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All right, welcome to the inaugural, nice word, right? That's a big word. I know. Episode of the Psychopedia Podcast with Investigator Slater and Tank Sinatra. That's me. You're the true crime fanatic, the person who's obsessed and all that. All of the above. You're going to tell me about a case. I am. That you have parsed down. Paired it down. Okay. I like parse better, but I know nothing about the case and I don't know much about true crime. I actually don't get the obsession with true crime, but
But you're going to try and win me over to the side of people who live in a constant state of fear and anxiety is what we're going to do here. I don't think that people who love true crime are in a constant state of fear and anxiety. We'll let them tell us. That said, after this case, that may change. We'll let them tell us. You did bring a knife here. I did. But I also brought a soft microphone cover. So...
It's balanced. Sounds like something a killer would say. But welcome to the show. This is our first episode. Very excited. You're very excited. I am so pumped. I'm pretty excited. I like true crime. I just don't watch it because I get sad. You know what I mean? You're probably more normal than I am.
I don't get sad. I get interested. Yeah, you said it relieves your anxiety. It does because you're just kind of facing it. It's like exposure therapy, which we talked about a little bit. Listen, I like true crime. I'm not obsessed with it. But during the process of this podcast, obviously people who listen to the podcast are going to be obsessed with true crime. Yeah.
If you're listening, hit that follow button. That's it. Subscribe, share, review. We love you. Thank you for listening. Brooke, tell them you love them. I love you. Hardcore. That sounded believable to me. With that said, I don't want to... Listen, it's more about them loving me and you. No, we need to love them too. But we do. We already do. We need to say it. Sometimes it's nice to hear. From the bottom of my bleeding, empty heart. Yeah.
So, yeah, why don't you just tell me a little bit about this story, as you call it, that real people aren't even involved in. Let's dive in. Wait. Let's not dive in. We're going to dive in. I just want to dip my toe in for a second. Okay. I don't think I'm not going to dive in. I'm going to dive. These are questions, just general setup questions I like to do. Is it recent or...
Old-timey. What did you say that you consider recent, like in the past century? Old-timey is anything past 2020. No, I'm kidding. No, so like... And then we're pretty old. Yeah, like were there cars around? Can I tell you the year and we can just bypass the guessing of how old it is? Sure. 1913. Whoa! Yeah.
That I was not expecting. Yeah. What were you expecting? A modern crime. Yeah? Yeah, like a crime with cell phones and... Oh, no. No, no. I'm actually extremely interested in the older cases. I don't know why that is either. I didn't expect people to be churning their own butter in this crime. We're not...
They're turning their... They might be. People are making shoes, for sure. They might be. They're not being made by Nike in Pakistan. They're definitely making their own clothing. 100%. We're going to hear about that a little bit. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So it's an old... They're growing their own vegetables.
There was cocaine and Coca-Cola. Yes. It's an old timey story. It is. Before things got crazy, even though they were crazy. Right. In this sense. I think I get what you're saying. People have been people forever. Yeah. And they're doing fucked up people shit. Yeah. Bad people stuff. Bad people stuff. And it's in our neck of the woods, this story. The story starts off on September 5th. That's my birthday. I know.
I know. I couldn't wait to tell you. Wow. It's your birthday. Not a great day in 1913, but... Was it someone's death day? It was the day it was discovered that someone died brutally. Ooh, that's a rough day. Yeah. Sorry to hear that. So two kids were playing along the banks of the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey. Yeah. All right. They noticed a large brown paper bag wrapped in twine, like you would find at like a butcher shop. In the 19... In the early... Right.
So these children are walking along the banks of the Hudson River and they find this package wrapped in brown paper and twine. They're curious, like kids are, and they go up to this package and they open it. What do you think they thought it was, like money or something? Yeah.
I don't think they were expecting a headless torso, which is what they were greeted with. I think they probably were like, oh, let's see what kind of... Oh my God, those poor kids. I mean, how do you recover from that? And they were siblings. So I feel like those parents have therapy bills. They were sitting on Freud's couch for real. Right? Yeah.
So they open up the package and a headless torso rolls out. Big package, obviously. It's a decent, it has to be. That's what she said. Nice. There's no head and there's obviously no bottom half. So it's maybe not like if it was me, I'm not a big person. It wouldn't be a very big package. Yeah. That's what she said. We got it. The next day, another package washes ashore and there's more body parts in it.
Who found those? I think it was a couple walking their dog. Jesus fucking. Which is how every fucking dismembered body is found. Couple walking their dog? Actually, I was walking Cash this morning. I have a little video of it. I'll probably end up posting it on all the socials. I'm telling you, there was a hip connector bone on the side of the street.
