On Saturday, September 6th, 1913, police discovered a portion of a woman's torso on the shore of the Hudson River. Two days later, fisherman found more pieces of the body in a pillowcase that had been sunk to the bottom of the river with a rock. For the following two weeks, newsmen delivered the gruesome facts of the case with surprisingly tasteful restraint while sifting through the influx of speculations and false-leads for the New York area's captive readers.
A rambling letter sent anonymously to police called the girl "Ella" and implicated a New York physician, offering detectives a handful a rough clues. None of these clues worked out, however, and police turned their attention to another physician who may have been a love interest of one Annette Day, as whom the body was tentatively identified.
Annette's brother and sister both swore her resemblance to the body, but were later proved wrong. Poor Casper Janin thought it was his wife Lena for a few days, but she turned up alive when police searched the house of a boyfriend who lived across town- doubly embarrassing since Casper positively identified the torso as his wife's at the morgue. Dr. Stamets thought it was his wife, and Mr. Sterneman swore it was his daughter, but they were all wrong.
The woman in the river was in fact Anna Aumueller, an Austrian-born housekeeper, and the detective who identified her and captured her killer was Inspecter Joseph A. Faurot. The event marked Faurot's ascent into celebrity, and of this we're quite glad, because as it turns out, Inspector Joseph Faurot was host so many adventures that a woman with an extremely familiar looking torso was just the tip of the iceberg.
- Finds killer priest using soaked pillow case
The pillowcase reeled in by those fishermen was traced to its manufacturer, who turned over records on the sale of that particular pattern. Inspector Fauro traced every purchase of pillows from Sach's second hand store, eliminating suspects one at a time. The trail eventually led to an apartment on Bradhurst Ave. under the name "A. van Dyke". That apartment contained tell-tail blood spray, postcards addressed to St. Boniface Church on 2nd Ave. and 47th with attention to Anna Aumueller , and a torn picture of a man.
When detectives questioned the priest at St. Boniface, he told them that Anna had worked as a housekeeper in their rectory but had been let go two weeks prior for health reasons. He also identified the man in the picture as Father Schmidt, of St. Joseph's on West 125th.
As soon as Faurot arrived at St. Joseph's, he spotted Schmidt and began questioning. Within minutes, Father Schmidt cracked and rode back with police to the apartment on Bradhurst to give a detailed confession.
But Father Schmidt wasn't just a murderer. When Faurot searched the rectory at St. Josephs, he found a rent receipt for an apartment on West 134th. There, police discovered an elaborate counterfeiting operation. And that's not all, police also uncovered a box full of blank death certificates. After the arrests of Schimdt and his counterfeiting partner Dr. Earnest Muret, a local physician came forward and told police that the duo had approached him with a scam to insure a handful of future victims and kill them for the policy money.
After a first trial in which Schmidt fained insanity ended with a hung jury, a second trial led to his conviction and he was hanged in 1916. He remains the only Roman Catholic priest ever to be sentenced to death in the U.S.
- Lives inside awesome buddy-cop comedy
The New Oxford Item of May 11, 1916, quotes Jacksonville, Florida Chief of Police F.C. Roach with: "There's too many confidence men about our fair city. I don't care as long as they confine their infernal machinations to the Yankees that infest us, but some of our best families have been beguiled. They must be arrested." And with that, he sent his officers out to rid the streets of tricksters. Inspector Faurot just happened to be on vacation in Jacksonville at the time.
For many New Yorkers, a host of Southern cops on the lookout for suspicious Yankees might be unsettling, but for Faurot and his friend Seargent Haley, it was a chance to have a laugh. It's clear that the two were picked up by police on suspicion of running a con operation. After that, accounts vary. One version states that the two simply allowed themselves to be held and questioned by detectives until they presented their credentials to the chief, embarrassing the detectives and eliciting bottles of wine from the chief as an apology.
But the version presented in the Times is that Faurot claimed to be a newspaper man, and Haley a traveler, in order to deliberately arouse suspicion as a prank. After being questioned and arrested, Faurot pulls out his badge and the Jacksonville detectives say something to the effect of: "Lol. You dudes are solid dudes", and they all proceed to chill together.
- Independently invents and thoroughly explains world's oldest cop trick
With the quick cadence and rainy, grey-scale texture of a dime store novel, Faurot himself wrote a newspaper piece about the Hans Schmidt investigation. My favorite part? "I had instructed one of my detectives to speak harshly with Schimdt in addressing him. I explained that I would use the reverse tactics, and by this means win him over to me and thus, perhaps, he would volunteer information that I ardently desired."
