Hans Schmidt: The Bloodlust Priest - Part 2

Part 2 of our Hans Schmidt series takes us back to the 1800s in Germany for a look at Hans's childhood and the relatives that came before him. Listen in as we unpack the "clews" from the newspapers and the trial transcripts that might just give us insight into why Hans committed the murder and dismemberment of Anna Aumuller in September of 1913.

This is the episode where we expose all of the dirty secrets that he was keeping when he arrived on America's shores in the summer of 1909!

WE WOULD RATE THIS EPISODE "M" FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY. 

As was mentioned in the episode, here is the article about automats and the anti-waiter movement in the late 1800s:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/automat-20th-century-waiterless-restaurants

Transcript

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What do slaughterhouses, automats, and telepathy have in common? You're about to find out on this episode of Forgotten Felonies! Welcome back to Forgotten Felonies. I'm Monica. And I'm Olivia. And this is where we take you back in time to rediscover the tales of vintage villainy that time forgot. Now, I've got to give it to you straight. This is the hardest episode I've ever worked on. This episode is part two of probably the craziest story we've covered yet. Olivia, how did you find this story anyway? Okay, so I was lounging on my couch watching a show called The Lake Erie Murders, which, as you can guess, revolves around cases surrounding Lake Erie. There was one... One episode about a 70-year-old nun named Margaret Ann Paul in Ohio who was murdered by a priest in 1980. Me being curious, I decided to hop on my phone and Google the case. When I did, I found a part where it says that the priest was the second Catholic priest in the United States to be convicted of murder. And right next to him, there was Hans B. Schmidt's name listed as the first, and it said he was executed in 1916. I clicked over to his page, and I was astounded at what I was reading, and I promptly sent you the link. Yes. So it was amazing. And I do need to give everyone right now a very stern warning. This episode has a very high Ick factor. Okay, so on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being really, really disturbing, it is an 11. I would say this episode is rated M for mature audiences only, and if you are younger than 18, you should probably turn it off. So, please, I beg you, do not listen to this if children are within earshot. So anyway, um, Honestly, if I had known like how gross this was and like all of the things I was going to have to say out loud, I might have passed. On covering this one, um, because even my notes became really uncomfortable to like type, but I was texting Olivia and just saying, like, 'Oh my gosh.' The things I'm going to have to say. But yeah, I mean, I didn't even realize how truly awful it was going to be until I got to. Page 882 in the trial transcript. And that is why I have chosen to tell the story backward, because that's how it all unfolded for me. And it has been the craziest ride. You're probably like the most knowledgeable person about. horns. I would have to agree. From what I have seen from other sources. And we will get to that at the end of part three, because now there has to be a part three after everything I have uncovered. Thank you. Um, So if you have not listened to part one. you really must stop listening right now. And you have to listen to part one. So part one explains the finding of random body parts in the Hudson River. in September of 1913, and how the pillowcase that one piece of torso was wrapped in led the detectives to Father Hans Schmidt at St. Joseph's Church. And they found that the victim was Anna Aumuller, a chambermaid at St. Boniface's church who had been hopelessly in love with Hans since they'd met. at the end of 1910. And when they searched Hans' Room to find evidence linking him to the crime scene, and when he was being particularly dramatic, they found some papers linking him to a Dr. Ernest Muray. And they went to speak to him. And what they found was that the two of them were counterfeiting partners because Father Schmidt, who believed he was ordained as a priest personally by the spirit of St. Elizabeth, wanted to make money to give to the poor. Like literally make money. Now, as I mentioned in part one, I have read over 1, 400 pages of trial transcript, and I have all the details of Hans Schmidt's— very warped and twisted— childhood. And here's a little insight into my creative process for putting these episodes together. I do the research, I take pages and pages of notes, and then I literally write the story how I want to tell it. And so I sat and I wrote the story of his childhood, thinking it was going to be just a few pages because this episode is also going to cover things in addition to that, right? But the story of Hans' childhood was so long. That it would have been at least an hour-long episode all by itself. And that's why I realized that... His childhood itself, I mean, up through young adulthood, had to be... an episode by itself, and that means there has to be a part three. And Olivia and I uncovered even more twists and turns while I was putting together this part two that just blew my mind, you guys. And it's going to blow your mind as well. It's this has been such a ride. I have been. I have been on the Hans Schmidt train for a month. Oh my gosh. Like I'm kind of looking forward to this being over, but. This has been insane. But anyway, guys, let's get to this story. But again, I have to warn you, this episode is really gross. So with that being said, let's travel way back in time to the 1800s in Germany. Johann B. Schmidt was born on January 3rd of 1881, and he was the sixth child born of ten. Now two of those children were baby girls who died at birth, one was a boy who died in very early childhood, two were girls that lived up to or past the age of 18, and the remaining five children were boys that lived to adulthood. So that means seven children lived in the Schmidt household. To really get a feel for where things went wrong, we need to rewind quite a bit further. As one of the psychiatrists put it during his trial, he was born to, quote, bad stock. And as one of his defense attorneys, Mr. McManus, said in the opening statement, 'For four generations, Mark Yu, one in every six of his relatives on both sides, the maternal and the paternal side, was either a lunatic or a suicide. Mark Yu, one out of every six.' A small family of father and mother of four children. One of them is doomed to the end of either insanity or suicide. Picture that, gentlemen. Picture that as an inheritance with which this man starts life. Geez, very poetic. Well, he wasn't kidding. There was a whole lot of testimony from Hans' father, who they had brought over from Germany to New York. York for the trial. Now, just to put it out there, there were actually two trials. The first was in December of 1913, just a few months after the murder, which if you recall, took place on September 2nd of 1913. That first trial resulted in a hung jury because two jurors were convinced that Hans Schmidt was hopelessly insane. Sane and therefore not criminally responsible for his actions, so it went to trial again in January of 1914. Hans's father and sister could not return for the second trial, and their testimony from the first trial was read into evidence by the attorneys. Also admitted into evidence were actual death certificates for Hans' family members. The attorneys and psychiatrists actually created a chart in court with a family tree to show all of the family members who had been admitted to asylums and who had committed suicide. And they used pointers like, 'This one was in an asylum this many times.' This one hung himself. This one shot himself. That's actually crazy. Yeah. I wish I had, you know, a diagram, like, you know, if could have found that it would have been really interesting. Now, Hans's parents were Gertrude Miller Schmidt and Heinrich Schmidt. And they weren't exactly a happy couple. And as should now be obvious, neither Gertrude nor Heinrich came from very