I'm telling you. What did you do? Well, I went to investigate it and Cash immediately put it in his mouth. Ew. So it derailed my entire investigation. I had to pull it out of his mouth. It was gross. Investigator Slater got beat to the case by a dog. I did. He didn't even like... Flinch. No. That's like a dream for him. Right. That's a nightmare for me. Right. It wasn't a nightmare. I was like, I'm on this case now, officially. He was like, no, you're not. It's in my mouth. Right. Okay. So...
Headless torso, body parts floating up a river. No head, just these dismembered body parts.
Weehawken, New Jersey. Weehawken, New Jersey. Rough place. Authorities determined that the remains belonged to a female who was approximately 25 years old and that the victim had likely been killed and dismembered within the last five days from when the discovery of the body parts was made. An examination of the remains also revealed that the victim's height was likely around 5 feet 4 inches tall, her weight between 120 and 130 pounds. Shorty had a dump truck. And...
Are you flirting with this corpse? Shorty had a wagon. Sorry. But you're not going to laugh now because they also found that she had been pregnant.
Oh, that's terrible. Maybe that's why she weighed so much. You're going to laugh about that? No. No, seriously. I didn't even think about that. You're right. That's so sad. I don't think that's a lot of weight. She's a pretty slim person. 5'4", 120 pounds? Well, you said between 120 and 140. 120, 130. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's slim. Yeah. All right. So I don't know weights or heights. Right. I'm 250 pounds. Okay. Wow. Jesus. I'm fucking made of- You're jacked. You're tanked. Yeah. Tanked out.
Don't get it confused. Right. I won't. You're the investigator. I'm the investigator and I'm five feet. According to an article in The Sun, an examination of the remains by a county physician revealed that she wasn't in the water for more than four days, that she was not drowned, and that the severing of the limbs and the head had been done by one expert in surgery. Yeah, she was a fucking butcher paper. Right. Obviously, she didn't drown. Okay.
We're going to get to who did it shortly. So aside from gleaning some victim profile info from the remains, investigators still had no idea who the remains belonged to, how they got there, and who the perpetrator was. So they knew nothing except for a basic victim profile. However, they did have a few clues to work with, and each one was pivotal to the investigation.
One, inside the brown paper bag was a pillowcase. And inside the pillowcase is really where the dismembered body parts were stuffed.
The pillowcase in and of itself was pretty innocuous. It was pretty basic. But for the fact that it had a little small manufacturer's tag on it, and on that tag was the letter A, embroidered. Okay. Okay. Second clue, there was a birthmark on the victim's shoulder. Third clue, there was a greenish-gray rock called schist. Okay.
which was used to weigh down the paper bag. Now Schist is a rock that exists in New York commonly, but not so much in New Jersey. So now they've realized that this murder likely happened in New York. It was also wrapped in a New York newspaper. So at this point, the New Jersey police department pulls in the NYPD. Was it the NYPD back then? It was the police department in New York.
So one common theme in this case is that there was really solid, skillful police work done. They pull in this investigator called Investigator or Inspector Joseph Farrow, who's like a total G, all right?
He actually introduced the use of a certain forensic technique in the United States. So I want to quiz you. Wait, he pulled in a technique that was new in forensics at the time? Yeah, he like pioneered it. Oh, okay. So this guy's like Einstein. He didn't like create this technique, but he was the first one to employ it and to use it successfully. Okay, gotcha. Okay. Did he introduce fingerprint analysis...
Did he introduce forensic odontology? What does that mean? That is the examination of dental evidence. Okay. All right. Did he introduce luminol spray? You know what that is? No. It's a spray that has a chemical reaction to hemoglobin and iron so that when you spray it, it detects blood. Like when you kill the lights, it glows. Okay. Kind of like a black light type of thing. Yeah. And you know when there's been blood. Yeah. So which one of those did he do? Well, I'm having a hard time here because...
The woman didn't have any hands.
Right? You didn't have a head, so she had no teeth. Was it luminol spray? No, but that was really good guesswork. I like how you backed into that. I was smart. Yeah. I mean, you guessed wrong, but that was like a really, really educated guess. I'm impressed. He was the first individual to use fingerprint analysis to identify a criminal. Wow, big time. And the first to obtain a conviction using fingerprint evidence in 1910. So that was before this case. Just a few years. He's a G. So this story is about him, really.
It is. I mean, for me, it is like, I sweat him. You got to look into him a little bit more. Joseph Farrow. F-A-U-R-O-T. If you Google him, there's like pictures of him teaching like crowds and crowds of people. Fingerprint analysis. Cops, like how to use fingerprint analysis.
