The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt, page 17
In the flesh, however, the two didn’t measure up. None of Hocke’s friends mentioned the scars on Schmidt’s face—a striking feature not easily missed. Sergeant Daniel McLaughlin, one of the officers who measured Schmidt at the Highland Park police station, testified about seeing the scars after the arrest. Detective Fred Dibble also testified to seeing the scars when he viewed the body at the morgue.184 A photograph showing Schmidt in a hunting outfit was entered into evidence; the photo clearly showed three thin marks on his left cheek.
Known signature of “Emil Braun” from his 1914 marriage license to Adele Ullrich. New York City Municipal Archives.
Known signature of “John Switt” from his 1914 marriage license to Anna Hocke. New York City Municipal Archives.
John Switt’s height also didn’t match Schmidt’s. Anna’s friends described Switt as about six feet in height, but Sergeant Mclaughlin testified that Schmidt was only five foot seven.185 Most damning of all was “Switt’s” signature on the marriage papers. Stockwell placed it next to a known sample of Schmidt’s handwriting, and the two did not appear to match.
On July 30, Stockwell tossed out Switt’s claim and declared Adele Ullrich Braun to be Schmidt’s legal widow. Adele had finally won the legal vindication she so evidently desired. By mid-August, much of the contentiousness among the litigants had evaporated, and the three women decided to bury the hatchet. On August 15, they inked an agreement “to avoid [the] litigation, trouble, and expense” arising from the “unusual circumstances surrounding the estate.”186
They split Schmidt’s property three ways. Gertrude received some of the furniture and a set of fine silver that had been in her father’s family for years. The Royal Oak property went to Helen, while Adele received the deed to 418 Glendale Avenue, which, a Pontiac Press Gazette reporter noted, was a white elephant. The diggers left the property in shambles, and no one wanted to buy a house used by the Royal Oak Bluebeard to stash the body of Irma Pallatinus.
Oakland County Probate Court judge Ross Stockwell ruled that Adele Ullrich Braun was Schmidt’s legal widow. Oakland County Probate Court, Michigan.
Curiously, both Helen Schmidt and Adele Braun retained their “married” names, although Adele added “Schmidt” in parenthesis. Oakland County Probate Court, Michigan.
Dondero signed on behalf of his ward, Gertrude. Curiously, both of Schmidt’s wives retained their married names on the court documents. Helen signed as “Helen Schmidt” and Adele as “Adele Braun (Schmidt).”187
The women faced just one final obstacle before the agreement became official: Anna Hocke Switt could appeal Judge Stockwell’s dismissal of her claim. Apparently content to drop the affair and move on with her life, she didn’t file an appeal, and the distribution of Schmidt’s estate began.
The case of the Royal Oak Bluebeard had finally come to an end.
EPILOGUE
If pictures are worth a thousand words, then before and after photographs of Gertrude tell a sad story of an emotionally drained teen anguished by the ordeal. The youthful eighteen-year-old in photographs circa 1918 looked like a woman of thirty-five in her 1920 passport photograph. Perhaps, in some sense, she became her father’s final victim—pressed into service as Schmidt’s “sister,” blasted by the press and dogged by police and reporters alike.
After the probate court fracas, Gertrude Schmidt returned to the Royal Oak bungalow, where her father had incinerated Augusta Steinbach. On April 20, 1919, nineteen-year-old “Trudy” Schmidt wed her sweetheart, twenty-year-old Erich O. Kurth, son of the widow who sheltered Gertrude and Helen in her Birmingham cottage during the press circus surrounding the case. Still considered a minor at the time, Gertrude Schmidt-Kurth remained officially under Dondero’s wing until Judge Stockwell discharged him as her court-appointed guardian just after her twenty-first birthday.188
The Kurths remained together for thirty-three years, but their happily-ever-after ended prematurely. Tragically, Gertrude Schmidt-Kurth committed suicide on November 19, 1952, at the age of fifty-two.189 Her obituary notes, among the list of her survivors, her “mother” Helen Schmidt.190
Helen Schmidt remained close to her stepdaughter, living at the Birmingham, Michigan residence of the Kurth family for more than a decade. In the early 1940s, she moved out of the Kurth household and into an apartment, where she worked as a dressmaker. She spent her last few years at the Southfield Nursing Home, dying of kidney failure on July 2, 1964, at the age of eighty-four.191
Adele Ullrich Braun remained in Detroit, where she found work as a bookkeeper for the Detroit Printing Company. She made one final appearance in the 1918 Detroit City Guide as Mrs. Adele “Brown” (she apparently Anglicized her married name) before exiting stage left, never again to appear under the limelight. According to probate court documents, estate agent John Baldwin managed to sell the Glendale Avenue house in November 1918. After the sale, Adele may have moved back to New York.192
In 1918, Glenn C. Gillespie ran for a second term as Oakland County prosecuting attorney. He won the election and continued a string of important victories in court. In one year, he won every single case he argued. In 1921, Gillespie became the youngest circuit court judge in Michigan history when Governor Groesbeck appointed the thirty-five-year-old to fill a vacancy on Oakland County’s Sixth Circuit Court. Over the next decade, he left his mark, authoring several key decisions. He literally wrote the book on criminal jurisprudence in the Great Lake State; Gillespie’s Michigan Criminal Law became standard reference for criminal courts.
