The Only Priest Sent to the Electric Chair: The True Crimes of Hans Schmidt

0:00 What happens when the person you're taught to trust with your soul is hiding something unspeakable? Is it madness, belief twisted into obsession, or a hunger for control that hides behind ritual and authority? I'm Brittany Ransom and This is When Killers Get Caught, a podcast where we dig into the lives, behavior, and psychology of people who commit the most extreme crimes and what happens after they get caught. In this episode, we're unraveling the story of Hans Schmidt, a Catholic priest who performed forbidden rituals, lived a double life, and committed a murder so brutal it shocked the nation. Because even behind the collar and even behind the altar, the truth always leaves a trail. For centuries, the Catholic priesthood has been associated with moral authority, ritual purity, spiritual guidance. Priests are expected to live apart from ordinary temptations, stay celibate, stay disciplined, and devote themselves entirely to God.

0:52 In many communities, particularly immigrant communities in the late 19th and earliest 20th centuries, priests were not merely religious leaders. They were counseled, moral arbiters, educators, and symbols of stability in unfamiliar lands. Their authority was rarely questioned, and accusations against them were often dismissed outright as simply unthinkable. But that image does not always reflect reality. Long before modern investigations exposed the systemic abuse, institutional secrecy, and patterns of protection within the Catholic Church, there were isolated cases that shattered public trust in the way that felt impossible to reconcile. These cases were rare not because wrongdoing didn't exist, but because the cultural, legal, and religious structures of the time were I'll equipped and often unwilling, to even confront these situations. No case did that more completely than the story of Hans Schmidt. In the early 1900s, Schmidt became the only Catholic priest ever executed in the United States. His crimes were not only brutal but profoundly symbolic. He illegally married a woman in a secret ceremony he performed himself, got her pregnant, and when the risk of exposure became unavoidable, he uttered and dismembered her with chilling deliberation.

2:03 The violence was extreme, but what unsettled the public even more was the way Schmidt framed his actions not as a panic or a rage, but as a ritual sacrifice and a distortion of his faith. As the journalists, investigators and prosecutors began pulling at the threads of Schmidt's life, it became clear that the murder of Anna Amiller was not an isolated act. It was the visible tip of a very dark history that had followed him across multiple continents. Financial fraud, counterfeit money, suspected murders, and patterns of disturbing behavior had been ignored, minimized, or simply transferred away by an institution more concerned with reputation and accountability. This is the story of Hans Schmidt, the priest who preached sacrifice, practice bloodshed, and left behind one of the darkest chapters in American religious and criminal history.

2:52 So the start. Hans Schmidt was born in 1881 in the Bavarian town of Auschenfenburg. It's in Germany a all communities seeped in a very Catholic tradition, the outward measures Schmidt appeared to be an intelligent and deeply religious child. He showed an early interest in church rituals. He memorized his prayers quickly, and he demonstrated A seriousness that adults often mistook for devotion. But beneath that surface were behaviors that, in hindsight, stand out as very troubling. As a child, Schmidt spent long hours watching animals be slaughtered at the local obitor, which is essentially just a butcher. While other children recoiled from the sights and sounds of blood, Schmidt would watch with fascination.

3:34 He would watch them cut the draining of the blood, the methodical separation of the body parts, not with fear, but with calm attention. It wasn't curiosity. It was a fixation. At the same time, Schmidt immersed himself in Catholic ritual. He built homemade altars, reenacted Mass in his home, and played priests pretend with an intensity that went behind normal childhood imagination. That ritual structure and symbolism, it all just seemed to captivate him. Even when he was a young child. The language of sacrifice, the blood offered, the body broken, redemption through suffering very much embedded itself deeply into his worldview. These two fixations, vilas and ritual, did not exist separately. Over time, they started to intertwine. And despite concerns about his temperament and social behavior, Schmidt excited when he was old enough he was going to enter the seminary.

4:27 In the rigid hierarchy of the church, obedience and conformity were especially prized at the time, but Schmidt repeatedly clash with the authority. He was very argumentative, emotionally volatile, and resisted to correction. Nevertheless, though, they ordained him in 19 O four and he was 25 years old, a decision that in retrospect, I think we can all say had pretty devastating consequences almost immediately after he was ordained. Schmidt he can cycling through conflicts with his superiors. Instead of confronting these issues publicly, church officials followed a pattern that will later become infamous. We're just going to reassign him to another church. By 19 O 8, Schmidt was sent away not to reflect or to receive treatment, but they sent him across the Atlantic to the United States pretty much going this won't be our problem right now. Schmidt's first American assignment was St. John's Parish in Louisville, KY, or Louisville, as they like to say, a growing community with a very strong young immigrant Catholic population.

5:26 And once again, conflict followed him. Parishioners started complaining that he had a very short temper, he was very erratic, and he honestly had a lot of unsettling intensity. People would have meetings with him and and they said the way that he would just stare at them, creep them out. But instead of investigation or discipline, the solution was relocating him again. And this time they sent him in New York City. He gets assigned to Saint Boniface Church in Manhattan where he encountered a woman, Anna Omeler. Anna was a young Austrian immigrant. She had recently arrived in the US. She was employed as a housekeeper and she was kind of the perfect victim. She was isolated, financially dependent and very far from her family and support system.

