The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt, page 9
The telegraph cleared up the mystery about the fate of Adele Ullrich, who was alive and well in New York City. But Plummer’s telegraph indicted that Schmidt married Ullrich, when Gertrude described her as just a housekeeper. Schmidt allegedly wed Irma Pallatinus as “Emil Braun,” so if Schmidt also married Ullrich as Braun, then he married two women using the same alias. This possibility raised another question: was Adele Ullrich Braun the same “Mrs. Emil Braun” who wired Detroit Chief of Police Remember Kent? Or was “Mrs. Emil Braun” Irma Pallatinus?
“Mrs. Braun” watched the blur of green as the westbound train steamed toward the Motor City and wondered if she would, once and for all, resolve the mystery of Emil Braun in the midwestern boomtown. With his square jaw and swarthy complexion, Emil was a handsome man. Adele looked at the wanted poster she held in her lap. For the past three years, she had conducted her own investigation into the disappearance of her husband, who abandoned her in April 1915.
Born in Germany in 1873, nine-year-old Adele Ullrich immigrated with her parents in the fall of 1882. The Ullrich family settled in New York, where Adele became a naturalized citizen and later clerked for several businesses, managing to accumulate a sizable nest egg. She was forty-one, single and working as a bookkeeper for a brewery when she first met Braun in 1914 through a matrimonial advertisement. Following a brief courtship, she became Mrs. Adele Ullrich Braun on December 30, 1914.
The marriage, however, never made it past the honeymoon phase. After Braun managed to sweet-talk Adele out of her life savings, he made her life miserable before disappearing with his fourteen-year-old daughter “Gertie Trudchen” in April 1915. Braun took just about every penny she had, forcing her to fall back on friends and family just to make ends meet, and she had been searching for him ever since.
Braun kept his skeletons in the closet closely guarded, but when he ran away, Adele was free to look around for clues about her husband’s mysterious past.81 She discovered some tantalizing photographs in an old trunk. One picture showed the façade of a jewelry store with the name “Helmuth Schmidt” over the door. Another showed her husband, Emil Braun, standing on a Berlin street. A third picture showed Braun’s daughter. On the back the photo, in Braun’s handwriting, was scrawled “Gertrude Schmidt.”
The trunk also contained an incriminating document indicating that a “Helmuth Emil Max Schmidt” was wanted by the German authorities for “fraudulent bankruptcy.” Curiously, Braun’s silverware bore the monogram “H.S.” When Adele asked Braun about it, he became enraged and refused to answer her. It appeared she had finally found the truth about “H.S.”
Adele took the document and photographs to Lakewood police, who used the pictures to create a wanted poster and offered a reward of $100. While she waited for the poster to churn up leads, Adele continued to probe into Braun’s mysterious past. She interviewed neighbors and opened a line of communication with the Berlin police, who confirmed that they issued an arrest warrant for “Helmuth Emil Max Schmidt.”
She found out from the locals that she might have been just the last in a sequence of mistresses who lived at the farm. Braun first came to Lakewood with his first wife and another woman. Neighbors disagreed about the identity of this second woman. Some said she was Braun’s sister, and some noted that she was his housekeeper, with a certain wry smile that hinted at a more intimate relationship. During the summer of 1914, Braun’s first wife went back to Germany, where, Braun told neighbors, she became sick and died in a hospital in July. By the end of the month, the housekeeper had disappeared as well.
Adele Ullrich Braun managed to uncover a jaw-dropping history of deception, but she couldn’t locate the culprit. For four years, she had hunted, but H.S. stayed under cover until the name “Helmuth Schmidt” made headlines earlier in the week. When she reached Detroit, she would find out for sure if her “H.S.” was the Michigan “Bluebeard.”
Adele looked down at her hands and realized that she had clenched her fists, crushing the wanted poster into a wadded ball of paper.
