The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt, page 18
If Schmidt murdered Anita Schmidt, as investigators feared in 1918, he did so in a way that left no trace. Despite an exhaustive search, Lakewood authorities didn’t find a single bone shard. The lack of any remains doesn’t mean that the women escaped Schmidt’s “murder plant.” Adele Ullrich Braun offered an interesting clue as to their potential fate: she said that Schmidt reeled from the stench of burning hair and forbade her to use her curling iron. Adele may have embellished a bit to demonize Schmidt, but it is also possible that Steinbach’s cellar cremation wasn’t Schmidt’s first. This would explain why authorities found no bodies in Lakewood. Schmidt may have simply scattered the ashes in New York Harbor during one of his nocturnal trips.
Whatever the truth about Anita Schmidt’s demise, Gertrude obviously believed that she died sometime before 1918. On several official documents, such as the probate court guardianship papers, she listed her mother as deceased.
Detroit detectives uncovered two additional names linked with Schmidt: housekeepers who allegedly worked at Schmidt’s Glendale Avenue residence. The name Mae Murray first appeared in a statement made by bartender Frank Rhode, who worked at a drinking hole frequented by Schmidt. For a brief time, journalists considered her another victim, but Rhode’s description of the woman matched Irma Pallatinus.
The second name, Emma Berchoffsky, emerged during Schmidt’s confession. Schmidt said that he employed the woman as his housekeeper after Irma Pallatinus ran off with his money. This could be the woman Grace De Planta spotted at the Glendale Avenue residence during one of her visits in late 1916. Mrs. De Planta described her as an attractive blonde who sat by the window, knitting. Neither Pallatinus nor Tietz—women known to be associated with Schmidt in Detroit—had blond hair.
Yet the name Emma Berchoffsky appears only once or twice in the voluminous news coverage about the case. Either investigators managed to eliminate her as a possible victim, or they reached a dead end. Apparently, they did not have all the answers they wanted. Not long after the discovery of Irma Pallatinus’s remains, Oakland County sheriff deputies probed Schmidt’s Royal Oak property in an attempt to find bone fragments of other possible victims.201 The discovery of Schmidt’s safety deposit box led to high hopes for more clues, but it turned out to contain nothing more than mundane paperwork. Perhaps one day, someone will be doing excavations on the property of a World War I–era house and stumble across an unwritten chapter in the Schmidt saga.
In Behind the Green Lights, Cornelius Willemse wrote that Schmidt murdered eight women before Augusta Steinbach, although he didn’t name names.202 He also said that after the case broke, he opened lines of communication with the authorities in all of the places where Schmidt advertised for brides. Willemse claimed that he learned of a police officer from an East Coast city who located a property owned by Schmidt. Under the basement floor, the detective discovered an unidentified, decomposed body.203
If Willemse’s account of Schmidt’s crime is valid, the Royal Oak Bluebeard would be one of the most prolific lonely hearts killers in American history, eclipsing Powers, who murdered five, and Beck and Fernandez, who together murdered three and possibly a fourth. But Willemse’s credibility is marred by the inexplicable factual errors in his chapter about the Schmidt case. For example, he stated that Gertrude was twelve at the time of her father’s arrest and that Sheriff Green shot himself because he felt embarrassed about the shocking disclosures Schmidt made during his confession.
Curiously, Cornelius Willemse is silent about one of the most fascinating facets of the case: Schmidt’s alleged espionage. He described Adele Ullrich’s story in detail but did not mention her allegations, perhaps because he felt they lacked substantiation or because he wanted to focus on the lonely hearts aspect of the case.
There is no smoking gun tying Schmidt to any known espionage ring. The primary source for the allegations was Adele Ullrich Braun, so any discussion about Schmidt as a spy hinges on her credibility.
Unlike other characters in the Schmidt saga, Adele’s story didn’t change with each retelling. The first statement she gave to a reporter—a correspondent from a small-town New York newspaper who interviewed her in August 1915—is consistent with those she made almost three years later in Detroit. In both instances, she spoke about Schmidt’s interest in Sandy Hook, the maps he drew and the coded messages that he apparently sent and received.
