex appeal to handcuff the hardened cops questioning her.
“Sex lure is a powerful and useful weapon in the hands of a woman if she uses it with just the proper amount of delicacy and restraint,” Bird wrote in her profile of the “Bluebeard’s” daughter. “[Gertrude] is an expert in the use of it. With its subtle aid this wise maiden is baffling legal inquisitors by her nonchalant manner, her guarded replies to all questions they put to her, and by her general poise and bearing.”127
Bird, one of the reporters who grilled the suspects along with the investigators, studied her subject with the eye of a psychologist. Gertrude “understands well that she is exercising her woman’s prerogative to smile and pout, weep a bit, and ‘baby stare.’ Her eyes are large and of the deep, lustrous melting brown which so many southern women possess.”128
In her profile of the puzzling teenager, Bird described an instance when a reporter’s question hit a nerve with Gertrude. The reporter asked her why she lied so much. “Why do I lie all the time? That’s none of your business what I do,” she snapped, and then turned to Lieutenant John Reid of the Detroit Homicide Squad. Appalled but curious, Bird watched as Gertrude “ran one small finger up and down the buttons of his vest, whimpered a bit, and then with her great soulful brown eyes on his face, she begged piteously ‘Take me out of here, please. They tire me with questions. I have told all I know. I will talk to you alone, in one of the other offices, but I don’t want to stay here and be puzzled any more.’”129
Gertrude apparently felt comfortable talking to Cross and Gillespie, although Bird hinted that her answers were evasive and even disingenuous. “‘Yes,’ she says, amiably, ‘I’ll try and remember that date. Let me see, what was it? No, I don’t exactly remember. I’m sorry.’” Bird ended her profile with a line that captured how many felt about the enigmatic teenager: “Hers is the picture of tears, and smiles, and ingenuous girl mannerisms.”130
A writer for Pontiac Press Gazette who witnessed the confrontation between Gertrude and Adele Ullrich Braun in Gillespie’s office described Gertrude as “a clever framer of words. When asked why she had told so many conflicting stories about her mother, she said ‘Oh, I was only talking to you newspapermen and I didn’t think it necessary that I tell you everything. I told the prosecutor the real truth.’”131
Other reporters depicted Gertrude as an unwitting accomplice caught up in her father’s web of lies and deception. An article in the Detroit News seized on the anti-German sentiment of the time and characterized her as a “Victim of Her Father’s Prussianism.” Schmidt, according to correspondent Buda Stephens, belonged to the “soul-destroying school of Prussian militarism” that “lured women with matrimonial advertisements to gratify his insane ambitions for power, money, and jewels.”
Gertrude, Stephens explained, became just another one of Schmidt’s victims and couldn’t help the occasional fib because her father taught her to do it. “[T]aught by her father to spy on her various stepmothers and cover her father’s ruthless tactics with lies, [she] stands alone to speak for the dead man and face shadows with pointing fingers of accusation from the past. Is it any wonder that the young girl tangles her stories?” Stephens went on to blame Schmidt’s victims: “The women in the case are typical of the meek hausfrau willing to sacrifice body and soul for the materialistic or they would not have fallen into the traps of the autocratic Schmidt.”132
Just how many “hausfrau” had become ensnared in the malignant Prussian’s net remained a mystery, and Detroit cops believed that Gertrude Schmidt was the key to solving it.
THE BLUEBEARD’S BODY
Detroit, Michigan
Saturday evening, April 27, 1918
Although he was dead, the ladies in Schmidt’s life still wanted his body, literally. In a morbid twist, the corpse became a bone of contention between Adele and Gertrude, each of whom felt that she had the right to Schmidt’s remains.
The pending struggle had more to do with Schmidt’s five-figure fortune than sentimentality. Adele was confident that as his first living legal spouse, she had a legal right to Schmidt’s remains and thus, his bank accounts. “God knows I don’t care anything about it [Schmidt’s remains] if it isn’t necessary,” she told reporters. “I just want to establish my interest in his estate and get what rightfully belongs to me.”133 Adele added that she had no interest in attending Schmidt’s funeral. Gertrude, as Schmidt’s only surviving heir, felt that she had an equally strong claim.
In the meantime, Highland Park justice of the peace John Austin ordered the body held at the undertaking establishment of Alfred E. Crosby pending an inquest, which was standard procedure for any jailhouse death. Since there was never any doubt about the cause and manner of Schmidt’s demise, the inquest was a formality. According to criminal procedures of the time, Justice Austin needed six competent people to view the body. Austin had no problem rounding up the required number of eyewitnesses who, one by one, shuffled past the body, which they identified as Helmuth Schmidt. Dr. Kenneth Dick proclaimed that Schmidt died from “compression of the skull.” With the procedure complete, the body would remain at Crosby’s until a legal claimant arranged for a burial.134 The undertaker hoped that it wouldn’t take too long.
That night, Michiganders attended a citywide funeral of a different sort: the demise of John Barleycorn. As the terminal date of Michigan’s alcohol prohibition laws approached, people flocked to the taverns for one last public round. Saloon owners expected the “funeral dirge” to begin early and go all weekend as the taps would run dry at midnight on Tuesday, May 1.
Across the state, more than three thousand watering holes prepared to pass out of existence after the weekend binge, almost half of them in Wayne County. As expected, patrons crammed Detroit’s tonier establishments. Dozens of unescorted women flocked to the “peacock alley” at the Pontchartrain, drowning their loneliness in long-stemmed flutes that would soon be replaced by water glasses. A Detroit News reporter who eavesdropped on their conversation overheard a comment that captured the gloomy mood of the evening. “‘But what’s the difference, the boys are just about all gone,’ said a pair of red lips which contrasted with the blue of a French cape.’”135
Saloon patrons enjoy one last drink before wartime prohibition dried out New York City in 1919. Scenes like this took place all over the United States during World War I. Detroit had gone dry one year earlier, becoming the first major city to undergo the “noble experiment.” Library of Congress.
