Marie Walcker died a little before dawn on January 12, 1905, in a rented cottage at 6430 Union Avenue on the South Side of Chicago, a month and two days after her wedding. Her sister Amelia Fischer had spent the night downstairs on a lounge. Later that morning, while the two of them were stripping the bed, the widower asked Fischer to marry him. She told him her sister was not yet buried. He said that made no difference: the dead belonged to the dead and the living to the living.
The man was calling himself Johann Hoch. He was born John Schmidt in 1855 at Horrweiler in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, now in Rhineland-Palatinate, and Hoch was only the latest and best known of the names he used in America. Within a week of that proposal he had married the sister and taken her money, and within a month the police had exhumed his wife and found arsenic. The Illinois Supreme Court, reviewing the case later that year, observed that there had been practically no dispute at trial about what had happened. The argument was over what had killed her.
He had arrived in Chicago on November 8, 1904, eight days after walking out on another wife. On October 20, under the name John Schmidt, he had married Caroline Streicher in Philadelphia; he stayed eleven days. In Chicago he registered at a hotel on East Sixty-third Street as J. Hoch of St. Louis and told the proprietor he was a foreman at the Pullman shops on vacation. On November 16 he rented the cottage on Union Avenue for $21.50 a month, telling the owner, a man named Vail at the Chicago City Bank, that he ran a canning crew of twenty-five or thirty men at Armour & Co. at $125 a month. He showed his calloused hands, and Vail asked nothing more. He told a furniture salesman that he owned the cottage, had been a widower for four years and was thinking of marrying again, and bought $120 of furniture for it.
On December 3 he placed a notice in the Abend Post, Chicago's German evening paper: a childless German widower at the end of his thirties, with his own home, sought the acquaintance of a lady with a view to matrimony. Marie Walcker answered it. She was about forty-six, divorced, and had made her living washing and cleaning houses until she saved enough to buy a small candy store at 12 Willow Street. Her sister Bertha Sohn wrote the reply for her: she was a woman standing alone, forty-five, with a little business and a few hundred dollars.
The suitor came to the store on December 6. He told her he had $8,000, a house and a large lot, that his first wife had died after eighteen years of illness, and that he stood to inherit $15,000 from an old father in Germany. The next day he took her to see the house. On Saturday, December 10, she sold the store for $75 that morning, handed him that money and the $80 she kept under her mattress, and they went downtown and were married. Then they stopped at the bank, where she drew her savings of $270 and gave him that too.
Within the week a friend found her sitting pale in a rocking chair with sunken eyes. By December 18 she had eruptions around her mouth and had turned yellow. Hoch called in a doctor from a nearby drugstore, Joseph Reese, on December 20, and bought a two-quart syringe and rubber sheeting for the bed. Reese diagnosed nephritis and cystitis, inflammation of the kidneys and the bladder, and visited daily. She vomited almost everything she drank, suffered a violent thirst, and told her sister it felt as though ants were crawling through her body. Hoch kept her supplied with seltzer water from a saloon, which the doctor had not ordered, and prepared frequent enemas, which the doctor had not prescribed either, telling her relatives that he had.
Throughout, he played the devoted husband. He kissed her in the mornings, called her pet names, and wrote to her sisters that she must recover if it cost him thousands. He also wrote to Amelia Fischer, whom he had learned kept money in the same bank, thanked her for a photograph and said he would carry it on his breast. Walking her to the streetcar one evening, he told her that if he had met her four weeks sooner he would have married her. A professional nurse was hired on January 5 and left on the night of the tenth. On the eleventh his wife, by then jealous, told him to go and marry her sister after she was dead. She died the next morning. Reese, who had no suspicion of poison, signed a death certificate for nephritis and cystitis, and she was buried in Oakwoods Cemetery on January 15.
Hoch married Amelia Fischer in Joliet on January 18. The next day she drew $750 from her account and gave it to him so that he could, he said, pay off the house. When the couple arrived at her flat on Wells Street, a neighbor stopped them in the hall: Bertha Sohn was inside telling everyone that he had poisoned her sister and was a swindler. He said he felt unwell and would sit down for a minute. When his new wife came back to the parlor he was gone.
On January 21 the body was exhumed. The coroner's physicians found nothing in the organs that could account for death, and 7.6 grains of arsenic in the stomach, with more in the liver; two grains was enough to kill. Chicago's Inspector George Shippy, who had been collecting complaints about Hoch for years, had his photograph sent to newspapers across the country. In New York he had taken a room with a landlady, Catherine Kimmerle, and proposed to her. She refused, and on January 30 the police took him at 546 West Forty-seventh Street, where he was living as Henry Bartells. Among his things was a fountain pen with no nib. Its reservoir held fifty-eight grains of white powder.
To the inspector he gave the name John Joseph Adolph Hoch and said he had used another because he did not want a sister-in-law to find him. He called the powder tooth powder. On the train back to Chicago an officer told him it would be analyzed, and he said there was no use: it was arsenic, bought to kill himself when he heard he was wanted for bigamy, though he had decided to come back and face the murder charge instead. He named the place in New York where he had bought it. The prosecution later proved that the drugstore there did not sell fountain pens and had sold him no arsenic. Within a week of his arrest five women he had married had identified him, and on February 23 a coroner's jury charged him with Marie Walcker's murder.