stable families. Heinrich Schmidt's family was riddled with people who had either been put in insane asylums or had committed suicide or both. On both his mother's and father's side, this is Heinrich, so Hans Father, going back at least three generations, he had lots of insanity and suicide. Heinrich's maternal grandfather was insane and his paternal grandfather had committed suicide. Heinrich's uncle committed suicide and Heinrich's aunt attempted suicide twice by throwing herself in a river. And he actually was there. And he witnessed them pulling her out of the river once when he was eight. Oh, good grief. And two of Heinrich's brothers had children who had either been committed to asylums or had committed suicide. So those were Hans' cousins. Now, Gertrude's family, so this is Hans' mother. They were Heinrich's cousins? No, they were Hans's. Oh, no, no. You're right. You're right. Yeah, Heinrich's brothers' children. I should know this. I do genealogy. So I know it's kind of confusing. But anyway, so Gertrude's family, so Hans's mother. Her family also had insanity and suicide attempts, and she herself was insanely religious, if you remember from part one. Gertrude's brother, Lawrence Miller, had hung himself in 1905. And that same year, his 18-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Margaret, hung herself. Now, I mentioned in part one that Gertrude was so overly Catholic that she neglected her duties as a mother and as a housewife, leaving the duties to her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was 10 and a half years older than Hans. Gertrude would literally go to church three or four times per day. Now, if that is not overdoing it, I don't know what is. I mean, it's excessive and you cannot tell me otherwise. Mm-hmm. Now, Hans's mother, Gertrude, was Catholic, and Hans's father, Heinrich, was Protestant. Heinrich wasn't overly religious like his wife, and he even admitted that his wife was, you know, a bit absurd with all of it. Like he said in court, it was too much. Now Heinrich, he was hardly ever home. He was a railroad inspector and it required a whole lot of travel. He had, I mean, he would be gone far more than he was home. Like the majority of the year, he would not be home. So he couldn't, you know, tell her you're going to church too much. You need to be home more. What are you doing? Stop putting this on Elizabeth. Knock it off. He couldn't really do anything about it. And when he was home... He and Gertrude would not see eye to eye on a lot of things, especially religion. And Heinrich, he wanted his wife to be Protestant. I mean, that's what he believed. So he truly believed, you know. The Protestant religion was true, so he wanted his family to be Protestant, but he also didn't agree with how she was managing the house or, you know, wasn't managing that house. He also didn't like that she was dragging her children into Catholicism, especially Hans, who she called her little priest. It makes you wonder how they actually got together. Yeah, I don't know. Was it like arranged marriage? I don't know. I really don't know. And I had to wonder because I know in Ireland, I know that, you know, Protestants and Catholics do not get along. Like there has been, you know, there have been wars going on. Oh, yeah. Like King Henry VIII. So I don't know if it's the same in Germany. I wondered that if it's everywhere or if it's just in Ireland that it's such a big deal. But so I don't know if they still had that over in Germany as well. Which I'm sure I could have Googled quite easily, but I didn't. I don't know. But anyway, so now by the age of five, Hans had built an altar in his room. Like he was the only. only one of the kids who was also super into Catholicism. And so he got special favor. He was the favorite child. Now he was not the baby of the family. was the sixth out of 10. He had younger siblings, but he was the favorite of his mother's children. And so he had an altar in his room that he had built. He had his own little candelabra and he had even put together his own little priest costume and he would play mass all day. He would just practice saying mass, you know, in Latin and stuff like that. He was a priest. He makes me think of like a... Phantom of the Opera. He wouldn't play normal games with other boys. He wouldn't go out and play with them at all. He just wanted to pretend that he was a priest. And so it was a bit much as far as Heinrich was concerned. He didn't like it. He didn't condone it. He just, you know, he was concerned about it. So Heinrich and Gertrude would fight. And it was not just about religious stuff. I mean, they just, they didn't get along. And these fights were often physical and violent. Now Hans was very small when he saw his father actually go after his mother with a knife— one time. And this was terrifying for Hans. This would be terrifying for anybody. And he was very attached to his mother. I mean, he was the one that was the most attached to his mother. And in fact, when his father was gone— most of the year— Hans actually shared a bed with his mother. And when his dad would come home, which was often in the middle of the night, his dad would kick Hans out of the bed and make him go sleep with the other children. In their shared beds. Now, what I gather from that little tidbit of information is that this house wasn't, you know, really big enough for seven kids. You know, I mean, it wasn't a giant house. And so it sounds like, you know, there were several kids in one room. And it sounds to me like the walls were pretty thin. And it turns out that when Heinrich was home, he wanted to, you know, get frisky with his wife. Pretty normal. And Gertrude was kind of noisy in bed. The kids could hear the noises through the walls, and Hans was too young to understand what was happening, but he did recall seeing his father beat up his mom sometimes and go after her with a knife. So he had heard his mom make similar noises when his father was hurting her. So every time Hans heard those noises through the walls when they were in bed, Hans believed that his father was in the bedroom stabbing his mother. Yeah, can you imagine being a small child and believing that the mother, who you love so much, is being repeatedly stabbed? By your father on the other side of the wall. Like, how traumatic and terrifying would that be? I think it's kind of traumatic to think about hearing that from your parents. True, true. Good point. But yeah, he really believed, though, that his dad was in there, like, cutting his mom up. Isn't that interesting? Mm-hmm. But yeah, anyway, it was when his older brother, Carl, who was two years older than him, explained to him what was actually happening. And I don't know how old he was when he explained to him. What was happening on the other side of the wall. But that's when he finally understood that his dad wasn't stabbing his mom in there. Isn't that interesting? But yeah, every time he heard that, he was terrified, thinking his dad was attacking his mother. Because those noises he'd heard before. He associated with when they were fighting. Mm-hmm. So very, very intriguing. Anyway, so yeah, when Hans was sharing this with the psychiatrist later, he didn't say how old he was, but I do have reason to believe it was before he was seven. And I'll tell you why. Because if he had been seven and believed that his mother was being stabbed, he would have imagined a lot of blood. And if Hans Schmidt had imagined a lot of blood when he was seven, it would have immediately given him an erection. By the age of seven, he would not have been disturbed by that at all. You were really right about the 'ick fuck.' Yes. So everybody imagine a dial in your mind when it says 'ick' above it and turn it all the way up as far as it will go and then turn it up a little more past the 10 because. Here it comes, guys. Yeah, so let's dig into where this bloodlust came from. I'll just have to push through. The embarrassment. And again, if you have children listening, please turn this off or put on headphones. If you are under the age of 18, just turn it off. Pretend I'm your mother. I'm giving you the mom face. Turn it off. Okay. So in part one. We mentioned that