On January 12, 1905, a woman named Marie Walcker died in a rented cottage on the South Side of Chicago, about a month after her wedding. Her husband, a German immigrant who called himself Johann Hoch, was courting her sister within hours, and married her a few days later. He borrowed $750 from the new bride and disappeared. When the dead woman's body was exhumed, it held a large amount of arsenic. Hoch was arrested in New York at the end of January, brought back to Chicago, convicted of his wife's murder, and hanged in the Cook County jail on February 23, 1906.
That one conviction is the whole of his legal record for killing. The rest of what is said about him rests on the work of police, reporters and one persistent pastor, who traced a man of many names through marriages, desertions and deaths across the Midwest over about ten years. In 1964 the magazine American Heritage put the number of women he married at roughly 43 to 50 and wrote that about a third of them were murdered with arsenic, while conceding that the true figure was unknown. A Chicago Daily News photograph caption from February 1905 described him more cautiously, as accused of bigamy with between 11 and 23 wives and suspected of killing six of them. Only the death of Marie Walcker was ever put before a jury.
Johann Hoch was the name he died under, and the one the newspapers made famous, but it was not the name he was born with. When a pastor in Wheeling, West Virginia, wrote to Germany in 1898 asking who the man was, a prosecutor in Mainz named Rung replied that he was a merchant called Jacob Schmidt, born on November 10, 1862, at Herrweiler near Bingen on the Rhine, who had left Germany on January 5, 1895, while a warrant for fraudulent bankruptcy was out against him. That is the account given by A. I. Schutzer in American Heritage. A 2020 history of the Wheeling case by Will Wallace for the local news site Weelunk gives a different version: that he was born John Schmidt at Horweiler in 1855 and came to the United States in 1883. CBS Chicago, in 2021, said only that his real name may have been John, Johann or Jacob Schmidt.
Schutzer pieced together an outline of his earlier life. In that account he served an apprenticeship as a metalworker and then worked in pharmacy; married a first wife in Vienna in 1881, who was buried in 1883; and then married a woman named Christine Ramb, with whom he had four children. He emigrated to America in 1888. A fellow passenger on that crossing reported in 1905 that the man had courted and married a servant girl on board and left her about two months later.
The list of names he used in America is long. American Heritage counted about eighteen, among them Jacob Schmidt, Albert Huschberg, Count Otto von Kern, Jacob Erdorf, Henry Martels, Dr. Hart, Martin Dotz, H. Frick, Jacob Huff, DeWitt C. Cudney, Heinrich Valtz and Henry Bartels. He often took the surname of a woman's previous husband. Schutzer described him in middle age as a man with side whiskers, a chin beard and a mustache, gold-rimmed spectacles, light blue eyes, one drooping eyelid and large teeth.
A Chicago furniture dealer later gave police his records of the man's purchases. They ran from June 1891, the magazine reported, and each new household was furnished under a new name, often the name of a dead husband. In 1894, as Jacob Erdorf, he married a woman who, by the magazine's account, lost $1,800 to him; her sister lost $800. By the account in American Heritage he had also lost money speculating in barley, and by January 1895 he was in flight from debt.
Early in February 1895 a man calling himself Jacob Huff opened a saloon in Wheeling, a river city in the West Virginia panhandle. He began courting well-off German-speaking widows, some of them members of the congregation of the Rev. Herman C. A. Haass, pastor of St. Matthew's German Lutheran Church. Haass advised caution. One of the widows, Caroline Hoch, married Huff anyway, on April 18, 1895.
Weelunk described her as Caroline Miller by birth and a longtime member of St. Paul's Evangelical Protestant Church. She had married in 1885 and was widowed in 1892. It was her married name, Hoch, that her new husband would later adopt as his own.
She fell ill soon after the wedding. Her doctor, H. T. Ford, believed she had nephritis, a disease of the kidneys. Another physician, Gregory Ackerman, visited and declined to step in because she was Ford's patient; his account of that visit appeared ten years later, in the New York American. Caroline Hoch died in the early hours, on June 15, 1895, according to Weelunk. Haass came to suspect Huff, American Heritage reported.
Huff then staged his own death. Weelunk reported that by the end of June his belongings, with a suicide note, had been found on the shore of the Ohio River; American Heritage, which put the scene on a Monday early in July, described his clothes, his derby, a note and an old German silver pocket watch left on the bank, with bare footprints leading into the water. Police dragged the river and found nothing. Witnesses later said, according to Weelunk, that a man who looked like Huff had left a rowboat at Bellaire, Ohio, and bought a train ticket to Chicago. About a week after the supposed suicide, a traveling salesman reported seeing him alive across the river; Haass passed this on to the police, who did not reply. Weelunk wrote that he had emptied his wife's bank account, sold her house and collected her life insurance.
