In early 1883 a Viennese housemaid named Josefine Timal, thirty-four, met a well-dressed man who said he was a railway engineer and promised to marry her. She gave notice, packed up everything she owned and went off with him on what she believed was the start of their honeymoon, bound for Kraków. Near the Hranice Abyss in Moravia, the flooded chasm the Germans called the Gevatterloch, he raped her. Then his accomplice, Karl Schlossarek, came up, and the two men bound and gagged her, robbed her and threw her into the water weighted with a heavy stone; at the trial Schlossarek said that when she fought back, Schenk cut her throat with a butcher's knife. The man was Hugo Schenk, and she was the first of at least four women he and Schlossarek killed that year.
He was born Hugo Ignatz Rudolf Schenk on February 11, 1849, in Čechy pod Kosířem, in Moravia, the son of Wilhelm Schenk, a judge, and his wife Barbara, whose father was a burgher of Olomouc. One brother became a doctor. Hugo became a swindler. On December 5, 1870, he was sentenced to five years at Mírov for marriage frauds, cheating women out of the dowries they believed they were bringing to him, and was pardoned after two. At thirty-two he was convicted again of marriage fraud and sent for two years to the prison at Stein, where he met Schlossarek, a locksmith serving time for theft. He was released in January 1883.
His method was to answer or place newspaper advertisements, find lonely maids with savings, court them and promise marriage, and then take them out of the city and kill them for their money and belongings. After Josefine Timal disappeared he worried that her aunt Katharina, also a maid, in Budweis, would notice. He wrote to tell her he had married Josefine and invited her to visit his estate. On June 21, 1883, he met her at the station and took her to Krummnußbaum, where he and Schlossarek killed her on the bank of the Danube and sank her body in the river. When it was found, some money was still on it; Schenk told the court that Schlossarek had known about it but forgotten in his hurry. About six weeks later Schenk killed another maid, Theresia Ketterl, in a gorge near Lilienfeld. On December 28, 1883, near Kittsee, Rosa Ferenczy, thirty-three, who had met him through a newspaper advertisement, was walking with him along the Danube when she was struck on the head with an iron hatchet; each man later said the other had struck the blows. Her body went into the river.
Schenk was arrested in Vienna on January 10, 1884, and Schlossarek the next day. Police found the apartments of his brother Karl, a younger office servant who had played a lesser part, and of Schlossarek, while Hugo's own address turned out to be only a mailbox for replies to his advertisements. The three were tried in March 1884 before a special court in Vienna in a case that filled the newspapers. The four murders were enough for death sentences for Schenk and Schlossarek, and they were sentenced in mid-March. Karl Schenk, who was described as intellectually disabled and gravely ill, escaped the gallows. Contemporary suspicion put the number of women Hugo killed at six or more.
On April 22, 1884, the executioner Heinrich Willenbacher and his assistants hanged Schlossarek and then Schenk on the strangling gallows in the courtyard of the Vienna Regional Court. After the execution the neurologist Moritz Benedikt examined Schenk's skull, which is now in the Vienna Criminal Museum; the original gallows is kept at the criminal museum in Scharnstein Castle in Upper Austria. The writer Egon Erwin Kisch later told the story of a woman who survived meeting him in "A Woman Waits for Hugo Schenk."