6:11 The power and balance between him being her preacher, her priest, was severe. It wasn't just priest and employee, but also the spiritual authority and subordinate laborer. The relationship started very quietly, but it couldn't remain hidden for too long. When Schmidt got transferred again, this time to Saint Joseph's Church in West Harlem, the relationship continued in secret. The church's frequent relocations and tended to manage internal problems discreetly. Instead allowed Schmidt to maintain a double life. And on February 2013, he pretty much crossed the line where you can't go back. He performed a marriage ceremony himself, secretly marrying him to Anna, and under Catholic law, the ceremony was invalid. In fact, the ACT is considered to be a very serious sacrilege. Priests are forbidden to marry and and he had no authority to perform a sacrament that would only benefit himself. But to Schmidt, this ritual mattered more than law. The structure of the ceremony, the symbolism, the act of binding for all things that he valued. And for Schmidt, rules existed to be manipulated. In the summer of 1913, Anna told Schmidt she was pregnant. For Schmidt, this was not simply a scandal. It was an existential threat.

7:29 Exposure would mean he'd be defrocked, publicly humiliated, and possibly put in prison. He wasn't entirely sure. Unlike previous conflicts, this was not something that a transfer would fix. Instead of fleeing or confessing, he just started planning. He rented an apartment for Anna in northern Manhattan, claiming it was for one of his relatives coming from abroad. He purchased a butcher's knife and a hacksaw, gathered heavy pieces of Manhattan schist, a detail that would later actually unravel his plan. And these actions were not impulsive. They were calculated, deliberate, and methodical. For folks who don't know, schist is a shiny olated metamorphic rock that's characterized by very flaky, minimal grains, kind of like mica powder that people put in resin projects. The only reason why I know anything about it because I do things with resin.

8:20 He decided that everything was going to go down September 2nd, 1913, and he goes to Anna's apartment. First, he slashes her throat with a knife, severs several major blood vessels, and then, with chilling calm, he decapitated her, sawed her body in half, wrapped each sex in a newspaper dated August 31st, suggesting that he had been preparing. This was not just improvised. And then the lower half was placed inside of a pillowcase that was embroidered with a monogrammed letter A. To each piece, Schmidt tied heavy stones. He believed that if he just dumped her in the river, it would erase everything. After he dumped Anna's remains in the Hudson River, trusting that gravity water would conceal the crime. Surprised they didn't.

9:04 Three days later, children on the New Jersey shoreline found a woman's torso and then further downriven further downriver in Weehawken, the lower half of the body surface still wrapped in that distinctive pillow case. The case crossed 8 lines with the New York Police Department took control due to the nature of the evidence. The autopsy revealed the victim was under 30, had recently been pregnant, and had likely given birth prematurely before her death. Then came the pillowcase. Police traced the embroidered A to a linen manufacturer that kept meticulous records. Those records LED directly to Anna Omeler's apartment and inside, the investigators found blood splatter across the walls and the floors Scrubbed, but not a race. 6 bars of soap and a scrubbing brush sat next to the sink and in a trunk they found the butcher's knife and the hacksaw.

9:56 In another, they found letters that had been written to Schmidt. The The plan fell apart in just a few days. When detectives confronted Schmidt at Saint Joseph's Church, he didn't deny what he did. He in fact, he confessed almost immediately. And he told the police, I loved her. Sacrifices should be consummated in blood. That statement set the investigators off. They were completely shocked because Schmidt wasn't framing these murders as fear or desperation, but as a ritual. Love, sacrifice and blood inseparable. In his mind, this wasn't remorse, it was justification. And when that information went out to the press, it caused a frenzy.

10:39 It was everywhere, on the cover of every newspaper across the country. Not only had a priest killed someone, but in quite possibly one of the worst ways. Schmidt's first trial began December of 1913. His lawyers never contested the facts, only that it was obvious that he was insane. They argued that he was driven by religious delusions and an uncontrollable bloodlust. And for 20-3 days, this trial went on and the newspapers published every single detail. Schmidt became a spectacle, a symbol of what happens when faith is corrupted. But the jury just couldn't decide. Deadlocked 1:50 At his second trial, the judge issued a warning urging jurors to apply common sense.

11:25 Premeditation, planning and concealment are incompatible with legal insanity. And this time, Schmidt was convicted of first degree murder on February 18th, 1916. He was executed at Sing Sing Prison via electric chair at just 35 years old. And to this day, he remains the only Catholic priest to ever be executed in the United States. Now after Schmidt's conviction, journalist started really digging into his life and what they realized was virtually at every location where Schmidt had been transferred, something a little weird happened. Like they realized that he operated A counterfeit printing press and he had planned insurance fraud with a dentist named Ernest Arthur Murray.

12:14 Then when he was in Louisville, the body of a missing 9 year old girl was found dismembered in the basement of the church where he worked, Saint John's Parish. They blamed A janitor, but the mutilation after the case in New York came out made those police go. Maybe we got this wrong. German authorities later linked Schmidt to a murdered girl in his hometown, but he had never been questioned. We really don't know how many victims Schmidt had and Hans execution managed to close only one case, but not really the larger question. Was he a single year monster or warning sign that was just ignored?

12:54 I think for most of us who are millennials, we remember when we were in high school how the Catholic Church got pulled into the public eye because of this same kind of mindset. And for me, as I was researching this, it was pretty shocking to me that they have been hiding the indiscretions of priests for over 100 years. For some reason, I just thought this was something that happened in the 60s and 70s in the US, you know, a sign of our times in our country. So it's kind of crazy to realize that there could be a lot more men like Hans Schmidt who have lived and killed while hiding themselves amongst the Catholic Church.

13:37 I think also his story reveals how authority Shields predators. And I think we see that time and time again in modern day institutions choose silence over accountability and belief gets twisted into justification for violence. It's definitely a lot to think about and I would love to know know what you guys have to say about it. I know this first episode was a little shorter, but I'm just getting back into the swing of things. Just want to remind you all, thank you for listening. I'm Brittany Ransom. The truth always leaves a trail, and in Schmidt's case, that trail LED straight to the electric chair. Thanks for listening.