Han said he bit Anna earlier in the evening before he killed her and he tasted her blood and he wanted to taste more. Totally normal. Totally normal. She's joking. That was sarcasm. That is not normal. And when he killed her, you know, he cut her throat and then he was drinking it while it flowed from her neck. And he pressed her against him and he wound up. I see I have to say this. I'm like hesitating. And he wound up ejaculating prematurely between her legs. In reality. See, that was me pushing through. In reality, he did tell the psychiatrists that he had intercourse with her. They later told the court that it had been proven that having intercourse... with a dead body was impossible and that they had decided that he must have ejaculated prematurely between her legs because they had proven it was impossible. Possible, but I think that's laughable. Hans himself said that he had intercourse with her while he drank the blood as it flowed from her neck. And there was an incident in the jail, okay? This is really, really interesting. There was an incident in the jail when he was being questioned by three psychiatrists one day. One of the men questioning him, Dr. Gregory, had a blood blister on one of his fingers. He had pinched his finger while he was changing attire the previous day. So Hans kept staring at this mark on Dr. Gregory's finger. And finally, Dr. Gregory asked him, 'What are you looking at?' Hans said, 'Are you a priest?' And Dr. Gregory said, 'No, sir, I am not a priest.' Hans said, but you are going to be a priest. Then Dr. Gregory asked him to explain. And Hans said that he had the mark on his finger that meant he would be a priest. So then Dr. Gregory got an idea. He stood up and he walked over to where Hans couldn't see him because the questioning was actually taking place in a pharmacy in the basement of the city prison. That's what they called it. So he borrowed a hat pin from another one of the doctors. So he's standing over in the corner and he pricked another one of his fingers, not that blood blister, but like his index finger. And he pricked one of his fingers to drop a big drop of blood. And then Dr. Gregory came back around and he put his finger with the blood right in Hans's face. Good glory. Hans immediately turned red and flushed, his pupils dilated, and he grabbed for Dr. Gregory's hand. Dr. Gregory pulled his hand away, and Hans... got up and chased him around the room. Another one of the doctors, Dr. Karpis, got up and was chasing Hans, like trying to intervene. And Hans was finally able to get a hold of Dr. Gregory's hand. Dr. Gregory was able to get his hand away, but not before Hans got the drop of blood on his lip and licked it. Ew. That also reminds me, I just thought of like a Scooby-Doo scene where they're chasing each other. Thank you. With the music. Yeah. Yeah. All around the room. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So Hans then said, 'All blood is mine.' But he said it in German, which I looked up. It was like 'or something' but yeah. So when he sat down, he had sweat all over his forehead, his hands were all clammy, and he had had a true physical reaction to seeing the blood, like it was crazy. They tested it and it was like, 'Whoa.' He had this true reaction. So he later said to Dr. Gregory, 'You are going to have to commit a sacrifice, you know, just as I had done with Anna.' God will be speaking to you soon and will ordain you as a priest. Bye. So the question is, like, where did this come from? Like, why? Why is this happening? Where did this come from? And, you know, I know that's what you guys want to know. And that's what I wanted to know, too. And it's when Hans's father took the stand or when they read Hans's father's testimony into this, the second trial. And it's in the transcript. That's when I finally got the answers that I was looking for. And that you wish you didn't know. I was like, here it is. Cause I was like, where does this come from? Cause I'd seen these little bits and I was like, what is going on with this guy? I don't understand. But yeah, so here's, here's where it was. So it turns out. That when Hans was little, he liked to go out with his mother to the barnyard when she was killing the chickens and the geese. And, you know, she'd cut the heads off because, you know, for dinner she needed to get a chicken to cook or something. And Hans would pick them up, the heads, and put them in his pockets. He would carry these heads, these dismembered chicken heads or geese heads or whatever in his pockets for days. That is gross. Yeah. He'd just carry them around and he would get scolded for it. They're like, Hans, what are you doing with this? I was just going to wash your pants and I found this head. What are you doing with this? And he said it was because he liked the blood. Now, first, his father said he was doing this at the age of five or six. And then later he said it was ages 10 or 11. It may have been that whole span of time. I'm not sure if there was like a translation issue, because keep in mind, he spoke German— not English. So there was like, you know, translation stuff. On another occasion, Heinrich caught Hans with the head of a rooster that had been freshly killed. And Hans had the head of the rooster mounted on the end of his penis. He was walking around with the head of this rooster on his penis and he was six years old. So I would say, probably, that five or six, putting them in his pockets, was probably accurate. So Heinrich severely punished him for this. He was like, 'What are you doing?' No. Like, that's that is bizarre. Mm-hmm. That is bizarre. But yeah, he was six years old. But this isn't all, you guys. Okay, at the age of seven, specifically, something very major happened. Like, I mean, that other stuff, that was child's play. Okay. That was nothing. Oh, no. That was nothing. Okay. Seven years old, guys. Seven years old. There was a younger boy named Fritz Battenberg, younger than him, okay, who lived in the same housing complex as Hans. I don't know how much younger— he didn't say. But Fritz would often go with Hans out to feed the geese. So these two are together a lot. Now one day, Hans convinced Fritz to take his pants down or something. And the two of them... We're playing with each other's parts. And this became a regular activity. But to avoid getting caught, they started going to the neighborhood slaughterhouse. Every neighborhood needs a slaughterhouse, apparently. I don't know. Back then. Maybe. I don't know. So they would be masturbating each other while the animals were being slaughtered. I am not making this up. And Hans really enjoyed the blood. Now, they say that neurons that fire together wire together, guys. And it would seem that this is how Hans made that connection between blood and sexual desire. Now, later, Hans and Fritz even attempted penetration. And when asked by the psychiatrist, Hans said that he got the idea after seeing goats and sheep on the farm. So I had some questions about this. Now, when I first saw that he'd had this first sexual experience at the age of seven with a neighbor boy. It didn't say that Fritz was younger. So I initially assumed that it would have been with an older child, right? That's where I initially assumed. I was surprised that it was with a younger child. Then it came up several hundred pages later in the transcript that Hans and his older brother Carl, two years older, had an incestuous relationship from the ages of seven to 14. So there's that age seven again, right? Carl was two years older. So I wonder if perhaps Carl had introduced Hans to this activity. Hans just didn't want to throw Carl under the bus or maybe Hans really did start it all. And he's the one who approached Carl and was like, 'Hey, you should try this. This is fun. Come with me to the slaughterhouse. Let me show you a trick.' I don't know. I don't know. It also came out that Hans and one of his older sisters had an incestuous relationship. And it didn't say which sister or how long it lasted. It only said, 'she told him he had to keep it a secret.' Once, though, when he was 14, which was two years after his sister Catherine had died of diphtheria, his older sister Elizabeth came