Hans Schmidt, The Catholic Priest Who Was Executed For Murder
Hans Schmidt was an unusual child. He had a chilling habit of spending his afternoons watching the cows and pigs be processed through the local slaughterhouse in his hometown of Aschaffenburg, Germany.
He was also entranced by Roman Catholic rituals and reportedly played priest with a homemade altar. These two childhood passions would eventually converge in an unsettling way.
Schmidt attended seminary, but at the end of his training, he was considered too “unbalanced” to be ordained. So, he studied philosophy for a year, forged a degree to make it seem as if he had turned his life around, and convinced a bishop to ordain him in 1906. Two years later, he was arrested for fraud and defrocked.
Hans Schmidt, the only Catholic priest ever to be executed in the United States.
The ex-priest then forged more paperwork and traveled to the United States, eventually securing a position at the Church of St. Boniface in New York City in 1910.
There, he met 17-year-old Anna Aumüller, an Austrian housekeeper at the church’s rectory. They began a sexual relationship — while Schmidt was also sleeping with a male dentist — and secretly “wed” in 1913 in a ceremony performed by Schmidt himself.
Later that year, Aumüller informed Schmidt that she was pregnant. He knew his career as a priest would be over if word got out, and he allegedly heard God telling him to “sacrifice” his wife.
On Sept. 2, 1913, Schmidt followed this “command.” He slashed Aumüller’s throat in their Manhattan apartment, drank her blood, raped her corpse, dismembered her, and dumped her remains in the Hudson River.
When Aumüller’s body parts began washing up on shore, the police traced them back to Schmidt. He quickly confessed to the crime, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and executed by electric chair on Feb. 18, 1916, at age 35.
What makes Schmidt’s tale one of history’s most interesting stories and not simply a run-of-the-mill murder case is that, to this day, he remains the only Catholic priest ever to be executed in the United States.
How ‘America’s First Supermodel’ Died In A Mental Asylum
Public DomainAudrey Munson poses with a cat in 1915.
To refer to Audrey Munson as simply a supermodel would be dismissive. She was a renowned artist’s model and film actress whose interesting story stands out in a crowded field of women with similar tales.
Munson served as the model for some of the most iconic sculptures in New York City, including the 25-foot gilded bronze statue perched atop the Manhattan Municipal Building, Civic Fame. She also posed for dozens of other famous works of art around the world, from the Three Graces fountain in Washington, D.C., to a marble Venus de Milo sculpture at a royal palace in the Netherlands.
In addition, Munson acted in silent films and was one of the first women to appear nude in a non-pornographic movie. But despite her fame, Munson received little compensation, and she was not able to save enough money to support herself after her star had faded. In the 1920s, as her popularity decreased, she and her mother moved to upstate New York.
PortableNYCTours/Wikimedia CommonsCivic Fame, the statue atop the Manhattan Municipal Building that was sculpted using Audrey Munson as a model.
With no savings to speak of, Munson found a job as a waitress. It was during this time that she began to demonstrate signs of mental illness, such as her insistence on being known as “Baroness Audrey Meri Munson-Munson.”
She blamed her downfall on Jewish people, and her outspoken antisemitism led her so far as to contact the U.S. House of Representatives, insisting that they create a law that would protect her from “the Hebrews.”
At the age of 40, the woman known as “America’s first supermodel” was committed to a mental asylum. Aside from a few years at a nursing home in her mid-90s, she spent the rest of her life at the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane, dying in 1996 at age 104.