“I AM GLAD HE KILLED HIMSELF”
Pontiac, Michigan
Thursday morning, April 25, 1918
The next twenty-four hours were characterized by nervous anticipation. Gertrude and her stepmother rested uneasily at the Birmingham home of the Kurths while possible criminal charges lingered above them; detectives and municipal workers waited at 418 Glendale Avenue for the word from Gillespie; and the chief prosecutor eagerly awaited the arrival of three women who were on their way to Detroit to assist in untangling the vines created by Schmidt’s matrimonial advertisement swindle: Helen’s sister, Mina Hofbauer; Agnes Domaniecki; and the mysterious “Mrs. Braun,” whomever she may be.
Plummer’s telegram suggested that Gertrude fibbed about Adele Ullrich. On Thursday morning, detectives grilled Gertrude again, this time in a room filled with investigators and reporters. One Detroit Free Press reporter, Carol Bird, eavesdropped on the interview, carefully jotting down the eighteen-year-old’s words. Bird described her as an “extremely attractive girl, rather well developed for her age, and possessing a face alight with intelligence.”82
This time, Gertrude condemned her father, portraying him as a womanizing control freak. “My own dear, ‘truly’ mother was, undoubtedly, murdered by the man I am forced to call ‘father.’ My stepmother and myself might have met the same fate eventually. Taking all the facts into consideration, I cannot help but say that I am glad he killed himself. It was his only way out of his crime entanglements.”83
The reporters looked up from their notebooks and stared at Gertrude, who immediately recognized that her attitude stunned some in the room. “It sounds heartless and unwomanly for a girl to say that she is glad her own parent has ended his life, doesn’t it? At first I was terribly grieved. Everything happened so suddenly—all those dreadful revelations right out of a perfectly clear sky. First to be informed that my father was a murderer, and not just the average sort of murderer, but a wholesale slaughterer. And, before I had completely recovered from that shock to be told that he was dead, and by his own hand.”84
Gertrude paused to take a sip of water before continuing her statement. “Looking back through the years with my father I have been able to recall many circumstances which have convinced me that he was all that people say about him, and was guilty of the crimes with which he has been charged.”
She echoed Gillespie’s theory about her father’s probable plan for Helen:
Do you know, I believe that my step-mother and I would have probably suffered the same fate those other poor women did had my father gone his way unmolested by the law. I have come to the conclusion, too, that my own dear “truly” mother was killed by him. At the time of her supposed “death,” in Hamburg, when I was 12 years old, I never questioned my father’s story regarding the way she had passed out. I was too young, of course, to be suspicious. He was my father, and I naturally trusted him. My mother had not been ill prior to her “death,” but one day when I returned from school my father met me in the doorway, told me my mother was not feeling well, and asked me to run over and visit friends, and spend the night with them if I cared to, and then, the next day…
Gertrude struggled to keep her composure. She took a deep breath and continued. “The next day when I returned from our neighbor’s house my father informed me that my mother had died the night before. Shortly after that we left Hamburg for this country. It seems too terrible, but I do believe now that my mother was a victim of my father.”
Gertrude shivered as she recalled the evening of March 11, 1917, when she came home to find her father in the basement:
And just to think that I was talking to him while, perhaps, the blood of that unfortunate Steinbach girl was on his hands. I came home one day about the time the New York woman was supposed to have been murdered by him, and I couldn’t find him in the upstairs room. I went downstairs in the basement, and he hurriedly met me. I remember that he appeared nervous and seemed to be annoyed at my entrance. Back of him lying near the open furnace door, I caught a glimpse of something—it looked like a big bundle—I couldn’t say exactly what it was. He took me by the arm and said: “Run along Gertie and meet mamma at the car. She is coming from town.” I did as I was told, though it did seem strange that I should be asked to escort her home. And now, to think that perhaps those smoke clouds issuing from our chimney that day were…
She began to bawl, her chest heaving as she swallowed gulps of air. After catching her breath, Gertrude concluded her statement by offering an explanation for their apparent complicity in Schmidt’s scheming. Schmidt ran his household with the discipline of an army field officer, and the troops always followed his orders. “My father did many strange things and made many strange requests,” Gertrude explained, “but we never questioned him, or asked the whys and the wherefores of his commands. He was a domineering man, stern and unrelenting. He demanded obedience from his women and he got it. That was why I never rebelled at the strange girls he used to bring to our home, nor asked him to go into detail about their sudden disappearances.”