Inside the watch was his photograph. That picture became the pastor's most important piece of evidence.
Haass did not let the matter drop. In the years after 1895 he read obituaries, marriage notices and personal advertisements from across the country, looking for a man who married quickly and moved on. American Heritage wrote that he found a case in Dayton, Ohio, involving an Otto Hoch; an 1897 death in Cincinnati linked to a John Schmidt; and a case in Milwaukee involving a Jacob Otto Hoch. Weelunk compared the matrimonial advertisements he studied to a modern dating app.
In 1898 Chicago police arrested a man calling himself Martin Dotz on charges of bigamy and fraud. The complaint involved the furniture dealer whose records would later trace the man's households back to 1891. Haass saw that the description fit, and he wrote to Luke Colleran, the Chicago chief of detectives, enclosing the photograph from the watch. Inspector George Shippy showed it to the prisoner, who admitted that it was his picture but denied ever having been in Wheeling.
In a letter dated November 1, 1898, Colleran identified the prisoner as Jacob Adolph Hoch, said he was serving a year for bigamy under the name Dotz or Doesing, and urged that he be indicted for murder in Wheeling. Haass took his file to William C. Meyer, the state's attorney there. Caroline Hoch's body was exhumed on November 14, 1898, but nothing remained that could be tested for poison. It was at this point that Haass wrote to Germany and received the prosecutor's reply naming Jacob Schmidt.
The case stalled for want of evidence. The man was taken to Wheeling on June 30, 1900, American Heritage reported, and was freed about two weeks later. No charge in Caroline Hoch's death was ever tried.
The account in American Heritage follows him through several more marriages after his release. In Argos, Indiana, as Albert Huschberg, he married a widow and collected $2,000 in insurance money. He took her and her daughter, who was fifteen, to Chicago. Both of them, and about $1,500, were not seen again, according to the magazine; no charge was brought over their disappearance.
In 1901 his trail led to a widow in San Francisco. He obtained a mail-order diploma in hypnotism from a school in Jackson, Michigan. One woman he married refused the treatments he wanted to give her. In St. Paul, in 1902, he worked a swindle as Count Otto von Kern. On June 18, 1903, calling himself Dr. G. L. Hart, he married a woman in Milwaukee, and American Heritage reported that he later tried to chloroform her in Minneapolis. She survived.
In December 1904 an advertisement in the Abendpost, a German-language Chicago newspaper, brought him to Marie Walcker. American Heritage spelled her name Welker; CBS Chicago used Walcker. CBS described her as a widow who ran a candy store in the Lincoln Park area, and reported that he persuaded her to sell the store and took her savings. American Heritage wrote that they married nine days after they met, that he borrowed $475 from her, and that he set up house with her in a rented cottage on the South Side.
She soon fell ill. A Dr. Reese treated her for nephritis. She died on January 12, 1905, about a month after the wedding. That same night, according to American Heritage, he was courting her sister in the kitchen. The sister had mentioned that she had about $1,000 in savings. They married on January 16, 1905, the magazine reported. She advanced him $750, and that night he vanished.
The sister went to the police. On January 22, 1905, Marie Walcker's body was exhumed, and it was found to contain a large amount of arsenic.
In New York he had taken a room in a Manhattan boardinghouse under the name Henry Bartels. CBS Chicago reported that he proposed marriage to the woman who kept the house; she refused and went to the police. American Heritage wrote that she recognized him from a picture in a newspaper.
He was arrested on January 30, 1905. Police found a revolver, a large sum of cash, and a fountain pen containing about 58 grains of arsenic. When one of the women he had married identified him, he admitted who he was. "I am Hoch," he said, according to American Heritage, "and I am a much abused man." He was returned to Chicago to face the murder charge.
In Chicago a Daily News photographer pictured him in February 1905 in a room with four other men. The caption to that photograph calls him an accused bigamist and murderer, accused of bigamy with between 11 and 23 wives and suspected of having killed six of them.
His arrest also brought Haass back into the story. By 1905 the pastor was serving a church in Utica, New York, and the press called him "Hoch's Nemesis." He gave a newspaper interview about the case he had pursued for a decade. Weelunk credits Haass, Shippy and several of the women who survived marriage to Hoch with bringing about his arrest and conviction.