to visit. Elizabeth was married by this time and was 24 years old, and she shared the bed with Hans that night, and she was actually on her period, which he didn't know anything about. He didn't know what a period was. And he said, 'The bed, quote, filled with blood.' And it made him incredibly sexually excited when he saw it. I don't know if anything happened. After that, that was all he said. Now, another really creepy fact in the transcript was that once when he was seven, his mother had had a miscarriage in her bed. So this was one of the little baby sisters that had died at, you know, at birth or whatever. He tried to climb into the bed with his mom. He pulled the covers back and he saw all the blood from the miscarriage and he got an erection immediately and his mother sent him away. So. Yeah, he had a very strong association between blood and sex, and it was established very early on in his life. And so that's why he had sex with Anna. And, you know, even with his boyfriend, Dr. Mireille, he would be really rough. He admitted to the psychiatrist he would be rough with both of them. Sometimes and make them bleed. And neither of them liked it, but he got really excited with it. And, you know, blood was his kink. So, yeah. So, he started having sex with boys at the age of seven. And... Never stopped. He was having sex with all the neighborhood boys, like lots and lots of neighborhood boys, taking them to the slaughterhouse right up until he went to a private Latin school to prepare for his priesthood education around the age of 14. It makes you wonder how many of the boys in Ascheffenburg made that same association between blood and sex. That's an excellent question. And actually, I saw somewhere that even Fritz, like also the blood really excited little Fritz after a while. It would be really an interesting study, I think, if the psychiatrist had thought of that and gone over to actually study to see what things were like over there or look into all of the... The boys who had... been a part of that and see how they all turned out. That would be super interesting to see. Um, But yeah. Yeah. Anyway, but that is where... The whole bloodlust thing came from. Why be blue? Don't be blue. Perhaps the fact that you are inclined to feel sad should make you happy. Why? Because it may be a worthwhile hint to take better care of yourself. Blues are apt to come from poisoned blood, often caused by uric acid, which the kidneys should filter from the blood. Strengthen your kidneys with Doane's Kidney Pills, the remedy recommended everywhere for backache, uric acid trouble, bladder, and kidney ailments. A case right here in Brooklyn. Miss Higgins, 53, Jora Lemon Street, says... I had spells of backache every few days. I could hardly lift my head on account of a dull, tired-out feeling that came over me. I used Joan's kidney pills and, in a short time, felt like a different woman. Doane's Kidney Pills. 50 Cent at all drugstores. Foster Milburn Co. Buffalo, New York. All right. There are some very notable illnesses that also happened in his childhood that I think are very worth mentioning. So, at the age of five, Hans got diphtheria. I don't know the extent of his illness. I don't know if he got like really exceptionally ill or not, but diphtheria can cause permanent damage to the organs. It can be a very serious illness. His sister Catherine, the one that was five years older than he was, she wound up dying of diphtheria when she was 18 and he was 12. At the time. So she died in 1893. Then, the following year in 1887, when Hans was six, he started school and he contracted measles. So this is a very serious viral illness and I looked into this to see if there could somehow be an explanation from this, like, to explain his, like, future criminality. And I did find something interesting. There's a severe but rare complication associated with the measles called... Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE, that can cause personality changes, mood swings, and psychosis, that can start soon after or be delayed several years after the initial measles infection. Huh, that's interesting. Yeah. So I did find that to be an important clue into what's wrong with Hans. Now, of course, we can't prove that he had this complication. I don't have medical charts for him, but it's, you know, something to think about. It's almost always fatal, though, if it develops into the subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. However, the internet did tell me that it is possible to survive and still have the long-lasting neurological complications. Yes, but don't forget that mental illness already runs strongly in Hans' Family, even without the measles, is very true. That is very, very true. So, I mean, one in six, you know, of his family members and every, like, family, like, gets... Mentally ill. But yeah, so in 1891. When he was 10, and this is really interesting to me. This is so interesting. In 1891, at the age of 10, he started getting jaundice. Hmm. Yeah. And this continued, like, throughout his teenage years. And, I mean, it probably continued for the rest of his life and just wasn't, like, worth mentioning or whatever. But doesn't that seem like a weird age to be getting jaundiced? Yeah, I usually associate it with newborns. I know, right? So that means his liver wasn't working correctly. And I looked it up because I mean, I was like, that's really bizarre. And it was named like there was a German name for it. And I had to Google, what does this mean? And it's jaundice. So I found that this could be due to organ damage from the diphtheria that he'd had at age five, or he could have contracted hepatitis B from one of the neighborhood boys or the schoolmates or the siblings that he'd been having sex with. And he could have had HPV. That's sexually transmitted. So yeah, but also measles impacts almost every organ system of the body. That's what the internet told me. Interesting. Yeah. So I mean, wow. So anyway, also at the age of 10, he sustained a head injury. I couldn't find any details about this. The psychiatrist didn't look more into it. They were just like, 'This doesn't seem to have made any significant impact or something,' but maybe they didn't know much about like traumatic brain injuries or, you know, back then it was. I mean, it was 1891. And then they were looking into this in, you know, 1913. So I don't think they really understood. All of that. But anyway, let's talk about, you know, hallucinations and things. Hans started having hallucinations at the age of seven. The age of seven was a really big year for Hans. It was. It really was. So the first vision that he had was the eye of God. He saw a triangle with an eye in the middle and it was standing right in front of him. He would see it standing there day and night, just staring at him like God. Was watching him. Even in the slaughterhouse? Well, you'd think that would have made him stop what he was doing, right? Would have scared me straight. But he told Fritz about it, his little slaughterhouse buddy. He told him all about the eye of God, and he was even drawing pictures of it at school. And he would see it everywhere. So the next time that he had a hallucination, it was auditory. And it was when he was 12 and he was going for his first communion. So he actually heard the voice of God tell him that he was going to be a priest. And he was in the church at the time that he heard it. And it struck him as like so amazing and so profound. He went back later that day and he heard it again. God again spoke the same words to him. And I mean, he heard it like he heard it with his ears. He heard the voice and he knew it was true. This was the path for him. It was happening. So he told his mom, he told his sister, and they didn't think he was crazy. They weren't like, oh my gosh, there's something wrong with you. You're hearing voices. They thought, oh my gosh, like you're so devout. and pious and chosen and special. And they fully believed that, you know, he was hearing the voice of God and this meant he was going to be this amazing priest and do wonderful things in the world. You know, I mean, that's what they believed. Real wonderful. So he again heard the