One could say that she had an axe to grind, but fabricating stories of a superspy would just be overkill. She already exposed him as a con artist whom, she said, tried to murder her. Besides, she spoke about Schmidt’s suspicious activity at the height of anti-German sentiment. Denouncing her husband as a spy came with great risk that others might question her loyalty. She evidently recognized this danger when she later made a point of telling the press that she and her siblings were all naturalized citizens.
According to Adele, during the five-month span from December 1914 until April 1915, Schmidt made maps of fortifications around New York Harbor. The time and place tallies with other efforts by German agents. When Schmidt lived in Lakewood as “Emil Braun”—from 1914 to late April 1915—northern New Jersey was the epicenter of German espionage. Most of these early efforts involved the destruction of war matériel. In the early days of the conflict, German authorities wanted to keep United States–produced munitions from going to their enemies. Their spymasters recruited transplants from the old country to carry on a war of sabotage and subversion.
Saboteurs experimented with explosive devices in the Jersey woods before using them on targets in and around New York Harbor, where ammunition and high explosives were gathered for shipment. According to one interesting albeit unproven conspiracy theory, German agents used a U.S. Navy–controlled radio tower at Tuckerton—just miles from Lakewood—to sink the Lusitania. As the story goes, the powerful radio tower sent the message, “Get Lucy” after the steamship left New York Harbor on May 1, 1915. Six days later, U-20 torpedoed the liner.
Throughout that spring, a series of attacks on munitions caches and outbound ships occurred within geographic proximity of Schmidt’s Lakewood, New Jersey farm. Captain Henry Landau, whose 1937 book The Enemy Within documents sabotage during World War I, even mentioned that one ring of saboteurs worked out of Lakewood, but he offered no names or specifics.204
Adele told Gillespie and a room full of reporters that Schmidt made overtures about stealing her brother’s identity papers in 1914—a time frame that coincided with a large-scale attempt to send German officers in the United States back across the Atlantic in a scheme Landau refers to as “passport fraud.”205 When hostilities began in 1914, imperial German authorities wanted to send the thousands of reserve German soldiers living abroad back to Europe, but the Allies didn’t want these men to find their way to Europe’s battlefields. They imposed more stringent travel requirements to prevent this mass movement.
To step over this block, German authorities tried to obtain passports from American citizens for use by their officers. Since passports of the era didn’t contain photographs, it was a simple switch; German reserve officers could return to Germany by masquerading as American citizens traveling abroad.
“DON’T TALK,” this circa 1917 poster warns. “Spies are listening.” Such propaganda led to exaggerated fears about enemy agents lurking in the shadows and caused many to eye their German American neighbors with greater suspicion than ever before. Library of Congress.
Adele, unaware of this shadow play, believed that Schmidt wanted the papers as an inroad to a new identity with which to entrap another victim, and this is one possible scenario, but once again, Schmidt was in the right place at the right time. The center of the “passport fraud” scheme was New York City, where Adele’s family lived.
“She [Adele] is convinced,” wrote a Detroit Times reporter, “that the man was a dangerous German spy and acted in that capacity here in Detroit.”206 Coincidentally, Schmidt moved to Detroit at about the same time that Albert Kaltschmidt’s group began its sabotage operations. In the spring of 1915, Schmidt stole Adele’s maiden name and fled west to the industrial heartbeat of America. Throughout the summer and fall of 1915—when Schmidt lived at 418 Glendale Avenue as “Adolph Ullrich”—Kaltschmidt and his gang targeted Canadian munitions factories.
Schmidt himself admitted to knowing spies, although when Sheriff Green and the Justice Department agents came knocking on his door in the spring of 1917, no one believed him. At the time, they believed that the devious Schmidt simply tried a Machiavellian maneuver to divert their attention away from the missing New Yorker. But it is possible that Schmidt had more than a passing knowledge of espionage in Detroit.