Hoch went on trial in Chicago for the murder of Marie Walcker on April 19, 1905. A month after the trial opened, he was found guilty. His first words after the verdict, as American Heritage reported them, were "It serves me right."
While he waited in the county jail for his execution, the magazine noted, he received several proposals of marriage. CBS Chicago reported that he was convicted of Marie Walcker's murder in 1905 and hanged at the old county jail gallows the following February.
Johann Hoch was hanged at the Cook County jail in Chicago on February 23, 1906.
Before he died, Hoch gave a reporter a piece of advice that American Heritage used to close its account: women were fine in their place, he said, but a man should marry only one at a time.
Counts of Hoch's marriages, and of the women who died during them, vary widely. American Heritage gave roughly 43 to 50 marriages over about eighteen years, and estimated that about a third of the women were killed with arsenic, but said plainly that the exact total was unknown. The Chicago Daily News caption of 1905 spoke of 11 to 23 wives and six suspected killings. CBS Chicago cited the 1964 magazine figure and noted a suggestion by the writer Tony Szabelski that the number of marriages may have reached 55.
None of those figures was tested in court. The death of Caroline Hoch in Wheeling was investigated, and her body was exhumed in 1898, but no charge was tried. An 1897 death in Cincinnati, and the disappearance of a widow from Argos, Indiana, and her daughter, are known as cases that Haass or later writers linked to him. The deaths and disappearances outside the Walcker case remain suspected, not proved.
Accounts also differ on basic facts of his life. The German prosecutor's reply of 1898 gave his birth year as 1862; the Wheeling history of 2020 gave 1855. American Heritage dated his emigration to 1888; Weelunk dated it to 1883. CBS Chicago said he reached Chicago in 1895, while the furniture dealer's records described in American Heritage traced his purchases there to 1891. American Heritage dated Caroline Hoch's death from the pastor's visit of June 14, 1895, and Weelunk gave it as June 15. The magazine put the staged drowning in early July 1895; Weelunk said his belongings were found by the end of June.
In Wheeling, Haass's part in the case has been retold as local history; Weelunk's 2020 account presented the pastor as the man whose suspicion, formed at a sickbed in 1895, led to Hoch's capture a decade later. In Chicago, CBS Chicago retold his case in 2021 in a feature on reported hauntings at the site of the old county jail, citing Szabelski's account that his ghost was seen there shortly after his death.
1855 or November 10, 1862: birth, as given by different accounts (Horweiler, 1855, per Weelunk; Herrweiler near Bingen, 1862, per the German prosecutor's reply quoted in American Heritage).
1883 or 1888: emigration to the United States, as given by different accounts.
June 1891: first of the Chicago furniture purchases later traced to him under a series of names.
1894: as Jacob Erdorf, marries a woman who, by the American Heritage account, lost $1,800 to him.
February 1895: as Jacob Huff, opens a saloon in Wheeling, West Virginia.
April 18, 1895: marries the widow Caroline Hoch in Wheeling.
June 14, 1895: the Rev. Herman C. A. Haass visits the sick Caroline Hoch.
June 15, 1895: Caroline Hoch dies (Weelunk).
Late June or early July 1895: his clothes, a note and a watch with his photograph are found on the Ohio River bank; no body is found.
1897: a woman's death in Cincinnati, later linked to him by Haass.
1898: arrested in Chicago as Martin Dotz on bigamy and fraud charges.
November 1, 1898: Chicago's chief of detectives writes that the prisoner is serving a year for bigamy and urges a murder indictment in Wheeling.
November 14, 1898: Caroline Hoch's body is exhumed in Wheeling; no poison evidence remains.
June 30, 1900: taken to Wheeling; freed about two weeks later for lack of evidence.
1902: swindle in St. Paul as Count Otto von Kern.
June 18, 1903: as Dr. G. L. Hart, marries a woman in Milwaukee; later accused of trying to chloroform her.
December 1904: meets and marries Marie Walcker in Chicago after a newspaper advertisement.
January 12, 1905: Marie Walcker dies.
January 16, 1905: marries her sister, takes $750 from her and disappears.
January 22, 1905: Marie Walcker's body is exhumed; arsenic is found.
January 30, 1905: arrested in Manhattan, living as Henry Bartels; arsenic found in a fountain pen.
February 1905: photographed in Chicago as an accused bigamist and murderer.
April 19, 1905: trial for the murder of Marie Walcker opens in Chicago.
A month later: found guilty of murder.
February 23, 1906: hanged at the Cook County jail, Chicago.