Glenn C. Gillespie, outdoorsman, circa 1917. Glenn C. Gillespie Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
Gillespie left public service in 1934 and returned to his private law practice, where he took up civil suits, arguing several landmark cases before the Michigan Supreme Court. He and Leola spent their summers at their second home in Pasadena, California. On their return drive to Michigan on March 11, 1959, Leola fell asleep at the wheel, and the car veered into a concrete abutment. Leola survived the accident with a fractured hip and broken arm, but seventy-three-year-old Glenn C. Gillespie died in the wreck.
George Anthony Dondero devoted the rest of his life to public service. He remained an assistant prosecuting attorney until 1919 and the attorney for the village of Royal Oak until 1921, when he was elected mayor of Royal Oak. In 1932, the small-town farm boy from Greenfield Township, Michigan, won a seat in the United States House of Representatives. He served a dozen terms, finally leaving the Washington political scene in 1957. He died in Royal Oak on January 29, 1968, at the age of eighty-four.
Convicted of murdering Hope Alexander, Allan Livingston maintained his innocence of any wrongdoing in the crime. In 1944, he appealed his conviction based in part on alleged trial errors and in part on an affidavit signed by a fellow inmate alleging that police propositioned him to participate in a frame of Livingston (he refused).193 It had been nearly three decades since the crime, memories of the event had faded and the stenographer had died before his notes could be transcribed, so there was no formal record to review either. The county decided to not to pursue the case, and Livingston was released. Terminally ill, he died that same year.
After nearly two decades of policing the mean streets of Detroit, Detective Fred Dibble became chief of police for the city of Hamtramck in 1918. For the next twenty years, he served first as mayor and then as member of the Hamtramck Board of Supervisors. He died of kidney failure in 1937 at the age of sixty-one.
Agnes Domaniecki remained in New York and faded into obscurity—a place, Captain Willemse said, where she felt most comfortable. “To the best of my knowledge,” Willemse wrote in 1931, “Agnes is still here, happily married to a steady industrious man who appreciates her. If he didn’t, he’d be a jackass.”194
Captain Cornelius Willemse remained on the prowl as a homicide detective in east New York until he hung up his handcuffs in 1925. New York’s finest didn’t fade out of the spotlight, however. He became a sought-after lecturer and later penned two memoirs about his life on the streets: Behind the Green Lights, published in 1931, and A Cop Remembers, in 1933. A sharp mind when it came to collaring deviants, Willemse used his chapter on the Schmidt case as a cautionary tale to single women who searched for mates through the classifieds. “I’ve got to say when it comes to the ‘lovelorn,’” he said, “keep your money in the bank. You’re safe as long as you do even against a criminal of the Schmidt type.”195 Willemse died in July 1942 at the age of seventy.
As Detroit grew to 1 million residents, the crime rate continued to climb. This rare wanted poster describes the robbery of a Woodward Avenue clothing store. Author’s collection.
In the late 1910s, Highland Park chief Charles Seymour had his hands full with all sorts of miscreants, from murderers to men who ran away from their wives—a vigorously prosecuted offense in the early twentieth century. He published this wanted leaflet to find Willard T. Guy, a Detroiter who allegedly abandoned his wife. Author’s collection.