Behind Chicago lay fifteen years of the same routine. His only lawful wife, Christine Ramb, had borne him three children in Germany before he deserted her in 1887. In America he found women through matrimonial advertisements, married them quickly, took what they had, and then disappeared, often adopting the surname of the latest bride. Between 1890 and 1905, by the count usually given, he married at least fifty-five women. The trail ran through Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Baltimore, San Francisco, Jersey City, Dayton and small towns in Indiana.
Some of the women died. In Milwaukee in 1893, as Dr. James, he married Lena Schmitz and then her sister Clara, and both died. In Chicago in August 1895 he married Maria Steimbucher, who said before she died four months later that she had been poisoned; no one acted on it, and he sold her property for four thousand dollars. Clara Bartel of Cincinnati died three months after marrying him in 1896. In Wheeling, West Virginia, by later accounts, investigators exhumed a wife named Caroline in search of arsenic and found that the organs had been removed. Others lost only their money: Julia Dose of Hamilton, Ohio, saw him leave on their wedding day, and Callie Charlotte Andrews two hours after the ceremony. In 1903 Mabel Leichmann, a bride of three days, survived an attempt to poison her.
None of those deaths was ever tried. The Chicago police called him the country's greatest mass murderer and the papers called him the Stockyard Bluebeard, but Shippy's department claimed certainty about fifteen killings, and the reports of twenty-five to fifty were never proved. Modern counts differ as well; the historian Richard Lindberg put the marriages at thirty-five and the killings at ten or more. The one death a jury considered was Marie Walcker's.
The trial opened in the Criminal Court of Cook County in May 1905. Witness after witness spoke German through an interpreter. At one point the judge, who understood the language, helped translate Bertha Sohn's description of her sister's crawling skin. Newspaper accounts describe Hoch whistling, humming and twirling his thumbs while the prosecution put on its case.
The defense's one serious line was the body itself. Before the inquest his lawyer had told reporters that the corpse was embalmed with a fluid containing arsenic. The state answered that point by point. The undertaker had used letheform, which contains none, and had no arsenical fluid on hand; none of Reese's medicines contained it; the wallpaper in the sickroom was analyzed and cleared. A second exhumation on April 24 found arsenic as a white powder in the folds of the colon, mixed with blood and mucus, which the state's pathologists said could only be the product of a living body. Reese, called as a witness, conceded that he had made his diagnosis without any thought of poison and that if arsenic had been given in life it was the cause of death. The one expert who testified for Hoch said that the arsenic might have leached in from cemetery soil and that he could not rule out sunstroke, diphtheria, appendicitis or fright. The jury did not believe him.
The most contested ruling concerned Amelia Fischer. A wife could not testify against her husband in Illinois. The prosecution brought a witness from Philadelphia who said Caroline Streicher was alive and had never divorced Hoch, and Hoch had admitted he had never been divorced. Because the marriage in Joliet was therefore void, the court let Fischer take the stand. Hoch was convicted on May 19, and the jury fixed the penalty at death. He told the court, by the accounts of reporters present, that it was all over with Johann and that it served him right.
Newspaper chronologies date the sentence to June 23, 1905; the judgment as quoted by the Supreme Court names June 25 for the hanging, and the record does not reconcile the two dates. A Chicago woman named Cora Wilson, who said she had never met him but wanted him to have every chance, advanced the money for an appeal, and Amelia Fischer, the wife he had robbed, tried to save him. Governor Charles Deneen granted reprieves, first to July 28 and then, within an hour of the hanging, to August 25. Before that date Justice Magruder of the Illinois Supreme Court granted a writ of error that acted as a stay.
The full court heard the case and affirmed. Chief Justice James Cartwright's opinion in Hoch v. People rejected every assignment of error: Fischer was competent because the bigamous marriage was void; Hoch's statements in New York and Chicago were explanations, not confessions, made after he had been warned; the hypothetical question put to the experts fairly stated the evidence. On the central question, whether the arsenic had been given in life by Hoch, the court listed what had persuaded the jury: his lies about money and work, his proposal to his wife's sister over her deathbed, the arsenic in his pen, the motive of gain, and his flight from the flat on Wells Street. The court denied a rehearing on February 8, 1906.
The hanging was set for February 23, 1906. That morning his lawyer, Frank D. Comerford, went to the federal court in Chicago and asked Judge Landis for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that Hoch's rights under the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated because Amelia Fischer had been pressured into testifying against him and into perjury. Landis refused, and at 1:32 that afternoon, by one account of the day, Hoch climbed the gallows in the jail behind the Criminal Courts Building. The last words most often given for him are a prayer: "Oh Lord, our Father, forgive them all. They know not what they do. They hang an innocent man. I am innocent. Goodbye." Other versions differ. No cemetery wanted him; Waldheim, which had buried the Haymarket anarchists, refused outright, and on February 24 he was buried in an unmarked grave in the potter's field at the Cook County poor farm at Dunning.