Sketches of airplane parts found at 9 Oakdale suggested that Schmidt collected information about new gadgets. If Schmidt was interested in military technology, he was once again in the right place at the right time. Several area factories, including Ford and Packard, experimented with cutting-edge aviation technology. At Ford’s Highland Park factory, workers built the experimental Whippet Tank. The new armored vehicle was tested on a series of artificial hills and trenches located on the factory’s grounds.
The idea that Schmidt worked as an enemy agent is an enticing theory, but there is another, more mundane explanation. The debonair “Captain Ullrich”—a man of intrigue and romance—may have been just another set of clothes in Schmidt’s wardrobe of fake identities. The dashing Heidelburg graduate who fought honor duels and gathered intelligence for the empire presented a more attractive façade than the underlying reality of Helmuth Schmidt, machinist at an automobile factory.
The espionage ruse also would have provided a way for Schmidt to exert control over the women in his life. They were less likely to go to the authorities if they feared prosecution as accomplices in a spy ring. Helen said that she wanted to leave Schmidt because she suspected him of wrongdoing but remained by his side out of sheer fear. As Gillespie noted in his statement of May 2, 1918, both Gertrude and Helen were convinced that Schmidt was involved with some shady business, which the prosecutor described as a “mysterious connection with the German government.” This “mysterious connection” might have intimidated the women into going along with his demands, possibly even playing along as Neugebauer’s sisters.
Adele evidently believed that Braun was an enemy agent. She told Detroit detectives that she warned him about the possible consequences if he was caught: “They both [Schmidt and Gertrude] used to sneer at me because I warned him against arrest for making those maps.”207 This statement suggests that Adele knew and understood the danger, which was perhaps all Schmidt needed to keep her under his thumb.
Perhaps espionage was Schmidt’s most grandiose deception.
NOTES
PREFACE
1. Pontiac Press Gazette, April 22, 1918.
PART I
2. Like thousands before her, Augusta Steinbach’s gateway to America was Ellis Island. The manifest of the Kronprinz Wilhelm—a document noting key information about the passengers prepared for immigration officers on the island—described her as five feet, five inches tall with brown hair and blue eyes.
3. Agnes (under the name Agnes Domoiecker) arrived at Ellis Island on board the SS Metapan on April 16, 1914. “Passenger and Crew Lists,” roll 2298, 177.
4. These advertisements originally appeared in the German-language newspaper the New York Herald. All of the major Detroit-area newspapers reprinted English translations: the Detroit News on April 22, 1918; the Detroit Times on April 23, 1918; and the Detroit Free Press on April 23, 1918. See also Willemse, Lemmer and Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights, 207.
5. There is no evidence that Neugebauer ever received this letter. The correspondence between Augusta and Neugebauer no longer exists, likely incinerated by Schmidt to destroy evidence that could link him to Augusta Steinbach. The basic content of their letters is known only through what Agnes Domaniecki relayed to authorities when her friend disappeared. Ironically, the “randy” note did survive, in a way. When the Schmidt case made headlines in April 1918, the Pontiac Press Gazette, as well as two of Detroit’s major newspapers, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit Times, ran articles about the note accidentally being delivered to Nelgebauer.
6. Carol Bird, “Chum of Slain Girl Involves Women in Case,” Detroit Free Press, April 27, 1918.
7. Detroit News, April 27, 1918.
8. A positive lifestyle, as defined by the Sociological Department, was a precondition to earning a portion of the wages.
9. Detroit Times, February 5, 1917.
10. According to T.H. Hetherington’s testimony at the preliminary hearing of Helen Tietz Schmidt, Augusta Steinbach first checked into his boardinghouse on February 9, leaving a three-day period during which her whereabouts were unknown. Detectives believed that she may have stayed at the city’s YWCA before checking into Hetherington’s place.
11. The 1917 Detroit City Guide lists Hetherington’s trade as furniture and antique furniture sales.
12. Detroit Free Press, April 29, 1918. T.H. Hetherington made a similar comment a few days later at the preliminary hearing of Helen Schmidt.
13. Ibid.
14. Detroit News, April 27, 1918.
15. Detroit Free Press, April 27, 1918. The original letters were discarded, but Agnes later described their content to Gillespie and reporters.