voice of God later when he was in the seminary studying to be a priest. He was told, if you don't have a vocation, go and get a vocation. And this is when he was kind of on the fence about, should I be a priest? Should I not be a priest? And that's what. You know, the message was. And we know about... Hearing, you know, the voice of God that told him, 'Anna shall be a sacrifice of love and atonement.' But also the night that he killed her while he was in her room and he was about to do it, he hesitated. And then he had a vision of Abraham about to slaughter his son. And he realized then that he really was supposed to do it. And yeah, aside from this, aside from all this, Hans said he regularly communicated with St. Elizabeth. So he was having a lot of these psychotic hallucinations, you know, from the time he was seven all the way up through adulthood. Mm-hmm. Yes, so lots of psychosis going on. So... In his early adolescence, Hans was still, you know, having sex with lots of boys, with his own brother, possibly even his sister. Again, I don't know how long that went on. So this... started a really big struggle within him. Now, he was very torn and he started going to the confessional a lot to talk to Father Seitz. Father Seitz was his idea. Man, an ideal priest, and he was handsome. His voice was ultra dreamy, and Hans really enjoyed confessing to him. And Father Seitz was trying to straighten him out in the confessional. Right, he's like— you got to get it straight, you got to stop doing this stuff. In 1894, the age of 13, he was really struggling. Hans was having frequent mood swings and struggling with those inner demons. He was having a lot of depression. And he was swinging toward the religious side. You know, God had spoken directly to him and told him, 'You are supposed to be a priest.' But why then did he have these desires for sex with his brother and sex with, you know, all of these boys? Why was he pulled so strongly back to this? The slaughterhouse, right? Why were his desires so strong? If God didn't want him to do these things, why did God give him these instincts in the first place, right? Right. Surely God thought it was OK if God liked giving him those feelings. So, I mean, he was really, really having the struggle. And part of his struggle was, you know, manifesting in sudden violent outbursts at home. He even went after his sister Elizabeth with a knife one time. And his father was threatening to beat this random violence out of him. So, I mean, like, that's going to help. Meet violence with more violence here. Let's do this. But yeah, up until the age of 14, Hans had been going to a just a regular neighborhood public school that just taught, you know, normal education stuff, but it did not teach Latin. And if Hans was going to go to seminary to be a priest after he finished school, he needed to learn Latin. And that would require an expensive private school. took a lot of convincing to get Heinrich to pay for it. And Heinrich finally relented and Hans started at the gymnasium. That's what... they call the schools that teach Latin in Germany. So he went to the gymnasium at the Augsteiner Kirche, I know I'm not saying that correctly, in Mainz in 1895. Now Hans, while he was at the gymnasium, he had a lot of boyfriends. At the gymnasium and even started sleeping with girls while he was there at 17. This is when he started sleeping with girls as well. And there's one boy in particular— worth mentioning. Ludwig Betz. So Hans and Ludwig were having sex almost immediately after meeting when they were 14, but Ludwig didn't last. Long at the gymnasium. Ludwig had robbed the automats in an automatic restaurant and was kicked out of school for it. And automats sound so space age. Yes, they do. You are so excited about this. I know. Okay, so it turns out that in the late 1800s, there was a movement to completely get rid of waiters. Waiters were seen as the enemy. The New York Times... Actually published an editorial in 1885 claiming that waiters were, quote, one of the necessary evils of an advanced civilization, unquote, and that the only time when it was okay for a man to use profane language around a woman was when they were swearing at a waiter. And this is because waiters were especially annoying. Waiters were said to prey upon customers, hovering over them, watching their every move and sizing them up in proportion to the amount of their order. Because waiters expect a percentage of your order to be given to them in tips. And back in the late 1800s, this was seen as very un-American, which is very different from today. It was a practice that had come over from Europe. In 1896, a German engineer, Max Seilhoff, who actually invented the vending machine, teamed up with a candy company to open a completely waiterless restaurant, which they called the Automat. The walls were lined with small windows and each one contained an item of food. You just had to put in a coin, the window would unlock, and you could take the meal out. No waiters, no tips, and you got your food. Without having to wait. It was the first form of fast food. Automats became very popular and began to die out when more convenient fast food restaurants like McDonald's began cropping up, but the last automat closed in 1991. That is such cool history. Bring them back. They're really cool. We will share pictures. I found a really cool article about these restaurants and the anti-waiter sentiment. And stuff. So I will share a link to that in the episode description. Um, but originally I was, I was thinking when I first saw that, like the automat thing and the automat restaurant. I was assuming maybe it was like just a little area where they had a bunch of vending machines and he just robbed a vending machine. And so I was just going to leave it at that. So I'm really glad that I actually Googled it. I was like, wait, what? This is totally cool. We have to share this. But yeah, it's really cool. So the man who invented vending machines also invented the... automat restaurants and in 1897 or 1898 Ludwig had broken into one of these like machines and had stolen all the coins and he got kicked out of school for it he went to a different high school got in trouble again and then he wound up committing suicide at the age of 17. Oh, yeah. So in 1899, so I mean, just moving back to Hans' story again now. In 1899, Hans' parents briefly split up. And because, you know, they did not get along. So Hans went to stay with his oldest brother, Wilhelm. Hans Mother, Gertrude, went to stay temporarily with her brother, Leo, who had never married. Now, Leo was a fairly wealthy older bachelor. And Leo didn't get along with most of his siblings, but he did very much like Gertrude and her children. And this fact is very important. We will be circling back to Uncle Leo. So don't forget about Uncle Leo, but I'll remind you who he is later. But Hans later said he didn't actually care much for Uncle Leo. He liked Uncle Loren's much better. Uncle Lawrence hung himself in 1905. Hans remained at the gymnasium school until 1901, but he was skipping school a lot and dealing with depression quite a bit at the end there. He had a lot of sexual dalliances with a lot of boys and girls at the school while he was there. And by the time he graduated, he said, he had just lost his willpower and ambition and was having a lot of headaches. But he did have a lot of bouts of jaundice too while he was there. And headaches are one of the symptoms of hepatitis B. So I'm still pretty convinced that he had contracted HPV when he was younger. Before he was 10. I'm kind of sticking with that. In 1901, he says he was under the influence of his mother, who at the time was living at Abenheim near Worms in Hesia. Hans was struggling really hard, you know, torn between his sexuality and his spirituality. So he did some soul searching and some praying and he heard the voice of God yet again. And this is when he said, you know, 'if you don't have a vocation, get a vocation.' And he was again told, you know, 'be a priest.' So he entered the theological seminary in Mainz on the Rhine. He was there at the seminary for four years, and he really struggled to follow the rules while he was there. And