Wow. And he obtained the first conviction using it. This guy helps me log into Beach Bum Tanning when I go there. And on your phone. Yeah, because I got to put my finger on that. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.
My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.
So, Faroe was on the case, so now we know it's going to go somewhere, right? So, he tracked down the manufacturer of the pillowcase, and he learned that an order of pillowcases with the same lot number as the one that was found with the remains had been sold to a man named George Sachs, located on 8th Avenue in New York City. Now, thankfully, Sachs maintained meticulous records on his clients, and because of that, Faroe was able to locate the address of the individual who purchased that particular pillowcase.
Wow. So they go to the apartment and they figure out who's renting it. Person who was renting this apartment presumably is linked to the murder or the murderer. You got to chase down that lead. Right? You don't know. So let me ask you, do we think that the person renting this apartment was A, an orthopedic surgeon from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, B, a geologist and visiting professor at Rutgers University, which is in New Jersey, a priest from Germany, or a butcher from Romania?
I have no idea. Can you just take a shot in the dark? An orthopedic surgeon? No. Again, like a good guess. A priest from Germany. What is he doing here? Killing people? Yes. Seriously? Yes. A death vacation? It's not a vacation, homeboy. Listen, so...
The officers let themselves in this guy's apartment and they made quite the gruesome discovery. Oh. The walls were covered in blood. The floor was covered in blood. With luminol or just blood? No, no. That was just to throw off your scent. Oh. There's nothing to do with luminol in this case. Okay.
Wimbledon wasn't invented until 1983. Correct. We're going to get into that at another case, another time. Yeah. Even though somebody clearly tried to like clean up the scene, there was still, there was still evidence. The bathtub was covered in blood and lying next to the bathtub, all shiny and clean was a large butcher's knife. Like somebody, somebody, this priest from Germany left like a fucking smoking gun next to the tub. He left this,
this knife, right? Investigators also discovered a trunk containing small handkerchiefs, all embroidered with the same letter A that had been embroidered on the pillowcase. So now they have another link. In the trunk, they also discovered a bunch of letters addressed to a woman named Anna Amular, who lived, presumably because it was addressed to her at St. Boniface's Church on 42nd Street in New York City. That's two A's, Anna Amular.
Was she a nun? She was not a nun. We're going to find out more about her. From this point on, investigators were able to identify a suspect. And the suspect's name was Father Hans Schmidt. Dun, dun, dun!
So at this point, Father Hans Schmidt was working as an assistant parish priest at St. Joseph's Catholic Church on West 125th Street. But before we talk about the grown-up version of this psychotic man of the cloth, let's go back a little bit and let's look at his childhood. Because for me, I find it fascinating to know where somebody started to better understand how they wound up being who they are. Yeah. Right? So let's go back in time now.
Hans Schmidt was born January 3rd, 1881 in Uschaffensburg, Germany, which is like a small town about 30 miles outside of Frankfurt. You nailed that pronunciation. I know. I think I have no idea. I legit practice it. Hans was one of 10 children born to Heinrich and Gertrude Schmidt. Very German. Very, very German. He was mostly raised by Gertrude, the mother, and she showed little capability of being able to raise children.
Ten kids.
Heinrich was either absent. He worked for the railroad, so he traveled a lot for work. He was either absent. My dad worked for the railroad. He did. Yeah. I hope that's where the similarities end. Yeah. Heinrich beat the shit out of Gertrude and all of the children. He didn't even bother to learn the names of his 10 children. He referred to them by their birth order number. Wow. So Hans was referred to as the sixth because he was like the sixth sibling born.
Well, obviously we don't know anything about the dad, but. I mean, he was a Protestant. He didn't approve of Gertrude being a Catholic. They fought all the time about that. He forbade Catholicism in his home. Like he was just, he was a. Psycho. Fucking maniac. Yeah. Yeah.
So in spite of having 10 kids, Gertrude really never warmed up to motherhood. She found it arduous. She found it isolating. We have 10 kids. I mean, honestly, motherhood can be a little arduous and it can be a little isolating. Yeah. Even by today's standards. Yeah, of course. And that's me as a mother speaking. But in Gertrude's defense, she also very likely suffered from like real mental illness. And back in the day, it just went untreated. Like
Like depression wasn't a thing that was recognized and dealt with. And she definitely, definitely struggled with depression at the very, very least. Yeah.
