On the afternoon of February 2, 1915, a small, thin man in a corduroy hunting suit with knee breeches and a feathered Alpine cap walked into the district attorney's office in New York and said he had killed eight old people. He gave his name as Frederick Mors. He was an orderly at the German Odd Fellows' Home, which cared for about a hundred elderly men and women and some two hundred and fifty orphans, and he had killed them, he explained, because they were a nuisance and it was time to put them out of their misery. A telephone call to the home confirmed that the eight people he named were dead. All of them had been certified as dying of natural causes.
His real name was Carl Menarik. He was born in Vienna on October 2, 1889, and had come to New York in 1914, speaking little English and wanting to work in medicine. The Immigrant Free Employment Bureau found him a job as a porter at the home, which stood at Unionport, then a village and now part of the Bronx, though several accounts place it in Yonkers. He was soon working as an orderly. He took to wearing a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck and insisted that the old residents address him as Herr Doktor. They were frightened of him. The children and the visitors, oddly, liked him.
Between September 1914 and January 1915 seventeen residents of the home died, far more than usual, and the administration had begun to wonder. By Mors's account eight of those deaths were his. His first killing was done with arsenic he bought from a local druggist, and he found it troublesome. He moved to chloroform. He described the method to the police in detail, through an interpreter, pacing and chain-smoking Egyptian cigarettes as he talked: a drop or two of chloroform on absorbent cotton held to the nostrils until the old person fainted, the ears and nose then stopped with cotton, and more chloroform poured down the throat so that the fumes could not escape.
The police did not simply take his word. Detectives searched the home, closets and all, and found a German manual on poisons at the back of his. The embalmer at the funeral chapel that served the home remembered the body of an old man with raw red burns around the mouth, which he had asked about at the time. Mors told them that he had used too much chloroform that time and that, after the embalmer's question, he had started smearing Vaseline around his victims' mouths before he began. The embalmer's recollection matched.
The eight people he named were Carl Hitzel, 78, whom he said he killed with morphine; Henry Haensel, 67, and Carl Garf, 65, with arsenic; and Katherine Piazza, 75, Mrs. Frederick Drey, 75, Elizabeth Hauser, 70, Henry Horn, 68, and Ferdinand Scholtz, 77, with chloroform. He also claimed that the superintendent of the home had encouraged him to get rid of the oldest and sickest residents. Nothing in the surviving record shows that claim was ever substantiated.
There was no trial. The district attorney judged him criminally insane, and doctors described him as a megalomaniac. He was committed to the Hudson River State Hospital to await deportation to Austria; some later accounts say it was the Matteawan hospital for the criminally insane instead. No court ever heard evidence about the eight deaths, and whether every one of them happened as he described was never tested. What was tested, the poison manual and the embalmer's memory, supported him.
In May 1916 he escaped. Most retellings stop there, or move the escape into the 1920s and say he was never heard from again, but he surfaced in 1917 in Torrington, Connecticut, calling himself Frederick Maurice Beno and working in the first aid department of the Turner & Seymour Company. When he registered for the draft in the First World War he gave the same date of birth as Frederick Mors. He also sent three letters saying he was the man who had killed eight people in New York. In April 1918 he left notes saying he meant to kill himself, and disappeared.
In May 1923 a skeleton was found near Torrington. It had lain there for at least four years, and two bottles believed to have held poison were found beside it. The officials who examined the remains identified them as his, partly from the type of shoes that both Mors and Beno were known to wear. That identification was made from bones and shoes, not by any modern means, and it is the nearest thing to an ending the case has.