Hans Schmidt Guilty of Murder
Hans Schmidt, Slayer of Anna Aumueller, Faces Death Chair.
Priest Who Has Been Undergoing Ordeal of Second Trial Is Convicted of One of Most Remarkable Butcheries in City’s History.
Case Given To The Jury At 2.30 This Afternoon.
Expert Testimony as to the Sanity of the Accused Clergyman the Principal Feature of Both Trials.
The jury in the case of Hans Schmidt, the confessed slayer of Anna Aumueller, whose body he cut up and threw into the Hudson river, upturned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree this evening.
The Court concluded the charge to the jury as 2.30 o’clock, but instructed jurors to go to lunch before beginning to consider the evidence. Immediately upon returning from luncheon the jury took up the case.
The finding of the upper portion of a woman’s body in the Hudson River, off Woodcliffe, N. J., on Sept. 5 last year and the discovery a few days later of the lower parts of the body in a pillowslip set the detectives at work on the murder mystery. After a week detectives under Inspector Faurot traced the pillow slip to the store of a second hand dealer, there it was learned that a man who gave the name of “A. Van Dyke” had purchased the slip. The purchaser gave his address as No. 68 Bradhurst avenue. This proved to be a small flat rented by Schmidt on Aug. 25.
Gaining entrance by the fire escape, the detectives found bloodstained garments about the room and in a few days they had traced, by means of an initialed handkerchief, the tenant of the flat. He proved to be Johann Schmidt, a priest at St. Boniface’s Church. At the rectory of this church they found that a girl named Anna Aumueller had worked.
When Schmidt was confronted with the evidence by the detectives he confessed that he killed the girl and was immediately taken into custody. He feigned insanity for a time, but a jury of doctors decided that he was in his right mind.
The first jury which tried Schmidt disagreed after deliberating several days.
Hans Schmidt Guilty of Murder, The Evening World, New York, 5 February 1914, page 1, column 7.