In addition to the depression with Gertrude, their family had a great deal of mental illness just in general. So Hans' great-grandfather suffered a mental break and he struggled with alcohol addiction. His great-uncle, great-aunt, and cousin all committed suicide. Oh, boy. And a different cousin spent the last portion of her life in a mental institution. So, like, in terms of DNA and genetics...
it ain't looking good for Heinrich. He really, he got dealt a bad hand. He just had to go kill some people. Just couldn't help himself. As I mentioned earlier, Heinrich is Protestant. Gertrude is Catholic.
And Heinrich did not support Catholicism in his home, but he traveled a lot. So whenever he would travel, Gertrude would reconnect with Catholicism. And that's putting it lightly. She ended up becoming like a religious fanatic. She attended mass twice a day. She...
enlisted Hans to be like her partner in crime, if you will, with Catholicism to like always go to church with her. And he ended up very much connecting with Catholicism as well. How long was the dad gone for? I mean, he was gone for big chunks of time. So when he was gone, they would set up a mock altar in the bedroom and Gertrude hand sewed priest's
like robe frock for Hans and he'd wear it and he'd put on fake mask services in Latin
He would speak in tongues. Was he pretending to speak Latin or was he actually speaking? No, he was, he spoke, I mean, not well, but he, he studied this all the time. Got it. And at this point now, his other siblings are completely ignored by Gertrude. She only has eyes for him. And he had like a birthmark under his like left, I think it was his left nipple. And she was convinced it was the mark of God. Where Jesus got stabbed? Yes. Stigmata. Oh my God. Oh my God.
So Hans literally in Gertrude's eyes was like the chosen one. He was often observed walking around at night at like a young age. We're talking six, seven, eight, walking around the village at night, really, really fast paced. Then suddenly stopping still freezing, claiming to hear the voice of God and then continuing on walking. Like nothing just happened. He was an oddball to say the least.
He was nicknamed Little Priest around his town. That's normal. Right? So we got, you know, some issues going on here in childhood. You see that kid that fucking acts like a priest? Right. And he's also now hearing God, which is auditory hallucinations. And, right, we're talking mental illness. Yeah. So.
So while the religious component of Hans' childhood was definitely weird as fuck, it gets a lot worse and a lot weirder. Really? Yeah. He developed a fascination with blood and suffering. He began to hang around slaughterhouses because he found the blood and suffering of the animals to be sexually arousing.
So according to this historian slash author whose book I use in many ways to research this case, his name is Mark Gatto, Hans Schmidt and another boy in his town named Fritz would meet at the town slaughterhouse. They would watch the animals bleed to death and they would mutually masturbate. Oh my God. I was going to joke that they would watch the cows get killed and jerk off, but that's really what they did. That's really what they did.
Him and his boy. Him and his boy. He'd go knock on his door. He'd be like, yo, Fritz. What you up to? You want to go? Rub one in. Let's go. Yeah. Watch some cows get slaughtered and get off to it. And the fact that he was able to connect with someone in that way. Right. Is really powerful. Because usually you got to find something like that's on the internet now. Right. The fact that these two little. You got to subscribe for that. These two little freaks lived in the same town in Germany and found each other is kind of nice. Yeah.
Right. You're right. I'm glad they had each other.
They attempted to have penetrative anal sex, and they were just constantly mixing sexual ground with each other. Oh, okay. So they were gay. I'm going to say bi given where this story goes. Well, he's into cows and he's into... But at this point, right, this one he's into fucking anything with a pulse. Yeah. Anything that has blood in it. Right. So they mutually masturbate, they try and have anal sex, and they're doing this all with the backdrop of cows and chickens dying.
Sounds hot. Yeah. I mean, it's not my fetish, but to each their own. Yeah. Hans at one point in his childhood was said to have decapitated his mother's geese, whom apparently she really loved. She had like a little vegetable garden, which helped to make money for the family. She had some animals that she really loved, probably more than her kids. And Hans went and decapitated the geese.
kept their severed heads in his pockets rolling around and would feel the blood dripping down his legs, like on the regular. Oh, not once? I think this was his thing. Like he kept it in there until his father caught him. His father probably beat the crap out of him. That's exactly what happened. Yeah. On another occasion, Hans cut the head off of a chicken and he kept the decapitated head and stuck it on the end of his penis until...
Heinrich discovered the chicken head. How did he discover the chicken head on the boy's penis? I think when there's beak coming out of a zipper. Oh my God. This guy was destined to be on the psychopedia podcast. Absolutely. And just destined to be, you know, known as this guy was sticking chicken heads on his dick at age eight.