After the interview, Bird followed the two women to Birmingham, where she described them as they reposed in the Kurths’ living room. Mrs. Schmidt sat, dazed and confused, oblivious to everything, including the Kurth baby in a rocker by the fireplace. The “puzzled” infant “gazed, with questioning eyes, from one solemn-faced woman to another…but Mrs. Schmidt, if she caught the baby’s puzzling glance, didn’t even smile reassuringly at him as women the world over do when they see that particular wonder-look in an infant’s eyes.”
While Bird depicted Helen as numb and even unwomanly, she was much kinder to Gertrude, characterizing her as a woman with the innocence of a toddler: “Her cheeks tinged with the natural color of youth, her reddish-brown hair arranged in a simple pompadour, the braid hanging in curls at the ends, her eyes somehow reflecting the candid, questioning puzzled look of the baby’s across the room—no one could attempt to picture her dabbling in such a pastime as burying bones of murdered women.”85
Gertrude played the victim well, but detectives wondered if she was a naïve girl bullied by a tyrannical father or a talented ingénue. Her condemnation of Schmidt shocked some, but Gertrude understood that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and that woman was about to step off the westbound train.
WANTED!
Pontiac, Michigan
Friday morning, April 26, 1918
On Friday, a procession of women arrived on the westbound trains from New York and visited Gillespie’s office in Pontiac, each with her own motives. Adele Ullrich Braun wanted to reclaim her purloined property, Agnes Domaniecki wanted to bring some sense of closure to the tragic affair and Mina Hofbauer wanted to help her sister, Helen. Helen was an emotional train wreck and facing the possibility of some time behind bars, so her sister came to comfort her and try to clear her name.
Gertrude also traveled to the prosecutor’s office, leaving her Birmingham refuge to face her former stepmother, Adele Ullrich Braun. At about the time she climbed into Erich Kurth’s car, Gillespie opened a letter from Ocean County prosecutor Richard C. Plummer. The letter contained a note from Plummer and a shocking enclosure: a copy of a wanted circular published by the Lakewood Police Department in 1914:
Downtown Pontiac, circa 1918. Three women came from New York to the Pontiac office of Glenn C. Gillespie to help the prosecutor unravel Schmidt’s tangled web. Author’s collection.
In reply to your telegram which I have answered by telegraph today, [I] would say that Emil Braun whose picture is enclosed on a clipping from a reward circular, married a girl named Adele Ullrich about Thanksgiving 1914 and lived in this town for several months afterwards working as a jeweler. In April 1915, he disappeared, taking with him all his wife’s money of which she had about $2,500 saved by her while she was working as a book-keeper for some concern either in New York or the northern part of New Jersey. Although rewards were offered for Braun’s apprehension, police were never able to locate him. Mrs. Adele B. Braun as stated in the telegram is at present living at 764 Dawson Street, Bronx, New York. The enclosed circular will give you any other information you wish.
The circular included photographs of a middle-aged man, Emil Braun, next to his fourteen-year-old-daughter “Gertie.” Gillespie read the descriptions carefully:
[Braun:] Five feet eight inches tall, weight about 160 pounds, age about 38 to 39 years, slender but wiry build, tanned complexion, brown eyes, dark brown hair, close cropped brown mustache, six prominent scars on left side of chin made by sword, also two scars on left side of forehead close to hair, wore dragon ring with small red stone, is a German, speaks poor English, scar on right thumb, second joint, very winning manners, in company of daughter, two gold crowned teeth, visible, one on each side, upper jaw. Very apt to return to Germany, first opportunity he has. Very apt to clip his hair, or remove mustache. Very apt to grow beard.
[Gertie:] Daughter answers to Gertie Trudchen, five feet nine inches tall, weight about 140 pounds, age 16 years, stout figure, much developed, light brown hair, brown eyes, broad stubby nose, two gold fillings in two front teeth, visible, one on each side, upper jaw.86
Helmuth Schmidt, circa 1914. One of the only known photographs of Schmidt before he moved to Detroit, this portrait appeared in the April 23, 1918 Detroit Times under the caption, “ROYAL OAK SLAYING SUSPECT AND DAUGHTER.”