he behaved in really odd ways. For example, he would play the violin in the bathtub. I mean, who doesn't do that, though? It's always been a dream of mine. When he was performing his clerical duties, he would do so only in a shirt and cassock. And I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Do we know what that is? Like the priest shirt thingy. But he wasn't wearing pants or I don't know what they wear underneath. He wasn't wearing whatever you're supposed to wear. Other than the shirt and the cassock. Oh, it's like the... The Black Robe. Yeah, so I don't know, whatever. I guess his legs were bare, or maybe you're supposed to put something else over it. I really don't know, but... That he was just not dressed appropriately. He was also very childish. He was springing from one idea to another in an incomprehensible way. And also, he was supposed to ask permission for things like to go places and you know to do things. He hated asking permission, so he would just do whatever he wanted, breaking rules all the time. Also, he wanted to sleep during the day and be awake at night, which is not how things go. It's a very structured sort of thing. And um, so they they kept telling him, 'If you do not shape up, if you do not follow the rules, you're going to be kicked out. We're going to ask you to leave. You better shape up!' So it was not working out. And so by the end, like, he stayed the whole time, but he was constantly in trouble. And when it came time for the official like ordination, like he was supposed to be ordained at the end with all of his classmates and everything. When it got to the end at 1904, he was denied. I'm not surprised. It was really, it was playing the violin in the bathtub that really, it sent them over. They were like, 'This is too much.' Yeah. So they were like, 'You will not be ordained with your class.' We are sorry. Off you go. But the official reason they gave him was that he had an unbalanced mind. Father Kirstein said, 'You have an unbalanced mind. You will not be ordained.' And so, when asked at first about his behavior and habits when he was there, Hans told the psychiatrists that he had not. had sex with any of the young men at all while he was in the seminary over that whole four-year period. But then, when asked again later, he admitted that he had tried not to. He had tried to follow the rules as far as that goes and to be good. But there were times that he had slipped out when he was supposed to be sleeping and had gone into town and had, quote, fallen into his old ways. So he was not actually behaving himself. I don't think he could. I think he had compulsions. I just don't think. I don't think he could. It's the mental instability. Very unbalanced, yes. After failing at the seminary, he left for Munich and enrolled at the university there. At least he had a plan B at this point. I don't know how much planning went into it, but he went to college in Munich and he studied for about a year. He did all right, I guess. He had some dark moments of despair. He was having a full-on identity crisis. Some of the theology faculty at the University of Munich were connected to the seminary of Freising. Also in Munich. So he lived there for a little while. And it really lit that fire in him again. So he hatched a plan. And this is where the story... gets a little more exciting and some dominoes begin to fall. Hans studied philosophy at the University of Munich. He was only there for a year, which is not... long enough to actually earn a doctorate certificate. While there, he suffered from you know, depression, like I said, that identity crisis, and he decided to practice his powers of hypnosis, which he'd been interested in for a long time. And he decided to hypnotize himself and channel the higher-ups and the faculty at the university. Once he was one with their souls, he could just sign a certificate, giving himself a doctorate of philosophy. Technically, it would not be a forgery if he was actually the professor at the time that he signed it. Right? And then he'd be done with the university and he'd be a doctor of philosophy. So, I mean... Right? Nothing wrong with that. He would be the faculty at the time that he signed it, so... What's the problem? So somehow he found a blank certificate or he just drew one up himself. I don't know. But he had a certificate made up that essentially granted him a doctorate degree of philosophy from the University of Munich. You know, he signed the names of who he needed to sign it as. And it looked perfectly legit as far as anyone could tell. In 1906, he went back to the seminary in Maine, the one where he'd been kicked out, and he presented this doctorate certificate to Bishop Kirstein to show him how well he'd done for himself in Munich, and this convinced Bishop Kirstein to ordain Hans Schmidt to the priesthood after all. And the ordination was scheduled for December 23rd, 1906. Now Hans was again torn, not knowing if this was the right thing to do. Did he really want to be a priest? He did have those sexual desires after all. He knew... that that went against the priesthood. He also had those socialist ideas and believed in Planned Parenthood and all of that. He wasn't fully on board with the teachings of the Catholic Church. His mother was full of joy, though, over his ordination, but Hans was sometimes uncomfortable about it. But the night before the ordination... December 22nd. None other than St. Elizabeth herself, the patron saint of Hungary, showed up in Hans' room in the flesh? She was there to console Hans. She put her hands over him and ordained him as her special priest. And she used the sign, her thumb and middle finger together. And she told him that this was his special sign now and he was to use it as a sign that he was her special priest. So he was already secretly a really real priest, thanks to Saint Elizabeth the night before Bishop Kirstein ordained him a priest. But it was his and St. Elizabeth's and God's special little secret. So Hans was used to keeping secrets, though, you know, by this time at the age of 25. He was a master of secrets. Drink pasteurized buttermilk and be beautiful. Sold by the poinsettia plant of the Tampa Dairy Co. On sale at many of the fountains. Or we will deliver it to your home. Improves your health and complexion. Makes good, firm flesh and tissue. Tampa Dairy Company. Now, Hans First position was as an assistant priest at Darmstead at the Church of St. Elizabeth, which was just one more sign that he really was St. Elizabeth's special priest. But he was transferred out of there after only a few months. He wound up in Burgle, but there was gossip about him and another priest having an appropriate relationship. And he was transferred again. Hans just couldn't keep it together anywhere he went. Next, he was transferred to Seligenstad. And shortly after he got... Got there, he got sick with a horribly serious case of rheumatism, which spread throughout his entire body, even affecting his heart. Now, when rheumatism affects the heart, it is known as rheumatic fever. And this is a complication of strep throat or scarlet fever. It can cause psychiatric problems if the bacteria crosses into the brain. He was really, really unlucky. He really was a sickly fellow, wasn't he? Yeah. He had to go home to his parents' house and was in bed for nine months. His parents were back together again by this time. They had moved back to Ascheffenburg. This was 1908 when he was 27 years old. During this time... During Holy Week. He had yet another vision. It was Christ on the cross, covered in blood, and he appeared to him. Christ spoke to him. They had a whole conversation while Christ was on the cross. At one point, while he was sick, his sister Elizabeth came to help take care of him. She saw him without his shirt on and noticed a birthmark under his left nipple. It was a brownish purplish color, about two inches by four inches. And she asked him, you know, what it was. And he said it was a special mark that proved he was of special birth. It was where blood and water flow, he said. And it was why he had been christened Johannes. Now in Germany, the name Johannes is strongly associated with John the Baptist. And