Captain Cornelius Willemse, standing beside Deputy Police Commissioner John Leach, watches beer go down the drain in New York during the Prohibition era. New York World–Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Collection, Library of Congress.
Helmuth Schmidt is buried in an unmarked grave at Detroit’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. Six feet beneath the surface of section 32 lies the shattered skull of Michigan’s original lonely hearts killer, who took his many secrets with him when he committed suicide in his Highland Park jail cell.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
A Detroit News reporter captured the essence of the Schmidt saga in a headline article from April 24, 1918: “Pieced together bit by bit the evidence makes a mosaic colored with the blood of women and in it is the sinister shadow of a man accused of having lured them to their death through matrimonial advertisements.”196 The mosaic, however, is full of holes. There are several unanswered questions about Helmuth Schmidt and his alleged crimes.
He was Braun, Neugebauer, Roloff, Ullrich, Scharno and others, but who was he really? Pulling back the curtain exposes the wizard of Oakdale Boulevard as Helmuth Emil Max Schmidt, born on July 4, 1876, in Rostock, Germany. Little is known about his early years. He abandoned his Berlin jewelry shop in 1913 and immigrated to the United States aboard the steamship Bremen, arriving at the Port of New York on November 6 under the name of “Max” Schmidt.197 A week later, his daughter, Gertrude, alongside two other women, joined him there.
Almost from the time the Bremen docked, Schmidt began his warped version of the American dream by bilking desperate women out of their life savings. Schmidt conned women for profit, but statements from the various characters who interacted with him suggest that he was a complex individual with more than money on his mind.
One contemporary news report labeled Schmidt a “sex pervert,” but sex doesn’t appear to have been his primary motivation, either. Detroit, like most major U.S. cities, had a healthy red-light district. He didn’t need to advertise for love when he could find it for sale around the corner. He apparently wanted women from the “servant class” who hadn’t spent much time on their backs—vulnerable women with limited social options whom he could control and perhaps even own. Adele, Helen and Augusta were all middle-aged spinsters when they met Schmidt. None of them had been previously married. Irma was the odd woman in the group: at twenty-eight, she was comparatively young, and New York marriage records indicate that she had been married once before, in 1913.
A Pontiac Press Gazette writer speculated that “there may have been a more subtle motive due to a disordered mind. It is possible he had a mania for trifling with the affections of women.”198 This may have been closer to what made the Royal Oak Bluebeard tick.
For Schmidt, the climax of such liaisons may have resulted not from the sex but from the control itself. Adele Ullrich Braun, Gertrude Schmidt and Helen Schmidt all characterized Schmidt as a control freak who reveled in dominating the women in his life. According to Adele, he even claimed that he could control women with his hypnotic gaze—a belief in extreme control he shared with Raymond Fernandez, one half of the infamous “Lonely Hearts” duo. Fernandez believed that he could seduce women from afar by casting a voodoo spell over them.
The ultimate fantasy for Helmuth Schmidt may have come when he remained, literally and symbolically, on top of Augusta Steinbach. Only when discovery appeared imminent did he relinquish her body, disinterring and subsequently destroying it.
If, as investigators believed, Schmidt murdered Augusta Steinbach, the climactic moment of their relationship may have occurred when he throttled her—a moment when his control over her became absolute. Convicted lonely hearts slayer Harry Powers once remarked that watching his victims die provided more pleasure than a night at the local bordello. Like Schmidt, Powers strangled his victims and then buried their bodies under a structure on his West Virginia property.
A consummate raconteur, Schmidt became very adept at role-playing. He played imperial German officer Captain Ullrich at east side beer halls and then fooled Ford’s Sociological Department by slipping into his domestic alter ego, “Adolph Ullrich,” loving husband and father. He tricked countless women with his suave exterior. “His face and appearance,” Captain Willemse wrote, “were such that most women might trust. There was nothing about his manner of actions to suggest ‘the fiend’ or the degenerate.”199 The few surviving photographs of Schmidt suggest that, with a full head of hair, an olive-complexion and a square jaw, he was probably a real lady-killer.