That's, I mean, you don't have a shot. I'd probably hit my kid too if they were doing that. I mean, I can't blame Heinrich. I don't condone hitting your children. He was already beating them. What would you do? I don't know. What would you do if you found your kid with a chicken head on the end of his wiener? I would call Dr. Phil immediately. Dr. fucking Phil? No. Do you know he makes more money than Beyonce? He has more money than Beyonce. Dr. Phil? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Balling. Beyonce's got a lot of money too. She does, but he has more. Wow. Mm-hmm.
Fast forward a little bit, because the rest of his childhood was about dismembering animals, using blood in like fake rituals, religious rituals, his mother worshiping him, masturbating with Fritz. Like it's just, it's not the childhood I had. So unsurprisingly, at age 19, Hans Schmidt enters the seminary in Mainz, Germany, because he wants to become an actual priest. And probably he wants unfettered access to altar boys, I'm guessing. Yeah.
By the time he completed his seminary studies, he was ready to be ordained as a priest, but his reputation was ruined in Germany. He got busted for a counterfeiting operation he was running. He was noticed having interactions with sex workers, and Germany basically canceled him.
Wow, this guy was the first one to get canceled? Yeah. That's what this case is really about. He deserved it, though. He did. I mean, seriously, it's not like they found an old tweet. They were like, this guy used to stick chicken heads on his dick when he was like eight. So there's no statute of limitations on that. That's weird. Weird. That's weird now. It's 2023. It's never normal.
So what does he do when he gets canceled in Germany? He comes to America. Oh, that's why he came to America. So he began working at St. John's Roman Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky, but he pissed off the minister in charge over there. Obviously. And he was forced again to relocate. There's also speculation that he was involved in the disappearance and murder of a young girl named Alma Kellner. So in true Catholic church form...
They just transferred him. So he'd become somebody else's problem. Wait, so was that going on back then? The altar boys and the molestation? 100%. Yeah, probably way worse, right? Oh my God. 100%. Jeez. No, this is an epidemic that's been going on for probably... Right. Yeah. And it's not just in the Catholic church, to be fair. Yeah. Dave, my husband, for listeners, his rabbi was busted...
on a Dateline sting. Really? Yeah. He was trying to get 15-year-old boys in a chat room to meet him. And Dateline set up a sting
And in he walks with some wine coolers thinking he's about to meet some 15 year old boys. This guy bar mitzvah Dave. Did he meet Chris Hansen? Yes, he did. Yeah. He bar mitzvah Dave, this fucker. And he was going to meet 15 year old boys with wine coolers. And then he got ambushed. Yeah. And you could see pictures of him. Like Dave and I Googled him. Obviously it's so gross. He was like,
his chest, like topless pictures. I don't, can, can a guy be topless? Yeah. Okay. So he was topless with like his, his red hair. It's so gross. So it's not just in the Catholic church, but it is absolutely been going on and it's still going on. Only there's light being shed on it now. Thanks to a lot of the work that my, my family's law firm does and that I help with thankfully. And yeah, hopefully we're gonna, we're gonna slow things down.
All right, so this little freak over here. He gets kicked out of the church in Kentucky. And where does he go? Where every weirdo fits in. New York. New York City. Yeah.
So he takes a job at St. Boniface's parish, as I mentioned earlier, that that name should ring a bell, St. Boniface's, where he met and fell in love with a Hungarian immigrant who was working as a housekeeper named Anna Amular. A woman? A woman. Oh, so he's like, you know, just anything. First of all, he's a priest. Yeah. What are you doing? You don't fall in love. You're not supposed to. You're supposed to be in love with God. That's your, you know, homie. But like, also they're human. So I don't know. I'm not even faulting him for falling in love. No, no. He's a priest, but...
So Anna's working as a maid in the church rectory and Father Schmidt lives and works at this church. Hans claims that God ordered him to love Anna, which apparently gave him the green light to have lots of sex with her on the church altar. So he's hiding it, obviously, because it's a no-no. Yeah. But he's doing it.
The two even got married in a secret ceremony that he officiated. So whether or not it was legitimate or not is, you know, debatable. But there's speculation that the reason why he officiated, aside from the fact that nobody else could officiate because it's not sanctioned, right? Yeah. Is because he knew it was illegitimate, but he did it to placate Anna because Anna wanted some type of a legitimate relationship going. Yeah. Yeah.
He ends up getting relocated again to a different parish called St. Joseph's because apparently his lifestyle choices were not fitting in with the other church's teachings, meaning there was speculation that he was molesting altar boys in the confessional booths. Oh my God. Right? So Catholic church does what? Moves him? Transfers him so that he can go molest boys in a different location and it's not their problem.
