On December 10, 1904, a Chicago widow named Marie Walcker married a man calling himself Johann Otto Hoch. She sold her candy store for seventy-five dollars and gave him her life savings of three hundred and fifty. On December 20 she fell ill, and on January 12, 1905, she died. Three days later, in Joliet, Hoch married her sister, Emilie Fischer, who gave him several hundred dollars; he left when another of the sisters denounced him as a murderer and a swindler. The police exhumed Marie Walcker's body and found arsenic.
Hoch was the last and best-known of the names used by John Schmidt, born in 1855 at Horrweiler in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, now in Rhineland-Palatinate. His only legal wife, Christine Ramb, bore him three children before he deserted her in 1887. He came to the United States and dropped his surname for a rotation of others, often taking the surname of his latest wife. He found women through matrimonial advertisements, married them quickly, got their money, and then left them or killed them with arsenic. Between 1890 and 1905 he married at least fifty-five women bigamously.
The trail ran through Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Baltimore, San Francisco, Jersey City, Dayton and small towns in Indiana. 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 declared 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. Many others lost their money and saw him disappear within hours or days: Julia Dose of Hamilton, Ohio, the same day; Callie Charlotte Andrews two hours after the wedding. In 1903 a bride of three days, Mabel Leichmann, survived an attempt to poison her.
After Marie Walcker's death he fled east. On January 30, 1905, in New York City, using the name Harry Bartells, he proposed to his landlady, Catherine Kimmerle. She refused, and he was arrested. Two days later he was indicted for bigamy, and within a week five more of his wives had identified him. The Chicago police called him America's greatest mass murderer, but they were certain of fifteen killings, and sensational reports of twenty-five to fifty were never proved.
He was tried for one murder, Marie Walcker's, and convicted on May 19, 1905. He turned pale, stared at the jurors and sank in his chair. He was sentenced to death on June 23, and told a guard he preferred the gallows to life in prison. A woman named Cora Wilson advanced money for an appeal. On August 24, the day before the scheduled hanging, Justice Magruder of the Illinois Supreme Court stayed it for a full review, and Emilie Fischer tried to save him. On December 16 the court declined to intervene. He was hanged in Chicago on February 23, 1906.