Gertrude Schmidt, circa 1914. Gertrude would be about fourteen in this photograph, which appeared next to her father’s, mug shot style, in the April 23, 1918 Detroit Times.
The body at Crosby’s funeral parlor matched the circular’s description of Emil Braun, and “Trudchen” was a dead-ringer, albeit a little thinner, for Gertrude Schmidt. Gillespie would quiz Gertrude on the photograph later when she arrived in Pontiac.
With the information provided by Lakewood authorities, Schmidt’s use of multiple pseudonyms became a little clearer. He lived in Highland Park under the alias “Emil Braun” from the time he moved to the city in early 1915 with Irma Pallatinus to November 1916, at some point changing his name to “Adolph Ullrich”—a name he used at the Ford plant. To evade detection, the audacious Schmidt apparently adopted the name of his Lakewood wife.
When he married Helen and moved to Royal Oak in the spring of 1916, he changed his name again, this time to Schmidt, but he kept the name “Ullrich” at work. From 1916 to his capture, he remained Helmuth Schmidt but still answered to Ullrich at work, all the while masquerading in the newspaper classifieds as Neugebauer, Roloff and most likely others.
Gillespie reread two key lines of Prosecutor Plummer’s letter. Braun “married a girl named Adele Ullrich,” and “Mrs. Adele B. Braun as stated in the telegram is at present living at 764 Dawson street, Bronx, New York.” There was no longer any doubt about it: the mysterious “Mrs. Braun” was Adele Ullrich Braun, not Irma Pallatinus, which meant that it was time for the county workers to do some digging. Under the supervision of Detective Dibble, excavations began immediately at 418 Glendale.
MINA AND THE LETTER
Pontiac, Michigan
Friday morning, April 26, 1918
Agnes Domaniecki checked into the Huron Hotel, but with her nerves frayed, she didn’t want to leave.87 While detectives attempted to coax the thirty-three-year-old domestic out of her downtown hotel room, Helen Schmidt’s sister, Mrs. Mina Hofbauer, described how Helen fell into Schmidt’s marriage-by-mail scam.
Mina explained that she and Helen emigrated from their native Anklam, Germany, in 1907. For the next eight years, they ran a successful dressmaking business in New York City. Everything changed in 1915 when Helen spotted a matrimonial advertisement in the New York Revue posted by a Herman Scharno. Against her older sister’s better judgment, Helen sent a letter to Scharno in Detroit and began a brief correspondence. Scharno described his fifteen-year-old “sister-in-law” Gertrude and a Hungarian housekeeper who worked days at his Highland Park residence. Gillespie nodded as he listened to Mina. The Hungarian housekeeper was almost certainly Irma Pallatinus.
In the fall of 1915, Mina said, she and Helen hopped onto a train to visit Scharno in the Motor City. Gertrude called Scharno “Papa,” which was when they discovered that Scharno was really Schmidt. After two days, the Tietz sisters returned to New York.
Schmidt’s deception didn’t kill the romance, though, and the pair continued to pen love letters to each other. Schmidt amplified his efforts to woo Helen by sending her jewelry. “We thought he was crazy the way he sent jewelry to my sister,” Mina told Gillespie. “He sent her a watch, and pins, earrings and a little horseshoe brooch. I can’t remember all the things she got but I know there were many. We thought he must have lots of money the way he spent it on jewelry.”88
The rich suitor proved too much for Helen to resist. Against Mina’s advice, she traveled to Detroit and tied the knot with Schmidt in December 1915. After the wedding, Mina returned to the Motor City to visit Helen and stayed for five weeks. During this time, Schmidt made a few passes at his sister-in-law, which caused a rift between her and Helen. Mina retreated to New York but didn’t talk to Helen for more than six months. Gertrude finally broke the feud by sending Mina some silver spoons.
While Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt forged a life together in Detroit, Mina Tietz fell for and married a New Yorker named Hofbauer. This bothered Schmidt, who apparently wanted Mina to relocate to Detroit and live with them. At first, this didn’t seem odd to Mina, but with Schmidt’s murder racket exposed, the invitation took on sinister overtones. Mina believed that Schmidt eyed her as the next Mrs. Schmidt once he had finally deprived Helen of her life savings.
