Schenk was born in 1849 in Moravia and lived in Vienna. He was educated, well dressed and plausible, and he worked with an accomplice, Karl Schlossarek, and with his own brother Karl Schenk.
He answered advertisements and approached young women in domestic service, courted them, promised marriage, and persuaded them to withdraw their savings for the new household. He then took them out of the city and killed them. Between May and December 1883 he killed Josephine Timal, her sister Katharina, Therese Ketterl and Rosa Ferenczy, by shooting or drowning. The bodies were left in the Danube and in fields outside Vienna. The Viennese press called him the Housemaids Killer, after the women he courted.
He was arrested on January 10, 1884 after the last victim's family pressed the police and a pawn ticket was traced.
He was tried in Vienna in a case that filled the newspapers of the empire, convicted, and hanged on April 22, 1884, along with Schlossarek. His brother received a long prison sentence.
Four victims are established. The stated range reflects further disappearances of servant women attributed to him at the time and never proved. The case is significant in Austrian legal history as an early instance in which police used the victims' financial records, withdrawals, pawn tickets, savings-book entries, as the spine of a murder investigation.