Hans's birth name is Johann. So he was close, but not quite. So. But wouldn't Does she have already known he had that birthmark? You would think so. I mean, apparently he knew it was always there. But when she testified in her testimony, she said that that's when she first noticed it. So maybe she was not the one who was having the incestuous relationship with them. Maybe it was the one who died. Probably. That's what I was thinking because... In the trial, they did name Carl by name, that he had had a relationship with Hans, but they didn't name the sister, and I wonder if it's because she was dead. Maybe. And so I was thinking it was probably Catherine. But anyway, that birthmark was supposedly where Christ had been pierced with a sword while on the cross. And so it was another sign to Hans and his Catholic relatives that he was the real deal, that he really was of special birth and he was so pious and devout and chosen by God. Oh, Hans. They didn't think that he was crazy. They thought he was just ultra special. Now, his sister Elizabeth wasn't the only visitor while he was sick with rheumatism. Hans also had a cousin, Otto Schmidt, who would come to visit him. And here's what he said about Otto's visits. During my sickness, I was frequently visited by a cousin of mine by the name of Otto Schmidt. A son of mine, father's brother. I liked him, yeah, and told him to handle me while I was in bed. What he means by 'handle him'? Well, I'm sure you can guess what that means. Apparently, Hans had groomed Otto when he was quite small and was molesting him all along. Hans' parents and Otto's parents often remarked that Hans and Otto looked a lot alike and they took that as the reason that the two were particularly close. They didn't realize that there was an incestuous relationship going on. Now, Hans was 27 and Otto was 15 at the time of Hans's rheumatic fever. And Otto is one of the relatives that committed suicide. Shooting himself in the head when he was just 18 years old, which happened a couple years after Hans went to America. So I would put money on the suicide being directly related to Hans, his leaving Germany, and the years of sexual abuse that Otto had endured. Poor Otto. I know. Yep. So anyway, still in Germany before Hans left, Hans recovered somewhat from the attack of rheumatism. He was able to get up and still like start walking. around and stuff, and he was well enough to get another position as an assistant priest in Gonsenheim, which is a small village near Mainz. He described the population as a lot of, quote, uneducated raw farmers. And they would laugh at his sermons. And so he didn't really like the people, but he loved the forests that surrounded Gonsenheim. While here at Gonsenheim, one of Hans' duties was to be a teacher of little girls. No, he didn't take him away from the children. Yeah. Now, I'm not sure if it was here or at a different place, but he did admit later to the psychiatrist that there was one place he was, like, stationed. At that he took a choir boy to his room, like a seven-year-old, and he molested him. And he made it clear it was not an altar boy. It was a choir boy. But anyway. Anyway, get this. He realized, this is so laughable, he realized while teaching the little girls here at Gonsenheim that when he would teach them things, he could put his thoughts into their heads. Like the information he wanted them to know, they would then know it. And it was like magic. Isn't that what teaching is? So he thought he must be telepathic. And this was like a new way of teaching. He was like, whoa, like I am like putting my information into their brains. And like, this is amazing. And it was like, oh my goodness, think of all the people I could help with this new magical ability. I could just transfer my thoughts and my knowledge into their heads. Like, of college students, if they're about to take exams, they could just pass and get degrees. Like, this is amazing. I'm amazing. I could do this for poor people in the name of St. Elizabeth. He was her special little priest. It is true. Yes. So he was like, 'Oh, my gosh, this is amazing.' Now, something very, very important and pivotal happened during this time. Remember, I mentioned Uncle Leo earlier. He was the old bachelor who was wealthy. Well, Hans's mother. When she had temporarily left Hans's father, she moved in with Uncle Leo. Well, Uncle Leo got stomach cancer and died. And Uncle Leo didn't have any kids to leave his wealth to. Instead, he left his wealth to Gertrude and Heinrich Schmidt and all of their kids, Hans included. But Gertrude wasn't Uncle Leo's only sibling. He had other siblings who also had kids. And one of the other siblings had been Uncle Leo— Lawrence. Now, I'm sure you guys are not writing all of this down, but Uncle Lawrence had been in an asylum twice, and he had hung himself in 1905. And that same year, his 18-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Margaret, hung herself as well, and that left one remaining child of Uncle Lawrence, and that was Adolph Miller. I feel like... We need to draw the family tree up and post it. Yeah, I did write down so many people. I have so many names. We need to see the tree, visualize the family, and write suicide. Asylum. We could, because I wrote it all down. I did. I feel like we should. We probably should. Yeah, well, Adolf was really upset that he had not been included in Uncle Leo's will because Leo left it all to Gertrude and her kids. Well, Uncle Leo just didn't like Adolf. Perhaps. Perhaps so. I don't know why. But Adolf was incredibly angry that he had not received any of Uncle Leo's money, and he wanted his share. It's funny, though, because, like I mentioned earlier, Hans openly admitted he personally didn't care much for Uncle Leo, and the only one of his aunts or uncles that he really cared about was Uncle Loren's, Adolf's dad, the one who hung out with him. himself in 1905. So anyway, that's neither here nor there. Adolph wanted money. So Adolph Miller in 1908 was showing up at the church in Gonsenheim over and over like a recurring infection. He would pop up out of the shadows, he would send threatening letters, and he was threatening Hans's life. He said he was going to publish in the newspapers all that he knew about Hans and his brothers and his sister if they didn't give him a cut of Uncle Leo's estate. Adolf knew, first of all, that Hans wasn't really a doctor of philosophy. He knew that the certificate was a forgery. And Adolf also knew that Hans was into... incest because, drumroll, Adolf and Hans had been sleeping together since they were boys. What? I assume he also knew that the other siblings were involved in incestuous relationships because I don't know what other dirt he might have had on them. And so, in the face of these threats, Hans simply disappeared from Gonsenheim. He just took off. And apparently, that's just as bad as going AWOL from the military. I had no idea. So absconding from your assignment as a priest without permission is an egregious violation of church law. Who knew? Hmm. Well, there you go. Yeah. He took off to Munich and was in hiding using the alias Rudolf Baum. He decided that his idea about the new method of teaching— that thought transference or telepathy— well, now was as good a time as any. So he wrote up some letters and he sent them to at the University of Munich. Somehow he had a whole roster and he sent these letters to a couple hundred students. He told them that he could guarantee they would pass their certification exams. And they didn't have to pay any money until they had their certifications in hand. They just needed to respond to him for more information, and he signed it, Dr. Xantos. It's crazy how, like, we look back and we're like, wow, they were so gullible. But at the same time, people now are probably still just as gullible to this stuff. Yeah. So he said that he chose that name, Dr. Xantos, because it sounded, quote, oriental. And he thought that oriental people were really smart and mystical, so people would be more likely to respond to his ad. Good grief. Good grief. Yeah, that's what he said. So Hans was arrested before any students actually used his services, but there were two