To the shock of those who expected a bacchanalian sendoff to John Barleycorn, the city’s saloons passed a quiet evening, with only a handful of regular customers enjoying the last legal pull on the tap.
“There was no need for a downtown debauch on the last holiday evening,” wrote a Detroit News reporter, because people all over the state had begun hoarding barrels of beer and bottles of booze.136 The hoarding became so intense that liquor suppliers couldn’t keep up with the demand. They gave priority to orders from individuals over the atrophying saloons, and as a result, many of the taverns dried up well in advance of the May 1 deadline. When liquor was available, some tavern owners didn’t want to invest their money in the soon-to-be-illegal commodity, choosing instead to close their doors.
WITHOUT A TRACE
Lakewood, New Jersey
Sunday, April 28, 1918
On Sunday morning, the excavations resumed in Lakewood. An expert well digger rappelled his way down the dark shaft of the well. After hours of sifting through the muck, he found no trace of the missing women.
By the time William Mason’s men pulled the mud-caked man from the well, Plummer had Gertrude’s map in hand. One of the spots Gertrude marked was the area under the barn where Plummer noticed a change in ground level. The searchers immediately began to unearth the patch. Just under the surface, they found a layer of quicklime—an ominous sign. The chemical was used to mask the foul odor or rotting matter. Under the quicklime, however, they found bits and pieces of trash, indicating that Schmidt had used the floor of his barn for waste disposal.
The workers toiled late into the afternoon, but despite an exhaustive search, the New Jersey property proved to be a dead end. The two women remained missing, found only in newspaper articles about the dig. A New York Times correspondent, quick to pick up on the espionage theme first introduced by Adele Braun, subtitled his article “Officials Fail to Find Any Evidence of Murders by Lakewood Spy.”
“Helmuth Schmidt is thought to be a German spy and is believed to have killed his first wife, Anita, and Greta Darsch, a German girl, who lived with them,” the reporter noted. “The police think he feared the women would divulge his spy connections.”137
Back in Detroit, the Sunday edition of the Free Press featured a front-page story entitled “Schmidt’s Kin Sent for Mail of Slain Girl.”138 The article summarized the weekend’s developments in the case, citing several key sources, including Lena Welch and T.H. Hetherington. Welch “emphatically” insisted that she watched Augusta Steinbach walk arm in arm with Schmidt into the Royal Oak house a week before her disappearance, and she also believed that the Schmidt women were home at the time. The article then offered corroboration by citing Agnes Domaniecki, who recalled letters in which Augusta described the sisters she met in Royal Oak.
The Free Press correspondent quoted Hetherington, who stated unequivocally that Augusta Steinbach visited Neugebauer’s Royal Oak home on Sunday, March 4, 1917, the week before she disappeared. And, Hetherington added, when Augusta returned from Royal Oak, she talked about meeting Herman’s “sisters.” Augusta, he said, liked the younger sister but said she didn’t care much for the older one.
Undersheriff Harry Cryderman, like most officers involved in the case, followed the news carefully. His mouth dropped open when he spotted the bit quoting Thomas Hetherington. Hetherington’s alleged remarks amounted to a startling revelation; until now, the landlord had said nothing of this March 4 visit or Augusta’s description of Neugebauer’s sisters.139
Cryderman immediately recognized the significance of this new information. Hetherington was the third person to assert that Augusta mentioned these mysterious sisters. Individually, the statements amounted to little more than hearsay. But taken together, they added up to one logical conclusion: both Gertrude and Helen met Augusta Steinbach at least once, despite their repeated denials. And it appeared that they masqueraded as Neugebauer’s sisters when Augusta Steinbach came to visit. Gertrude must have known, or at least suspected, what her father was up to. After all, Schmidt had pulled this same con in New Jersey. Adele Ullrich Braun said that she met “Greta Braun,” who was in all likelihood Margareta Baersch, and Gertrude herself said that Schmidt told her to always refer to the housekeeper as her aunt. Schmidt, posing as Herman Scharno, also introduced Gertrude as his sister-in-law when he courted Helen, according to Helen’s sister, Mina.140
That evening, Cryderman phoned Gillespie. Exasperated, the undersheriff wanted to drag Gertrude and Helen back to Pontiac for another interrogation, but after reading the story, Gillespie decided to wait. This new information, if true, provided important corroboration for Lena Welch’s statement. But during two different interviews, including one in his office on Friday, Hetherington failed to mention this vital piece of information, causing the prosecutor to wonder about the landlord’s memory or the accuracy of the report (or both).
In any event, Gillespie now believed that Gertrude knew more than she was saying, but as far as evidence of complicity in a crime, he didn’t have enough. Welch didn’t see the Schmidt women with Steinbach; Domaniecki and now Hetherington repeated things they supposedly heard more than a year earlier without anything backing their claims. Besides, the evidence indicated that Schmidt murdered Steinbach on March 11, so Gertrude and Helen—if they played along as “sisters”—only helped in the concealment of a confidence game, not murder, and Michigan legal statutes insulated spouses and children from helping with the concealment of misdeeds.141 To successfully prosecute Gertrude, Gillespie needed proof that she actively, willingly took part in her father’s crimes. Hearsay alone wouldn’t do it.