One night, though, he's having sex with Anna on the church altar where she still works, which is St. Boniface's. And he claims that he hears God order him to sacrifice Anna. Oh, boy. He tells Anna this. He tells her that God is telling me that I need to sacrifice you. And in an effort to, like, snap some sense into him, she reveals at that moment that she's pregnant. Sadly, this would be...
He's like, great, two for one. Right. Extra blood. Is that literally what he thought? No, he thought I need to get rid of this problem because I can hide this fake marriage, but I can likely not hide... A whole human. A whole human being that comes into this world that's going to have needs and people are going to wonder where this baby came from. So I got to nix the problem. And there's only one way to do that. There's only one way to do that, apparently. Kill them. Right. So...
That night, he takes Anna to an apartment that he's renting, right? It was kind of like their shag pad. So he's renting this apartment that we heard about earlier in the episode. And while she's lying asleep in bed, he slits her throat from ear to ear so deep that he decapitated her. Oh, my God. So he takes her severed head into the bathroom and he goes out into the bedroom and
And he sees a bleeding body on the bed. And obviously he gets a hard-on. Oh my God, no. What do you mean, obviously? I forgot about that. We're talking about Father Hans Schmidt. So yeah, obviously.
So he rapes. Can you rape a dead corpse? Is it rape? Yeah. Consent is not given. I mean, it's definitely necrophilia because she's dead. It's not sex. I mean, it's not making love. It's something else. It's another category. Wait, so he kills her.
Did he kill her so that he could fuck her? No, he killed her to get rid of the problem. But that was like a nice little side effect. But then it was like a bonus. Like, oh my God, fresh. Oh my God, so hot. This headless chick on my bed. I gotta have it. Gotta have it. And he took it. He's like, where's Fritz? Where's Fritz when I need him?
So he takes the rest of Anna's body because the head's already in the bathtub. So now he takes the recently raped blood
bleeding out body. So much blood. So much blood. He must've got so aroused. I'm sure that he never went down. Oh my God. And he puts her in the bathtub and he takes a saw and he severs all of her limbs. He dismembers her and he wraps all of her body parts in a newspaper. Yep. And then in brown paper bag. And he weighs the bags down with schist, which is this
Heavy rock, typically found in New York, less typically found in New Jersey. He gets on a ferry from New York to New Jersey and he just starts dropping the packages. Oh my God. People in 1913 were wild. Right? You couldn't do that today. Yep. Not that you'd want to. Right. I wouldn't want to. Not that you'd want to.
And the next morning he led morning mass. Like nothing happened. That was a day in the park for him. That was, that was, are you kidding? That was fucking Disneyland for him. That was like the best day of his life. I used to jerk off watching slaughter cows get slaughtered. Right. Yeah. That was probably not, I would not be able to do much after doing that.
I'd have a tough time. I wouldn't be able probably to live after that. No, no. Yeah. For him, that was just like, he wouldn't have done it in the first place. So really we can't speculate what we would do after. Yeah. Cause we never would have done it. Yeah. So three days after he drops all of the body parts into the Hudson river, that's when they wash ashore. And that brings us to the top of the episode where we started.
The fact that Schmidt killed Anna was not in doubt when his trial began. We're up to the trial at this point because remember, Farrow enters the scene when the body parts are found and he...
works his way to being able to identify the killer. He finds him. He finds him. Okay. But when they get to the apartment, he's not there. He's not at the apartment, but they found those letters that were addressed to Anna at St. Boniface. So they go to St. Boniface. Now remember, he didn't work there anymore because he was transferred after molesting altar boys. He was transferred to a different parish. So they followed his trail and they found him and they approached him and he didn't deny it.
Did he think anything was wrong with it? No. Was he like, yeah, why? No, because God ordered him to sacrifice her. So they arrest him and there's a trial, right? And as I said, it's not in doubt whether or not he killed her, right? It's going to be presented by the defense that he was consumed by a bloodlust, right?
and therefore not responsible for his actions. So you combine that bloodlust with hearing voices, right? Remember, he claims to have heard God's voices on multiple occasions, along with his family's long history of mental illness, and they enter a plea of guilty. Guilty by reason of insanity. Okay. They had that back then? They had that back then. Now, for an insanity defense to hold water, defendants must prove to the court that the defendant didn't understand what he was doing,
was unable to distinguish between right and wrong, acted on an uncontrollable impulse or some variety of those factors. Yeah. Right? So remember, the defense isn't saying that Schmidt didn't intend to kill Anna. They're just saying that he'd been suffering from a mental condition that impaired his ability to appreciate that what he was doing was wrong. Which really is, what's the difference?