Schmidt effortlessly glided from one identity to another, sometimes engaging in a form of identity theft by stealing names. After he robbed Adele Ullrich Braun, he assumed her last name, living and working in Highland Park as “Adolph Ullrich.” A few years later, he sent out matrimonial advertisements from Royal Oak in the names of “Roloff” and “Neugebauer”—both surnames of Royal Oak residents in 1917. Intelligent, a master manipulator and an expert dissembler—hallmarks of what twenty-first century psychologists refer to as a sociopath.
Another unanswered question involves the number of women duped by Schmidt’s lonely hearts game. In addition to his two known wives, Adele Ullrich and Helen Tietz, two others (Anna Hocke and “Mrs. Hellmuth Schmidt”) claimed that they married him, and Minna Rederer insisted that her sister, Irma Pallatinus, went through some type of marriage ceremony. There could have been others, but the scope of his swindle is obscured by the very nature of his crimes. The shame of a weekend fling may have kept some women from stepping forward, particularly in an age when most women kept such affairs tucked away in diaries. Adele Ullrich Braun, in her willingness to discuss her private affairs in public, was rare.
Gillespie once referred to Schmidt’s Royal Oak house as a “murder plant” and compared Schmidt to Belle Guinness, who notched more than two dozen murders in a killing spree that spanned decades. The hard evidence indicates that Schmidt was no Belle Guinness, but the fates of at least two women known to be associated with Schmidt remain unknown.
According to some sources, both Anita Schmidt and Margareta Baersch vanished down the rabbit hole of Schmidt’s Lakewood, New Jersey chicken ranch. Anita Schmidt’s fate is obscured by Gertrude’s evolving story. At first, she said that Anita disappeared in Germany. The presence of Adele Ullrich Braun in Detroit forced Gertrude to tell Gillespie that her mother emigrated from Germany with her, which would have been on the steamship Amerika on November 15, 1913.200 But the Amerika’s passenger manifest contains no entry for an “Anna” or “Anita Schmidt.” If Gertrude told the truth, then her mother must have traveled under another name.
According to the manifest, Gertrude walked through Ellis Island alongside Margareta Baersch and a woman named Minna Gülzow, who identified herself as Schmidt’s sister and Gertrude’s aunt. In an interview with Gillespie, Gertrude said that Schmidt typically referred to his wife, Anita, as his sister.
If true, it was just one of several similar deceptions. After this first woman vanished, Schmidt subsequently passed off Margareta Baersch as his sister, “Greta Braun,” when Adele Ullrich visited in the fall of 1914. Gertrude later told Gillespie that her father directed her to tell others that Baersch was her aunt. Schmidt subsequently introduced Gertrude as his sister-in-law when he met Helen Tietz, and the evidence suggests that, two years later, he presented Helen and Gertrude as his sisters while he courted Augusta Steinbach.
Two excerpts from the November 1913 passenger manifest for the SS Amerika. The top excerpt includes the three women en route to meet Helmuth Schmidt. The identity of the woman listed in line fifteen, Minna Gülzow, remains a mystery. The bottom excerpt includes Schmidt’s address in New York. Notice “friend” crossed out and “brother” in parenthesis. Schmidt had a tendency to represent his intimates as his sisters. Were these two women victims of Schmidt’s “murder plant”? Their fates remain unknown. National Archives and Records Administration.
It is possible that Anita Schmidt likewise playacted as Schmidt’s sister, although her reasons for doing so remain obscure. Whoever she was, after “Minna Gülzow” left Ellis Island, she disappeared. An extensive search failed to turn up a single piece of documentary evidence indicating that she lived, married or died in the United States under that name.
If Minna Gülzow was anyone other than Schmidt’s sister, the surname may have been a pseudonym that Schmidt kept up his sleeve. At least one other time, he used the name “Gülzow” in a false context. On his New York marriage paperwork, Emil Braun listed “Amanda Gülzow” as his mother.
This raises an intriguing question: why would Schmidt’s intimates stand by while he introduced them to his paramours? If Helmuth Schmidt was a sort of malignant Svengali with an uncanny ability to manipulate women, then perhaps he browbeat Anita and his subsequent wives into posing as his sisters to facilitate his marriage-for-profit scheme. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds—Raymond Fernandez once introduced his mistress to his legal wife. Later, when Martha Beck became both his partner in the bedroom and his partner in crime, he introduced her as his sister, a ploy designed to lend legitimacy to his alias, “Charles Martin.”