Wait, slow down. I'm not following. Explain it to me again. He proceeds: "I was correct in my surmise...he confided to me that he heartfily disliked that 'very gruff detective'...and that he woud gladly tell me anything I desired to know, inasmuch as he believed that I was of kinder disposition."
However overjoyed I was that Dick Tracy had just commandeered my inner-monologue to tirelessly explain the wheel, it dawned on me that Faurot hadn't the benifit of "good cop-bad cop". In fact, I don't know that anyone did until almost 60 years later. Apparently the phrase did not drift into the popular lexicon until the early 1970's where, after likely being incubated on television police shows, it was hijacked by newspaper men to describe the carrot-and-stick methods of the Kissinger State Department. Ever-so-slightly earlier, but on the whole concurrently, the term "Mutt and Jeff" was used for the technique. The phrase comes from the popular comic strip by the same name about a tall gambler and his short friend. The earliest use we can find of "Mutt and Jeff" being used as a name for the interrogation method is in 1966. Prior to that, the phrase was a catchall for criminal duos wherein one member was short and the other was tall.
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- Sells Tires?
After the excitement of the Anna Aumeueller murder case and the execution of Hans Schmidt, Faurot rose through the ranks to the post of deputy police commissioner. During his time with the New York Police Department, he innovated methods of extracting images of fingerprints and obtained the first ever conviction using fingerprints as evidence. An avid defender of the new technology as a tool to both solve cases and track missing persons, he advertised its usefulness by holding contests in which he would identify other officers after letting them anonymously touch a selected item.
In 1926, he retired from the NYPD. He still consulted as an expert in fingerprinting and a creator of anti-theft devices. In the mid-1930s, the Goodyear tire company hired him to investigate the performance of their tires for a nation-wide ad campaign that drew on his celebrity.
Well, according to Faurot's account in the September 21, 1913 edition of the Pittsburgh Press, they broke in and took it. A reader with casual interest in Constitutional law might ask if this could be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Now days, the precedent is yes. The officers weren't granted a warrant.
Now perhaps Faurot skipped over the part where they first acquired a warrant, but that's considerably unlikely since the letter of the amendment reads that the warrant must be supported by probable cause, whereas Faurot includes in his account: "although we had little or nothing to base our action on, we decided that unless something developed that night we would take summary action [break in]."
Leaving still the matter of a Fourth Amendment violation to legal experts, we might assume that the officers acted in good faith to abide the letter of the law, except that Faurot goes on to say: "That night I told officers O'niell, O'connell, Cassassa, and McKenna, who were with me, that I intended to break into that flat, 'if I went to jail for it.'" Cassassa goes on to break through a window to let the rest of them in, and they find all the evidence they need to catch and convict Schmidt.
Far be it for us here at historytldr to bemoan an occasional broken window if it helps catch a killer-counterfeiter-insurance-scamming priest. But we couldn't help but ask: in the timeline of Fourth Amendment precedent, exactly how many years away is the alternate universe where Hans Schmidt gets off on some technical appeal to the exclusionary rule and the the great Joseph Faurot never rises to become the father of fingerprinting and my very favourite detective?
The exclusionary rule
A first, bad guess would be "one; one year", since that's when the supreme court ruled on Weeks v. United States. A guy named Frederick Weeks was caught sending lottery tickets through the mail, but because the search leading to the arrest was deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that the evidence in the case was inadmissible, and thus the exclusionary rule became precedent. But that was only for federal cases, not state cases like the trial of Hans Schmidt.
The rule was extended to the states in the 1961 ruling in Mapp v. Ohio. You see, in 1957, the home of future boxing promoter Don King was bombed by a numbers runner named Alex Birns. While police were investigating the case, they illegally searched the house of Dollree Map-the former wife of boxing great Jimmy Bivins- wherein they found a box of pornographic pictures and held Mapp on obscenity charges. She was found guilty, and on appeal, the Supreme Court overturned the decision and ruled the obscene materials inadmissible.
So is the answer 44 years? Perhaps not, since the police used their ill-procured evidence to get a detailed confession. The Court's standing definition of fruit of the poisonous tree didn't explicitly extend to scenarios like this until 1963 in Wong Sun v. United States. And the answer may not be 50 years either. In 1984's Nix v. Williams, the court ruled that if evidence was so unarguably destined to be found by legal police practice that the illegal search only uncovered the inevitable, then it could be admitted.
Verdict
Given the inevitability of discovery, the independent strains of legally procured evidence, and Faurot's knack for catching bad guys, we suspect that there are very few hypothetical worlds where Schmidt gets off. But even in those, we're sure that Inspector Joseph Faurot is doing just fine.