Like if I was ever to kill somebody, it would definitely be by reason of insanity. I would never like set out to kill somebody and think, okay, I should stop this and stop it and be under. Because you're otherwise mentally healthy. Yeah, that's true. Right. So the prosecution, however, argues that Schmidt's acts were not extraordinary and that both before and during the murder, he knew exactly what he was doing, right? He brought her to the apartment. He bought the knife.
He bought the saw. He did all of that. He executed a pre-calculated plan to kill her and he did it. Yeah. Right. But it all hinges on intent and whether you believe that he intended to kill and whether he understood the consequences of his actions. Okay. Because think about it, right? Like if a child like said,
set something on fire because he likes the way fire looks when it burns and it kills someone. Like he didn't intend to kill that person. Yeah. Right. So it's, it's different than somebody who would intentionally go out. Sure. But I mean, this guy definitely, aside from the hearing the voices in his head, knew what he was doing. A hundred percent. Although I would argue to say, I would make an argument that somebody like him,
really can't be held accountable for anything they do ever. They just need to be locked up. Well, after 34 hours of deliberation, the jury came back on December 30th as hopelessly deadlocked because many people felt the way you did, that he was insane.
And many people didn't like they were deadlocked. They could not come to an agreement. Well, whatever the case is, the guy needs to be locked up. A hundred percent. Yeah. No, that's that. Right. Yeah. It's just, we're going to go into what's really at stake here. Okay. The death penalty. Right. So if somebody is insane, they're not going to execute them.
The judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial, but a second trial followed, and the jurors in this trial were not buying what the defense was selling. They unanimously agreed with the prosecution that Hans had intended to kill Anna, was of clear mind when doing so, knew exactly what he was doing when he was doing it. As clear as someone who sticks the head of a chicken on their penis can be. True, true. Really. And they found him guilty of first-degree murder. Sure, agreed, 100%. Okay.
So that came along with a death penalty, right? Gotta go, dude. Gotta go. Sorry, God told me. February 18th, 1916, Father Hans Schmidt was executed. But I want to ask you how you think he was executed. Was he, did he die by hanging? Did he die by firing squad? Or did he die by electric chair?
Oh, those are all bad. Horrible. Oh my God. 1918, 1916. Firing squad seems a little primitive. Hanging seems a little brutal.
How is that more brutal than any of the other ways I just mentioned? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, like visually brutal, like publicly brutal. I don't know. I didn't say public hanging. Hanging? Nope. Electric chair. Was he like the first one to get electrified? Well, he was the first priest. Oh my God.
So, at 5.50 a.m., he stepped into the death chamber. He was strapped down and restrained to the wooden chair. A brown metal cap with a mask was placed on his head. Yeah. Electrodes were attached to his ankles and his biceps. Probably wouldn't have fit on your biceps. Yeah, because I'm huge. Right? While a priest, ironically, said prayers beside him. In a muffled voice through the mask, Father Hans Schmidt uttered his final words. What?
which were quote, my last word is to say goodbye to my dear old mother. Like this guy's got fucking mommy issues for sure. Right.
The executioner flipped the switch and 1,700 volts of current slammed into his body. How old is he at this point? Well, he was born in... He's pretty young. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do the math. 1960 minus 1881? Yep. 30... Yeah, that's like 60 back then. Yeah, I mean, it's still pretty young. Yeah, no, it's young. It's young. Like, he had dark hair. He wasn't graying. Yeah, yeah. You know, if you see pictures of him. He just had to go. He had to go. This guy had to go.
But he was still alive after that first. Ooh. Yeah. Even though his head was smoking, smoke coming out the top of his head. So a second bolt was administered. And then a third before Father Hans Schmidt was declared dead at 5.58 a.m. He was the first and so far only Catholic priest to be executed in the United States. Wow. Wow.
And that is the story. That's some accolade to have. This guy was a nut job. Nut job. Yeah, I mean, immediately, I didn't really care whether or not they found the intent for the murder. Like, this guy's got a...
This guy's got to go. And he went. I'm not like death penalty. Like I feel like if I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison, I just fuck, just kill me. I think about that all the time actually, because I'm a true crime fanatic. So I'm always hearing these cases. Oh, he was convicted of life in prison or just fucking kill me. Just inject me with some, whatever. Knock me. It just ended. Give me a good time before I go out. But like the whole idea of the death penalty is a very interesting topic, right? Because it's,
You have to figure out why you think prisons exist. If you think they exist for rehabilitation, then why are we killing people? Some people are beyond rehabilitation, potentially. They're trying to determine that. How do you know? I don't. I have no idea. It's a big question to ask. It's a huge question. And answer. And I don't have the answer, but it's something I think about.