students who had arranged... to meet him for more information. He told the officers that he wasn't actually going to take any money. He didn't actually want money for this service. He just said, 'that's why.' You know, you get the certificate first and then pay me. But he didn't actually want money. This was going to be him just helping because. He was St. Elizabeth's special priest and he was helping the poor. Like that's what he said. Yeah. Yeah, so that was what he said. But he also told them that he was planning on signing the certificates himself. And he had all of the official school seals, all of the certificates, like he had everything made already. He had created all of the stuff, like he had it all done. He was set up to forge all of it. And he explained that these would not actually be forgeries. Again, you know, because he said that he, you know, he would be signing them. Mm-hmm. I felt myself nearer to God. I actually was the professor himself. I entered into his spirit. And because he was entered into the professor's spirit at the time that he was signing the professor's name, it was not a forgery. It's not. The police in Munich also found out he had forged his own doctorate certificate, so he was facing charges for that forgery as well as the fraud for the attempted scam on the students. The police eventually in Munich dropped all the charges against him after he'd been sitting in jail for like two or three months, because they found Hans to be completely insane. I mean, they had psychiatrists come in and, you know, checked him out, did all the stuff. And they were like, 'This guy is very mentally ill.' So they said that he could not be held criminal responsible for his actions, and the judge released him to his parents. So the judge, the court in Germany, did not sentence him to an asylum, but they told his father, 'You need to commit him to an asylum.' He is mentally ill. You need to put him in a hospital. So his father took him to a place called Jordan's Bed Spa. And this actually was not an asylum. This was, in fact, a spa getaway. It was a retreat where you or I could go for a relaxing getaway. It's a cold water treatment spa where you would take cold water baths. You know, it's a thing that people do and, um, turns out Hans wasn't really a big fan of the cold baths so he only took one while he was there— just one bath. Um, The whole time. And he stayed for about three weeks. So later, like when this was going on, the trial was going on and stuff, they actually contacted someone at the spa to ask questions, like, how long was he here and blah, blah, blah. And do you take people who are. Are insane and they were like, 'If an insane person tried to come and stay here, we would turn them away.' This is not an asylum— like this— that's not what we're here for. This is literally a place for vacations. Interesting. Yeah. So he was there for three weeks and then he left. Now, the Catholic Church did not let him off the hook. The criminal justice system in Germany let him go because he was mentally insane. The Catholic Church was handling... things their own way. Hans had gone AWOL, right? And Hans had also done this whole forgery thing. Hans was found to be insane by the criminal court and there was clearly something not right with Hans. This was a big deal to the Catholic Church. They had to think about what this meant for their parishioners and having Hans, you know, work with people and the safety of their people. So the Catholic Church made a very important decision. Now, listeners, are you ready for this? This is a big deal. Yes. Hans was no longer a priest. Ever. Never, ever, ever again. Could Hans Schmidt act in the capacity of a priest anywhere, ever? As far as the Catholic Church was concerned, as a whole, in the Catholic Church's entirety all over the world, Hans Schmidt was 'dunzo bunzo.' Yeah. After he got out of the cold water spa, he didn't know what to do with himself. He took refuge in a convent for a while, and then he just went home to his parents. And after a while, his father, Heinrich, suggested he go to America. Thanks a lot, Heinrich. Yeah. Thanks a lot. So Hans immediately liked this idea. He realized there were some beautiful possibilities in starting over in a new land far across the ocean. Hans went ahead and put his skills to use. He used his telepathic powers and temporarily became whoever he needed to be. You know, to sign important documents and forge some paperwork, releasing him from the diocese in Germany so that he could join the diocese in America. And he forged everything. bit of paperwork necessary to make it look like he was still a priest in good standing. So when he got to America, everything looked completely legitimate and nobody had any clue that anything was off. Oh, Hans. Oh, Hans. So part one. talked about all of his assignments as a priest in the United States and how he met Anna Aumuller, getting her pregnant twice, being told by God that Anna shall be a sacrifice of love and atonement, and then killing her, cutting her up, and discarding her body parts in the Hudson River. We also told you about him meeting Dr. Muray in December of 19-1912, a dentist, and the two of them starting up a counterfeiting scheme in hopes of making lots of money to give to the poor, though Dr. Muray was more interested in making money. money for himself. Well, the night of September 13th, 1913, when they picked up Hans Schmidt at the rectory at St. Joseph's Church, the police searched his room. To look for evidence definitively linking Hans to the apartment at 68 Bradford Avenue, where Anna had been murdered and dismembered. And that's how they found... connections to Dr. Muray in the first place. Actually, they'd found evidence of counterfeiting and a receipt for rent for an apartment in the name of George Miller. They went to the apartment and found the janitress, who took them to the place where the man lived, who paid the rent on the apartment, and introduced the police to Mr. Miller, who turned out to be Dr. Muray. Naturally, the police took Dr. Muray in for questioning, did a search of his belongings, and so on. And that's when they found that he was in possession of an illegal weapon, according to the police. To the Sullivan Act, which was a charge they could arrest him on and keep him in custody while they tried to figure out if he was connected to the murder. But when Inspector Foirot sat down face-to-face with Dr. Muray, something quite unexpected happened, and it would take his investigation, as well as mine, in a very unexpected direction. Dun-dun-dun-dun! All right, so that was part two. And that is why there has to be a part three. It's not over. Holy moly. All right. But shout out to Ancestry. com, FamilySearch, Find a Grave, Newspapers. com, Christian for his quotes and ads. You can go onto our website and send us mail. Thank you. Yep. Or even in the description, there's a link that says, 'send us a text.' You should review the podcast. Give us some stars and follow our socials. On Facebook, it's Forgotten Felonies. And on Instagram, it's at Forgotten Felonies. Yeah. Stay tuned for part three. Yes, and we will... Be sharing. I'll we'll share the link to where you can find the transcripts because I want everybody to be able to read them. We're gonna be talking a lot about FACTS! In part three and where you can find the facts yourself. That's important. And how you don't make things up. Exactly. Because, oh my goodness, friends, I can't wait till you hear part three. Which we're gonna do right now. Yay! So Adolph Miller in 1908. was showing up at the church in Gonsenheim over and over like a recurring infection. Hello. Hello. Just like Christian. No, I'm just kidding. What? Infection? I just said Adolf Miller was showing up in Gonsenheim over and over like a recurring infection, and then you go, 'Hello?' That is, uh, that is apropos. I don't know. I'm awake. I apologize. That was perfect timing. Thank you. I am ready to go, what the— I have not done my homework, of course not. We struggled to find good ones, so I didn't really send a whole lot of them to the chat, but there's the Schlitz and Brown bottles. It doesn't have that smoky taste. Did we like that one?