Schmidt Verdict Yet In Doubt With Jury Deadlocked

Aumueller Slayer’s Fate Has Been Debated More Than Four Hours.

Arguments All Short.

Delehanty Scores Defense Alienists – Says Prisoner Never Was a Priest.

Although the jury to whom was given the case of Hans Schmidt, confessed slayer of Anna Aumueller, has been deliberating more than four hours, no verdict has as yet been reached.

At 4:20 the jury came in and asked Judge Warren W. Foster, in whose Court of General Sessions the trial has been held for the past two weeks, for the exhibits and a copy all of his charge.

It is thought extremely unlikely that a hung jury will be the result, as the court has said he will hold the jurymen at it all night rather than have a mistrial. The indications are, however, that the jury is pretty well tied up.

The charge of the judge was brief, covering about forty minutes, and was merely an outline of the laws governing criminal insanity.

At 1.25 o’clock Judge Foster finished the charge and the case went to the jury. It is confidently expected that a verdict will be returned after a very short session.

Turning to his argument as to the insanity of Schmidt Judge Olcott said that his client was proved to have an inheritance which was a mental taint of insanity and love of death and dead persons.

Insists that Schmidt has inherited insanity.

“He believed that death was better than life,” said Mr. Olcott. “Ten out of sixty-two of his forebears will either proved insane or committed suicide. The District-Attorney has built up, and, I believe, with sincerity in his own mind, a Frankenstein of his own imagination. The basis of it is the fact that Schmidt once tried to insure the life of the woman who was afterward killed by him. But his Frankenstein breaks to pieces, I think, in view of the fact that no insurance was ever issued, and so the woman was not insured when he killed her.

Delehanty Scores Alienists, Says Whiskers Moved Them.

Assistant District-Attorney Delehanty in summing up ridiculed the opinions of the alienist who said that Schmidt was sane. He said that Dr. Jelliffe’s conclusions as to the effect of heredity on Schmidt’s mind were reached by an “eeny-meany-miny-mo” counting process, and that Dr. White had decided Schmidt sane by glancing at the prisoner’s whiskers.

Schmidt was not a priest, said Mr. Delehanty, and had never been one, because he obtained his ordination through forged papers. His whole career, according to the Assistant District-Attorney, showed that he had used the respect and affection generally shown to the priesthood as the cloak for a lifetime of sordid and shameful crime. Schmidt shammed insanity, said the prosecutor, using the knowledge he gained when his sanity was questioned in Bavaria in 1897, and acted very much as though he had [illeg.] recently.

Schmidt Verdict Yet In Doubt With Jury Deadlocked, The Evening World, 29 December 1913, page 1, column 2.