Yeah. I mean, but if I was, God forbid, I had a psychotic break and killed, I don't know, somebody and they were like, Hey, Hey, Hey, listen, good morning. I know you're a little groggy right now. You just woke up. You're in a cell. You killed somebody. I'd be like, Oh yeah, I don't want to live anymore. I don't want to live with that fact. Right.
And in prison? More to the point would be, I don't want to wake up every single day and live my life in prison. Yeah. And listen, I would probably be okay in prison. Like I'd be their leader or whatever. Would you have like a partner?
No. A gay partner? Yeah. No. I don't know. I have no idea. Maybe. Listen, maybe there's a Fritz out there for you. Maybe there is a Fritz out there. But I have thought about the fact that I watched this show 60 Days In. Have you ever seen that show? They send normal people into jail for 60 days to like audit the prison. It's insane. Yeah.
There's another show that I watched about somebody who was wrongly convicted and incarcerated for 10 years. Oh, my God. So he goes back into prisons now to do these types of assessments and shed light on just... No, but they act as prisoners. So they wake up, they wear the uniform, they're undercover. Do they come out just completely fucked up? Oh, it's never good. It's never good. Yeah. But I was watching it and I was like...
I would like, I'd be screwed in prison. I make jokes. Like I'd be okay. I'd be screwed because I would want to hang out with the black people and talk about like black people stuff. I don't want to talk about Trump and skinhead shit. Cause I look like a skinhead. They would want me to be their God probably. Cause I'm huge. King of the Aryan race. King of the Aryan race. But I'd be like, no man, I just, you know, you guys like Jay-Z. I wouldn't make it an hour. I'm tiny. Yeah. You'd be screwed. Done. You'd have to be so vicious. I mean, I can be.
Really? Yeah. I can't see that. Oh, come on. Really? Yeah. It's the little ones you got to watch out for. Yeah. All right. Well.
You know, noted, but yeah, no, I would want the death penalty. A hundred percent. Just let's, let's end the charade of me living the same day over and over again behind bars. But yeah. So what if you found Jesus or something and gave you something? I'd want to go to heaven. I found, you know, you can't, you can't, well, right. You wouldn't be killing yourself. You're saying kill me. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, there's really no, I mean, I would take the death penalty right now. I haven't even done anything. Yeah.
Am I that bad? I would just, you know, somebody walked in here right now and they were like, get on your knees, turn around. I remember my grandfather saying,
He used to say, I'm going to go take a nap. Oh, I just wish I could nap forever. And he meant it. He meant it. Actually at his funeral, when I was giving my eulogy and I was really, really close with my grandfather, he was amazing. I opened up my little spiel by saying like, I remember you grandpa saying my whole life that all you wanted to do was nap forever. And like,
Here you have it, you know, and I hope it's everything you dreamed of. Oh my God. Did you cry? During the speech? Yeah. I did cry. He was a really, really funny guy. So I also tried to bring in some of his humor. Yeah. And he lived such a fantastic full life with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and
and all that. But of course I cried. I loved him so much. Yeah, of course. Did you meet him? Did you ever meet him? I don't think so. Maybe. Wait, you were at my wedding, so you met him. Oh yeah. I remember him. Yeah, he was funny. He went in for a nap. Yeah.
And you just did not want to wake up. Yeah. Well, this story was terrible. Thanks for sharing it with me. You're welcome. I mean, do they get worse than this? Yeah, this is scratching the surface. I can't believe there's so many. Listen, you signed up for this. I cannot believe there's so many stories like this. I feel like at some point you're going to go, that's it. That's all the crimes.
Sadly, it's a never-ending will of carbs. Is that why people like it so much? Maybe also because it's infinite? It's like Jay-Z putting out a new song every 10 minutes? Maybe. However often somebody is murdered? Could be. I would like that. You would like that. The quality would start to suffer after a while. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe it'd get better and better because he's sharpening his skill. Right.
But yeah, so thanks for sharing that with me. Thanks for listening. If you're listening. Yeah, well, thank them for listening. Thank you for listening and sticking it out. Say thank you to the computer. I just did. Okay. Did you not see me looking at it? We hope you guys had fun. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, share with your friends. Listen, this is not your average true crime podcast. You know, we're not morose over here. We're not, we're not making fun. We are, but we're not. We're just trying to bring a little levity to a very grave situation.
situation, which is being alive. And that's it. So we'll see you next week. Bye everyone.