16. Ibid.
17. Detroit Free Press, April 29, 1918.
18. Schmidt began the naturalization process by submitting his “first papers” on October 15, 1915, in Detroit, but evidently he never finished. Gertrude also didn’t complete the process. On Gertrude’s 1920 passport application (completed, in part, by her ward George Dondero since she was still considered a minor), Dondero added a handwritten notation that Gertrude was a naturalized citizen “by marriage only.” Thus, under Wilson’s edict, they were both considered “enemy aliens”—a fact not missed by the era’s news correspondents, who typically refer to Schmidt by the epithet “enemy alien.” Unfortunately, their records no longer exist. In 1920, Congress approved the destruction of these “enemy alien” records, and very few survive today.
19. Later news coverage indicates that the “spy story” was merely a ruse to open Schmidt’s front door.
20. According to the Detroit Free Press of April 26, 1918, the letter was addressed to T.H. Hetherington; according to the Pontiac Press Gazette of April 27, 1918, the letter was addressed to Louise Hetherington.
21. Detroit News, April 22, 1918; Pontiac Press Gazette, April 22, 1918; Willemse, Lemmer and Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights, 209.
22. Pontiac Press Gazette, April 22, 1918.
23. Testimony of Elizabeth Stilber, July 31, 1917, in The People v. Allan Livingston.
24. Dr. William S. Gass and Dr. James S. Morrison both examined Alexander’s body in the morgue. Dr. Gass, in an interview with Gillespie, said he believed that the perpetrator raped Alexander. Testimony of Dr. William S. Gass, July 31, August 28, 1917, in The People v. Allan Livingston, 14–15.
25. Detroit Free Press, July 9, 1917.
26. Ibid.
27. Pontiac Press Gazette, January 8, 1918. There is no transcript of the court proceedings. The court stenographer died shortly after the trial, and none of his colleagues could decipher his shorthand. The only testimony contained in the court file is that of Elizabeth Stilber, O.H.P. Green and Dr. Gass, taken by Glenn Gillespie on July 31 and August 28, 1917. Livingston based his 1944 appeal partly on the basis of the missing trial transcript, arguing that the jury considered the statements of fellow prisoners even though the judge instructed them to disregard this testimony. Without a transcript, Livingston argued, the impact of the statements could not be properly assessed. The People v. Allan Livingston.
28. Pontiac Press Gazette, January 8, 1918.
29. Quoted in Willemse, Lemmer and Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights, 206.
30. The People v. Allan Livingston, 7.
PART II
31. Willemse, Lemmer and Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights, ix.
32. Ibid., 202.
33. Pontiac Press Gazette, April 22, 1918.
34. Willemse, Lemmer and Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights, 208.
35. Biographical information from Fuller and Catlin, Historic Michigan, 224.
36. Pontiac Press Gazette, December 10, 1917.
37. Pontiac Press Gazette, January 8, 1918.
38. The People v. Allan Livingston, 7.
39. Pontiac Press Gazette, January 12, 1918.
40. Livingston always maintained that he had an alibi and that his conviction was the end result of a framing. In 1943, he appealed his conviction based in part on the testimony of a fellow convict who claimed that a Pontiac officer offered him money in exchange for providing bogus testimony about Livingston. The convict, Walter J. Godfrey, refused the offer. Affidavit of Walter J. Godfrey, January 15, 1943, in The People v. Allan Livingston.
41. The only evidence that Agnes laid this trap comes from Willemse, who noted that Agnes shied away from publicity. As a result, the newspapers missed a few vital aspects of the case, including Agnes Domaniecki’s behind-the-scenes investigation. According to Willemse, before setting her trap, Domaniecki made two trips to Detroit, where she interviewed various people associated with the case. Willemse, Lemmer and Kofoed, Behind the Green Lights, 202, 209–10.
42. Accounts vary about when the trunks were first opened. According to Willemse, he and Agnes opened and searched the trunks before the Detroit authorities arrived in New York. Later press accounts of the case indicate that the trunks lay unopened until Gillespie and Cryderman arrived in early March.
